The Ancient World Online: Myria

Myria is a treebank-based vocabulary tool. It contains about
6000 entries, all of which have a frequency of at least 50 occurrences
in a large automatically analyzed corpus. For each lemma, the tool
offers the following information:

• in which authors and genres is this lemma strikingly frequent?
• which words are semantically related?
• in which collostructions (collocations and constructions) does the lemma occur?

Myria does not focus on offering translations and lexicographical
information. For this, links to other online initiatives, such as
Logeion and Wiktionary, are established.

This tool is developed by Toon Van Hal and Alek Keersmaekers.
Frédéric Pietowski created the technical frame of the responsive
website, and Toon Van Hal dressed it up.
We are indebted to our student assistants Martijn Jaspers, Martijn
Windelinckx, Mathieu Lonbois & Yoran Joosten for making first
versions of
translations of the Greek sentences in Chilia. The tool is still under
active development (see FAQ).

cell

An educational subpart of Myria, Chilia contains ca. 1000 very
frequent words.
Each word is clarified by means of an authentic sentence, which is in
turn exclusively built from words which also belong to the Chilia list
(with the exception of proper names). Thanks to this feature, learners
of Ancient Greek are stimulated to study vocabulary in context by
carefully working through these example sentences. For each sentence, a
treebank is available (we have treebanked most sentences ourselves, but
fortunately we could also rely on already existing treebanks).

More information

• Van Hal, Toon. 2019. “The Chilia Project. A Thousand Words About a Thousand Words.” Pearls in writing. Tribute book for Marc De Groote, ed. by Tine Scheijnen & Berenice Verhelst, 95–97. Ghent: Ghent University | Skribis.
• Van Hal, Toon & Alek Keersmaekers. 2020. “Visualizing the
  Ancient Greek forest through the trees: how treebanks can advance the
  education of classical languages” Les Études classiques 88 (forthcoming)
• Keersmaekers, Alek, Wouter Mercelis, Colin Swaelens & Toon Van
  Hal. 2019. “Creating, Enriching and Valorising Treebanks of Ancient
  Greek: the ongoing Pedalion-project.” Paris. Available at:
  https://syntaxfest.github.io/syntaxfest19/proceedings/papers/paper_68.pdf.