Details
As it has already mentioned, the AncientGreek extension preforms four functions:
- Spell checks Ancient Greek Language text
- Hyphenates Ancient Greek Language text
- Converts and formats Ancient Greek Language text
- Provides a way to input text in Ancient Greek Language
This page will provide detailed info regarding these functions.
I have used as testing material documents published on The Little Sailing collection of Ancient Greek Texts and various randomly selected web pages.
Spell checker ^
The spell checker used comes form the Ancient Greek Spell Checker extension for OpenOffice, which is based on Morpheus word list (provided by the Perseus Project). It is considered to be an alpha version, although it has proven to be adequately reliable.
Known issues:
- Apostrophe is considered an "ignored character".
- Retrieval of long words is quite slow.
The following picture shows the spell checker in action, displaying the first couple of paragraphs of Aeschines - Against Timarchus.
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Some statistics on the Spell checker ^
Just to have an indication regarding the quality of the Spell checker, I edited several documents (random selection) and counted the number of errors reported by the checker (not including duplicates).
All documents come from the The Little Sailing collection page, saved as ODT, and had their language changed to "Greek, Ancient".
| Text | Number of Words (Reported by L.O.) |
Errors Reported / Words Unknown |
|---|---|---|
| Aeschines, Against Timarchus | 13,761 | ~35 |
| Aeschylus, Agamemnon (ed. G. Murray, Oxford 1955) | 8,778 | ~35 |
| Aristophanes, Frogs [ed. F.W. Hall and W.M. Geldart, Oxford. 1907] | 10,274 | ~60 |
| Aristotle, Parva Naturalia, On Sensation and the Sensible [ed. W. D. Ross, Oxford 1955] | 7,946 | ~20 |
| Euripides, Bacchae (ed. Gilbert Murray, Oxford. 1913) | 8,317 | ~60 |
| Herodotus, Histories, Book 7, Polymnia (ed. A. D. Godley. Cambridge 1920) | 27,301 | ~100 |
| Homer, Iliad, book 1 (ed. D. B. Monro and T. W. Allen. Oxford, 1920) | 27,494 | ~120 |
You can find all the documents here [~470KB].
Hyphenation ^
As already mentioned, AncientGreek hyphenator is based on Tex hyphenation patterns for Ancient Greek language. Tex is a high quality typesetting system and as long as my method of converting Tex patterns to Hunspell patterns is accurate, its quality is inherited to the AncientGreek extension, as it is easy to see at the above picture.
The interesting thing about AncientGreek hyphenator is that it can be used (with caution) on text written in "Katharevousa" and "Medieval Greek (Byzantine Greek)".
The picture on the left displays a passage of Alexandros Papadiamantis' 1882 novel "Merchants of Nations", written in "Katharevousa".
Although the spell checker is a bit off (due to the differences to the language used in regard to Ancient Greek), the hyphenator still does a pretty good job.
The fact that the hyphenator has patterns for both Greek Basic and Greek Extended code-points, vastly increases its quality.
Macros ^
AncientGreek Macros started as a helper to change text language to Ancient Greek, but have evolved to an extensive macro set which provides text manipulation, conversion and input.
You can get more information on the Macros page.