Learning ancient Greek

Words, words, words

My friend David Butterfield owns an unparalleled collection of books and papers relating to classical learning. Among them are typewritten sheets that were used by schoolboys at Winchester College in the 1950s for learning Greek vocabulary.

By any standards the expectation is astonishing. The boys were expected to learn something like 3000 words and forms in the course of three years - knowledge of which (along with grammatical instruction) meant they could easily read and make sense of much of the basic fare of ancient Greek literature, including the epics of Homer, the lyric poetry of Pindar and Anacreon, the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, the comedies of Aristophanes, and a slew of prose texts from Plato and Herodotus to Xenophon and Lucian, and of course the Greek New Testament.

I took on the challenge of turning the closely typewritten, faded, and scuffed sheets into a form that could see them easily used and printed. They needed some correcting and regularising, putting into alphabetical order, and the addition of accents — which were notoriously not of interest to English schools in most periods of the 20th century. I set the task to a graduate student at Oxford before realising that in the brave new world of AI, even OCR (character recognition) is embedded in the best LLMs (large language models) like Claude AI.

What would have taken a hundred hours of slog took about 30 minutes of prompting, and voilà!

All that was needed was to scan the vocab by eye and check that no errors remain - about five minutes a page.

There’s something supremely satisfying about using the latest technology to recover a valuable learning tool of this nature - even if those who wish to use it in future will have to master the old (and almost obsolete) skill of learning vocabulary by rote.