A chrestomathy ( ; from the
Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek (, ; ) includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the classical antiquity, ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Greek ...
'desire of learning', from 'useful' + 'learn') is a collection of selected literary passages (usually from a single author); a selection of literary passages from a foreign language assembled for studying the language; or a text in various languages, used especially as an aid in learning a subject.
In
philology
Philology () is the study of language in Oral tradition, oral and writing, written historical sources. It is the intersection of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics with strong ties to etymology. Philology is also de ...
or in the study of
literature
Literature is any collection of Writing, written work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings specifically considered to be an art form, especially novels, Play (theatre), plays, and poetry, poems. It includes both print and Electroni ...
, it is a type of reader that presents a sequence of example texts, selected to demonstrate the development of
language
Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and signed language, signed forms, and may also be conveyed through writing syste ...
or literary style. It is different from an
anthology
In book publishing, an anthology is a collection of literary works chosen by the compiler; it may be a collection of plays, poems, short stories, songs, or related fiction/non-fiction excerpts by different authors. There are also thematic and g ...
because of its
didactic purpose.
Examples
*
Bernhard Dorn, ''A Chrestomathy of the
Pushtū or Afghan language'', St. Petersburg: Imperial Academy of Sciences, 1847
*
H. L. Mencken, ''A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of his Choicest Writing'', New York: Alfred P. Knopf, 1949
*
L. L. Zamenhof, , Paris: Hachette, 1903
*
Edward Ullendorff, ''A
Tigrinya Chrestomathy'', Stuttgart: Steiner Werlag Wiesbaden GmbH, 1985.
* ''Bilingual Greek-Latin Grammar'', by
Georgios Dimitriou, 1785, that contained personal observations,
Epistles
An epistle (; ) is a writing directed or sent to a person or group of people, usually an elegant and formal didactic letter. The epistle genre of letter-writing was common in ancient Egypt as part of the scribal-school writing curriculum. The ...
and
Maxims, as well as biographies of notable men.
* ''
Rosetta Code
Rosetta Code is a wiki-based programming chrestomathy website with implementations of common algorithms and solutions to various computer programming, programming problems in many different programming languages. It is named for the Rosetta Stone ...
'', "a programming chrestomathy site", which "present
solutions to the same task in as many different
omputerlanguages as possible".
* ''The Ibis Chrestomathy'', dealing "solely with words that have a claim to naturalization within the English language".
* Heather Christle, ''The Crying Book'', Catapult: 2019. Explores the subject of crying and tears in a numbered series of extremely short essays.
See also
*
*
Parallel text
A parallel text is a text placed alongside its translation or translations. Parallel text alignment is the identification of the corresponding sentences in both halves of the parallel text. The Loeb Classical Library and the Clay Sanskrit Libr ...
*
Text corpus
In linguistics and natural language processing, a corpus (: corpora) or text corpus is a dataset, consisting of natively digital and older, digitalized, language resources, either annotated or unannotated.
Annotated, they have been used in corp ...
References
{{Authority control
Anthologies