This is another “marvel at the resources of the internet!” moment. To quote memiyawanzi, where I found the link: “I’ve come across this great index of Ancient Language Resources online Lexicity. It contains an index of online resources for the study of Akkadian, Aramaic, Coptic, Egyptian, Ge’ez, Old Georgian, Gothic, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Old Church Slavonic, Old English, Old Norse, Sanskrit, Syriac, and Ugaritic, with relevant links to new stuff, out of copyright grammars and texts on archive.org, and so forth.” From their About page:
Learning an ancient language is difficult, but it becomes more difficult if one isn’t part of a high school or college class or doesn’t have access to the more advanced resources of a university library. The natural solution is the internet, where some of those advanced resources are housed and where there is an abundance of materials intended to facilitate one’s study.
However, there are a few problems when turning to the internet. … The solution to these problems is to unite all the resources under a single banner after reviewing them to see which are most useful. Lexicity has done this for 16 of the most prominent ancient languages. All the ancient language resources we feature are free and available to anyone; they’re easy to navigate, easy to sort, and easy to access. You don’t need to be an expert or be willing to wade through 50 pages of search engine results – just visit our languages page to get started.
And what riches are there! Going to the OCS page, I found a link to the Codex Suprasliensis, the largest extant Old Church Slavonic manuscript; I remember it well from grad school days. And that’s just one link of who knows how many! Explore and enjoy.
Went in for a five-minute peek. Wow!
Gotta find about ten miles of string. To tie one end to my big toe and the other to the leg of my desk. Without that I may disappear in there forever.
Thanks for mentioning our site! It’s a work in progress, so we’ll have more resources up soon.
Be sure to check our site tomorrow, when the language forums will be up. We’ll have a message board for each language–an interactive, online community for ancient language lovers!
I’m embarrassingly excited about having OCS texts available at the click of a mouse. Too bad I have work to do today… I’m sure I’ll be back to look longer later. 🙂
That’s very cool, I have a strange fascination with Aramaic. Thanks, Stephen.
Cheers,
Andrew
Maybe Classical Chinese is just outside their sphere of interest, but it seems like Old Irish ought to fit nicely if they had room for a 17th language.
This is AMAZING.
I’ve changed the links in the post to archived versions, since they’ve moved to a new version of the site, which is here.
Hi Steve. I have tried accessing the website of Lexicity but it doesn’t seem to load at all. Tried a bunch of different browsers but to no avail. Do you know what has happened?
(the internet provided no such answers and there is no updates on their social media accounts).
Damn, you’re right. The last archived version of the site is from last September. Maybe they forgot to renew their hosting, or life got in the way? Too bad, at any rate. Thanks for the heads-up.
The domain name still exists. But it’s registered through “Domains by Proxy” and was last renewed 2023-04-07. The owner will have been getting renewal notices for a while now, so if that didn’t make them check the hosting…