Planning overview · Latin and Ancient Greek
Know the word by what it does in a text.
This is a vocabulary contest built around reading, not a spelling bee. Learners meet a word inside a short, cited ancient passage and show that they can recognise its sense, form, syntax, and force there—then carry it into the next text.
Design public · scored pilot not yet releasedTwo language tracks, two provisional levels
Latin and Greek run as separate contests. Equal list sizes do not imply equal morphology, textual traditions, or difficulty.
Why “most shared authors” comes next
Foundation
Secure a bounded, memorable starting vocabulary rather than an indefinitely expanding frequency list.
Breadth
Rank the next candidates by how widely they are distributed across author corpora, not simply by raw counts in one large corpus.
Transfer
Reward vocabulary that helps a learner cross from one author and genre to another, while keeping author-specific language visible.
The breadth rule is a curriculum principle, not a claim that every broadly shared word is equally useful or equally easy. Frequency, polysemy, morphology, genre, and passage quality still require expert review.
Five text-based round families
Sense in context
Select or state the meaning a lemma carries in this passage.
Micro-gloss
Supply a concise gloss that makes the local clause intelligible.
Context lock
Use nearby grammar and discourse to reject a plausible but wrong sense.
Translation repair
Diagnose and repair a rendering whose vocabulary choice distorts the text.
Author bridge
Compare the same lemma across two real passages without erasing differences of genre or usage.
What memorisation is for
- Faster recognitionRecall should free attention for syntax, argument, rhythm, and historical interpretation.
- Retrieval with evidenceA remembered gloss becomes useful when the learner can test it against morphology and context.
- Spacing and returnWords recur across passages and rounds so memory is strengthened by retrieval, not passive rereading alone.
- Transfer, not triviaSuccess means entering more texts with less friction—not collecting isolated dictionary equivalents.
Current release state
The contest architecture and an internal, unscored specimen lab exist, but no scored public pilot is cleared. The held lab contains eighteen ancient-text candidates and does not submit, grade, or rank learners.
- two collection fingerprints and seven literary-source hashes require provenance and textual re-review;
- the exact 1,769-entry manifests need eligibility correction, regeneration, and versioned freeze;
- item-level philological, bilingual, accessibility, fairness, and rights reviews remain open;
- named human panel appointments and approval records have not been asserted.
Release rule: authentic passages are necessary, but they become score-eligible only after their text, locus, answer, rights state, and review record are all closed.
Continue through the learning family
简体中文导言
这不是拼字比赛，而是一项以真实文本为依据的拉丁语与古希腊语词汇竞赛。参赛者须在有出处的古代语段中辨认词义、词形、句法作用与语用力量，并把所学带入下一篇文本。初级组拟在每种语言各设 1,769 个词汇项；中级候选包暂增 250 项，累计 2,019 项。新增词不只按总词频排列，而优先考察它们在多少位作者的语料中共同出现。拉丁语与希腊语分开竞赛，当前数字与清单均属待审核的课程边界，并非已发布的正式赛纲。