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Posted by aagha 10 hours ago

Ancient Library – 1,060 Greek/Latin texts, click any word to parse it(ancientlibrary.net)
170 points | 55 commentspage 2
veqq 7 hours ago||
Vowel lengths on the main text would be great.
bohnohboh 9 hours ago||
it would be nice to sort by date or date range as well
hcayless 5 hours ago||
The Greek font is terrible—it’s using the Modern Greek “acute” accent which looks weird, and commas aren’t supposed to have spaced before them. It’s cool that Perseus did the work that makes this possible though. More info about what edition we’re looking at would be nice too.
gaigalas 8 hours ago||
Clicking out to close a dictionary popup only works if you click empty space within the layout center. This is annoying. On a wide monitor, most empty space is on the sides (where clicking doesn't close).

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.

gfaure 8 hours ago||
Cool! Enclitic -que should _not_ be broken off as a separate word, though.
cwnyth 6 hours ago|
That plus the spaces between punctuation makes it clear it's done for tokenization, but nothing puts it back together again.
frollogaston 8 hours ago||
Wow, I used to spend forever looking up words in Latin books.
leoc 2 hours ago||
I'm a bit out of energy at present but I'll try to put together a comment.

From the point of view of a learner it's unfortunate that macrons (diacritical marks for long vowels) have not been added to the text, and that 'u's have not been altered to 'v's where appropriate.

The word-by-word treatment of translation makes this broadly a part of the category of interlinear texts. For comparison here's one of the early pages of Max Müller's 1864 Sanskrit-to-English interlinear of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitopadesha : https://archive.org/details/firstbookofhitop00ml/page/2/mode... . This is part of a revival of interlinear texts, as a resource for language learners, which traces back to John Locke but really caught on in the English-speaking world in the early nineteenth century thanks to James Hamilton. It's unusual for "traditional" interlinears in having one row which gives a(n explicit) morphological gloss of each word in the original (the "da, 3 sg. Pres. Par" and so on) in the same column as the original word, an English translation of the word, and (in this case) a transliteration. But morphological glosses are a standard feature of modern "interlinear morphemic glosses" https://www.christianlehmann.eu/ling/ling_meth/ling_descript... made by and for linguists who want to analyse and compare languages, rather than learn them. Linguists' adoption of modern IMGs seems to have taken off in the 1960s (though some use has been made of interlinears for "serious" linguistic purposes since at least the 1890s beginnings of the Linguistic Survey of India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_Survey_of_India ).

https://theamericanscholar.org/the-new-old-way-of-learning-l... is a very incomplete history of interlinears (the French are especially shortchanged) but probably still the best thing out there in English. See also https://www.reddit.com/r/interlinear . (I have to release some things about the history of interlinears myself but I'm years late at this point.)

https://shop.hyplern.com (might as well add an affiliate link! https://invi.tt/N5VZXP7g ) and https://interlinearbooks.com/ are two publishers offering modern interlinears aimed at language learners. The polished but expensive Legentibus service https://legentibus.com/ offers some interlinears too.

Guess who Vincent F. Hopper https://archive.org/details/chaucerscanterbu0000chau_k0e4 was for a time married to!

Boss0565 9 hours ago||
I like it. Can you make the formatting on parsed words easier to read?
milkcrate 6 hours ago|
Could stand to have a better Greek font, but this is great stuff. Thanks for sharing.