Kevin Albrecht 🏺📚
@kevinalbrecht
Building Kevilex — a reading app for Ancient Greek. Instant lookup, morphology, vocabulary tracking
A lot of people requested this feature in Kevilex, and now it's live! The texts page now remembers your last tab and filters, so returning to it brings you back where you left off. Hopefully makes it easy to get back to your favorite texts while studying Ancient Greek.
New feature in Kevilex! Collection pages now show a progress bar of your known vocabulary across the whole collection, so you can see how far you've come in an entire work like the Iliad, or LGPSI, like in my screenshot.
Some new features in Kevilex: On both the Collections and the Texts tabs, you can now favorite both Texts and Collections. You can also select an quick filter so that you can always see your favorited collections or your favorited text and find them quickly. Hope you enjoy!
While generally quite similar, due to the two editions being based on different manuscripts, there are some subtle word differences across the two texts. For example, see Revelation 5:9 and the presence or absence of ἡμᾶς:
New feature on Kevilex: You can now favorite collections to find them again quickly from your dashboard or the collections list.
New feature in Kevilex! Flashcards now have an “In context” section that shows the word in an example sentence — the one where you first met it when available — without giving away the definition.
New feature on Kevilex: When you are studying your Ancient Greek flashcards, after you hit your daily flashcard goal and cards are still due, a "Keep going" button lets you review the rest.
As expected, the new Odyssey film seems like it's going to be very controversial (though the early reviews are really good!), so I'm looking forward to seeing it opening night. I'm working on reading it in the original Ancient Greek on Kevilex... www.kevilex.com/collections/...
The team behind the @scrollprize recently decoded the first full scroll from the Herculaneum Papyri, called "PHerc. 1667". Super exciting discovery of this first virtual unrolling, which appears to be a Stoic text. The text is now hosted on Kevilex as well for everyone to read!
For a while on Kevilex, whenever you sat on a text for a while and didn't click to look up a word in a text, it could sometimes take up to 10 or 15 seconds to look up the word. Due to some funny behind-the-scenes bug fixing and performance tweaks, I am happy to announce that it is now much faster!
Made some tricky bug fixes to the Ancient Greek word lookups on Kevilex.com: Looking up words spelled with an iota subscript — like σῴζω ("to save"), κωμῳδία ("comedy"), and ᾠδή ("song") — now shows their definitions correctly.
On Kevilex, the word etymology panel now surfaces more English derivatives — looking up εὑρίσκω ("find"), for example, now shows that it gives us the English word "eureka."
We've launched the "Your week in Greek" weekly email update on Kevilex! Now you will get a weekly email with: * Reading stats * What's new on Kevilex * Other surprises Make sure that you are signed up to get email updates on your settings page at kevilex.com/settings to get the email!
Did a major cleanup of the dictionary and word mappings on Kevilex so that when you look up a particular word form, it better reflects the actual lemmas (dictionary headwords). Suprisingly complex to get right! (more in comments...)
I've started collecting what other people have written or recorded about Kevilex on the "Kevilex in the wild" section on the site at www.kevilex.com/about
Fixed a bug in Kevilex where some elided words didn't show their correct definition. They now show their definitions in editions that mark elision with the Greek apostrophe.
You can now read the Ancient Greek text of PHerc. 1667 — the first Herculaneum scroll ever virtually unrolled and read end to end — as a new collection, presented as a lightly-normalized raw edition alongside two reading editions with every word clickable for lookup:
Kevilex now has a Roadmap page, which shows what's planned and in progress, and supporters can now vote on the features they most want built next:
Kevilex's flashcards use a "spaced repetition" algorithm to always show you the flashcards you need to study right now. I do 10 flashcards or so per day so that I always get a little reminder of words I am learning in Ancient Greek.
On Kevilex.com, you can now see our collections of Ancient Greek texts with difficulty markers showing the average difficulty of the texts in that collection.
Fixed a bug where ἀναβήτω was incorrectly parsed as being a form of ἀνάπτω. Thanks to the bug reporter!
We now have calculated text difficulty live on Kevilex! Each text is scored automatically based on vocab rarity, syntax and morphology, verb tenses, etc. I hope this can be helpful for finding new texts to read.
Inflected place names in Ancient Greek such as Ἀφρική (Africa) and Γαλλία (Gaul) now show their definition and grammar instead of "Definition not found" on Kevilex:
Capitalized Ancient Greek words now resolve more accurately on Kevilex: proper names like the river Rhine show their real meaning instead of a look-alike common word, and the grammar panel shows the correct number for capitalized nouns:
The Septuagint (the Ancient Greek Old Testament) is now available on Kevilex due to popular request: www.kevilex.com/collections/...
Added a new Discover section to Kevilex, where you can find Ancient Greek tests in a nice new interface: www.kevilex.com/discover
Xenophon's Apology of Socrates is now live to read in Ancient Greek on Kevilex. Enjoy! www.kevilex.com/collections/...
I was interviewed recently on a (Modern) Greek podcast about Kevilex, my Ancient Greek learning tool. Don't worry if you don't know modern Greek—only the first 30 seconds are in Greek. Podcast link: www.youtube.com/watch?v=zf8k...
Kevilex is now available in Modern Greek... now you can use Kevilex to learn Ancient Greek in Modern Greek! The Modern Greek translations are in beta, as I am not a native Modern Greek speaker. I'd love to get any feedback on the translations.
Added some testimonials from some happy users of Kevilex to the site. Thanks everyone!