About the project

Welcome to Pedalion, a platform for learning and reading Ancient Greek!

Pedalion started as a modular grammar. Πηδάλιον is the Ancient Greek word for a ‘rudder’. Indeed, this website wants to be the rudder that helps students navigate the waters of the Ancient Greek language in a dynamic way. Students will be trained to move between the language’s formal, semantic, and syntactic levels, so as to overcome the static character of a traditional grammar. The grammar was realized through a grant from the Educational Council of the University of Leuven (2013-2015). The English version of this grammar is still in bèta. 

The project is currently expanding. Right now, the focus is on Natural Language Processing initiatives. So, for instance, we hope to offer users much more example sentences than the sentences we selected ourselves by making use of an automatically analyzed corpus.  

More information

• Van Hal, Toon & Yannick Anné. “Reconciling the Dynamics of Language with a Grammar Handbook. On Pedalion, an ongoing Greek grammar project”. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 32, nr. 2 (2017): 448–54.
• Keersmaekers, Alek, Wouter Mercelis, Colin Swaelens, and Toon Van Hal. “Creating, Enriching and Valorizing Treebanks of Ancient Greek.” In Proceedings of the 18th International Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories (TLT, SyntaxFest 2019), 109–117. Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2019.

News

March 2020: A new update of the English website is available. Most example sentences presented here are new: only a minority is still from reference works (by Smyth, Goodwin, Crespo, Rijksbaron). The most substantial novelty consists in linking as many example sentences as possible with a treebanked solution. These sentences are indicated through the clickable symbol "֍".

Contact

For any questions or remarks, you can contact the website's administrator, Toon Van Hal.

License

Unless mentioned otherwise, all information on this website is licensed under the Creative Commons CC BY-SA 4.0 License ().

Colophon

Realization of the content:

• Main supervisor: Toon Van Hal (KU Leuven, Research group for Comparative, Historical and Applied Linguistics - CoHistAL)
• Developer DendroSearch and co-responsible for the Leuven treebanks:  Alek Keersmaekers
• Project assistant: Yannick Anné (2013-2015)
• English translations: Reuben J. Pitts
• French translation of the Menander exercises: Sarah Béthume (Université Catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve)
• Student assistants: Aäron De Fruyt, Victoria Dabo, Annelore Goris, Mathieu Lonbois, Maxime Maleux, Milan Valadou, and Stijn Vangenechten
• Many thanks to Herman Seldeslachts and Lambert Isebaert (Université Catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve) for their precious suggestions.

Realization of the website:

• Website realization: Hans Coppens (KU Leuven, Department of Japanese Studies)
• Website hosting: ICTS KU Leuven

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