In this paper, we investigate the potential of enhancing learning resources for historical languages to facilitate translation into various languages and meet the needs of a broader range of learners. We report on the development and application of a modular grammar for Ancient Greek, titled “Didakta Grammar for Annotation”, which is based on Smyth’s Greek Grammar (Smyth 1920) and integrates perspectives from Rydberg-Cox’s “Overview of Greek Syntax” (Rydberg-Cox 2000) and the online Pedalion grammar (Van Hal / Anné 2017).
Didakta has been primarily designed as a resource that can be easily adapted for translation into different languages, especially those with few educational materials available for Ancient Greek, such as Persian. Resources for learning Ancient Greek often assume some prior knowledge of languages like Latin or basic grammatical concepts that might not be universally known. Didakta attempts to address such localization issues by presenting the Greek language independently, without drawing comparisons to other languages and eliminating any reliance on prior language knowledge in its explanations and learning methodology.
Similar to Pedalion grammar, Didakta is designed with a modular framework, which means that its contents are not arranged in a fixed sequence like traditional printed materials, allowing each section to function independently. Didakta is structured by grammatical categories such as case, tense, mood, and voice, with each category further segmented based on semantic or syntactic roles in sentences. For instance, the genitive case is subdivided into seventeen distinct types, including partitive, subjective, and possessive genitives, to clarify its various applications. The grammar also includes specific sections addressing some of the common difficulties and intricacies, such as different uses of the pronoun "αὐτός". Every grammatical category within Didakta is associated with a distinct tag useful for text annotation. For example, the locative dative is tagged as “DatLoc”. This tag can be utilized to link occurrences of locative dative in source texts to the corresponding section in Didakta's grammar. In each section of Didakta, learners can access detailed grammatical explanations accompanied by examples from authentic texts with translations and references. Didakta concentrates on simplifying and categorizing the more complex grammatical concepts in Ancient Greek. Its goal is to offer thorough explanations that clarify the intricate relationship between syntax, morphology, and the specific semantic nuances which learners frequently find challenging. Consequently, Didakta serves as a supplementary resource for treebanks, where such details are not addressed.
The content in Didakta, including explanations, examples, and English translations, primarily draws from Smyth's work but has been revised and updated in light of other sources such as “the Cambridge Grammar of Classical Greek” and the Pedalion grammar. Each section of Didakta also contains references to the relevant sections in these other grammar sources.
Although the core content of Didakta is designed to provide a general description of Greek grammatical concepts without direct comparison to other languages, translators have the flexibility to incorporate comparisons in the target language within each section. For instance, in the explanation of the dative of possession in the Persian version, the use of Ancient Greek dative is more directly mirrored in Persian than in English. The dative case with certain verbs like γίγνομαι and εἰμί is used to indicate possession and belonging. The individual to whom something belongs is expressed using the dative case. While modern Persian does not have grammatical cases, the postposition “ را ” [rā], which historically evolved from a dative marker in Western Middle Iranian, is capable of expressing an oblique sense (Windfuhr 1990). The Persian translation of Didakta notes that this use of Ancient Greek dative could be translated quite literally to “ مرا … است ” [marā… ast].
The English version of Didakta, along with its Persian translation is openly accessible online. All versions of Didakta employ consistent tagging across translations, allowing for a universal tagging system for annotations. As a result of this uniformity, speakers of different languages can annotations done by speakers of other languages and yet access explanations in their own language. Didakta has been used to annotate parts of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and has been effectively implemented in educational settings in both English and Persian. Didakta is currently accessible online in English (Shamsian / Smyth 2024a), Persian (Shamsian / Smyth 2024b), Kurdish (Rahimi et al. 2024), and is also in the process of being translated into Brazilian Portuguese.