For tbos version, I gather that a bilingual presentation would be more than necessary: keep Ancient Greek text on a side and display a scholar translation into a selection of switcheable languages
I built something similar to this by cloning the Diogenes repo and getting Claude to re-implement it in Python (it’s a very old battle tested Perl code base, so a great reference implementation) and using the TLG database for the Greek and Latin texts. You can take this even further by integrating it with the Barrington Atlas (there are scans on Anna’s Archive) for looking up ancient place names, so you have dictionary + map lookups. If you’ve read any of the Landmark series books you’d known what I mean.
Also better if you can generate chapter by chapter critical apparatus on difficult grammar and Anki decks. It’s an annoying part of learning these languages to have to stop and look up words, I like spending a few days learning vocab before reading and it makes it so much more pleasant than having to stop and look things up the whole time.
Obviously all this stuff is copyright so it can never be shared, but I don’t care it’s for my own personal use. I also bought like 6 hours worth of Ionnis Strattakis’ recordings where he reads a bunch of Ancient Greek in reconstructed Attic pronunciation and fine-tuned a text to speech model (styletts2) with full accent markings and breathings. It’s extremely natural sounding. My long term goal is to have a personal tutor that I can speak Attic to and basically have lessons with everyday (speech to text -> llm-> text to speech). All the pieces are there to actually do this.
LLMs have been an absolute game changer for me who is a hobby classicist but also knows how to build software. They are so amazingly good at Attic Greek and Latin, it’s like having the best teachers in the word at your fingertips for some really niche topics that it wouldn’t be possible with otherwise. Also extremely good at managing, building, cleaning up, deduplicating Anki decks.
My undergrad was in classics and viticulture, then did grad school in atmospheric science, which led me to tech and hackernews.
How did you get here?
The way the Greek is displayed isn't very helpful, though. Specifically, any vowel with a grave accent displays the accent as a separate letter, which makes it very distracting to read. I don't think it's a problem with the encoding, as I can copy the inline text and it displays just fine - though with some weird spaces before commas or periods:
ΕΝ ΑΡΧΗ ἦν ὁ λόγος , καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν , καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος .
It seems some books are missing chapter markings. Revelation, for instance. The verses are numbered, and you can notice when chapters change, but one can be lost when searching for a specific chapter.
Dictionary entries are cool, but I would want the in context meaning at least highlighted, so I don't have to read the full entry and do that myself.
Overall, nice idea but it seems like a very barebones implementation that needs a tremendous amount of polishing to be useful.
I don't get a definition for 'fulgere', third word first entence, just a reference to 'fulgo'. I can guess what it means though from the more common 'fulgur', maybe something adjacent to flashing or lightning, but translations seem a bit sketchy.
Definitely! I myself have been having a lot of fun[0] recently using LLMs to enrich one of my favorite beginner Latin readers[1] with audio forced-alignment, POS tagging, morphology, definitions, and other niceties that learners might appreciate.
[0]: https://hercules.hookbangsplat.com
[1]: https://archive.org/details/p1fablesoforbili00godl/mode/2up
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_Latina_per_se_illustrat...
A lot of role playing games, especially from Square Enix,leverage a lot of Latin and classical education.
Ancient Library is some vibecoded alternative that the LLM translation it uses will be incorrect. Color me unimpressed.
The thing that strikes me from ancient texts is not the obvious differences from our day, but the similarities.
Also most of the word popups use different spellings, like "iam" becomes "jam".
May I point out that in "Crudam si edes, in acetum intinguito", that "edes" is more likely to be the future of edere/esse "to eat"? (Just guessing by context.)
For example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Trajan_inscription_duoton... (Latin as typically carved in stone)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Herculanean_Rolls_-_... (Greek as typically written on papyrus)
A propos of breathing marks, iota subscripts, and the three different accent marks of Classical Greek, when I learned it at school we had to remember the breathing marks and iota subscripts, and would lose marks if we omitted them, but we didn't need to learn the accents. Modern Greek now has only (acute) accents, which you need to know to stress the correct vowels, exactly where the accents were in the equivalent Classical Greek words.
What should actually be done, and what OP should do, is take the Perseus website and make it so it doesn't 503 all the time (it is incredibly unreliable).
Then, FOIA the State of California for the pay-to-play data which the UC Irvine-based TLG hoarders are withholding from the public (it is a publicly funded project...) so that the corpus can be meaningfully extended and built upon.
The 1990's tier html vibe of Perseus is to its great advantage.
A complete parsing reader for the classical canon. Click any word in any text for its lemma, morphology, and full dictionary entry — Lewis & Short for Latin, Liddell-Scott-Jones for Greek.
1060 works · 293 Latin · 767 Greek · 140 authors · browse the full A–Z index
Latin
EpicThe great narrative poems of Rome.23 worksLyric & ElegyCatullus, Horace, and the Roman elegists.42 worksTragedySeneca’s tragedies.10 worksComedyPlautus and Terence.26 worksHistoryCaesar, Livy, Sallust, Tacitus.16 worksBiographyLives of the Caesars and famous men.68 worksOratory & RhetoricCicero and the art of Roman speech.48 worksPhilosophyCicero, Seneca, Lucretius.22 worksLettersCicero, Pliny, Seneca.8 worksDidactic & TechnicalTeaching in verse and prose.5 worksMyth, Hymn & ReligionOvid’s calendar and mythological verse.12 worksSatire & FableHorace, Juvenal, Persius, Phaedrus.6 worksProse FictionThe Roman novel.4 worksScience & MedicinePliny’s encyclopedia and Roman science.2 worksGrammar & ReferenceGellius’ learned miscellany.1 work
Greek
EpicHomer, Hesiod, and their heirs.45 worksLyric & ElegyPindar, Sappho’s heirs, and the Anthology.26 worksTragedyAeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides.34 worksComedyAristophanes and Menander.11 worksHistoryHerodotus, Thucydides, and their successors.47 worksGeography & TravelStrabo and Pausanias.2 worksBiographyPlutarch’s Lives and more.146 worksOratory & RhetoricThe Attic orators and the Second Sophistic.247 worksPhilosophyPlato, Aristotle, and the Stoics.53 worksDidactic & TechnicalManuals and treatises.12 worksMyth, Hymn & ReligionApollodorus’ library of myth.2 worksSatire & FableLucian of Samosata.71 worksProse FictionThe Greek novel.7 worksScience & MedicineHippocrates, Galen, Euclid, Ptolemy.26 worksGrammar & ReferenceAncient lexica.2 worksBiblical TextsThe Greek New Testament.27 worksEarly Christian WritingsThe Fathers of the Church.9 works
