Ancient Greek as a separate language

Suggestions
1

Steve,

Could we have Ancient Greek as a separate language from “Greek”. It’s like having Italian and Latin together.

2

The story bot gets confused too, here’s what it gave me when I asked for a story about a part of ancient history (I didn’t mind it per se as I read both but it gave me a chuckle).

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3

Exactly, Mithradates, LLMs would work better were the languages separated!

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4

Now here’s another thought though: instead of a separate language you could maybe set it to an approximate date or add a freeform string describing the type of language.

E.g. I know English, Im learning:

Greek (Koine)

English (Middle Ages)

English (1100)

Greek (Katharevousa)

French (Norman)

Serbian (Cyrillic)

That seems like it could be the most flexible way since so many of the translation functionalities are based on LLMs and working with context.

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5

This would be ideal, but only Steve knows if it’s feasible. As I understand it, Steve made some design choices years ago that are hard to change now. For example, that’s why we have to have both an “I know” language and an “I’m learning” language, even if many would like to have a proper monolingual mode.

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6

that would be sweet!

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7

Khaire, o Steve!

I still think having ancient Greek as a separate language is a great idea. Have you given any thought to this?

8

I guess the most apparent issue is that without Google Translate support, it would have to be a premium-only language, if I’m not mistaken.

mithradates’ example of requesting a “Greek” story and getting back ancient Greek comes across to me as a confused AI, a bug essentially, and it doesn’t inspire confidence that the AI models are up to the task of sticking to the desired language variation. But mithradates’ suggestion could be useful to address it… It could let you specify “modern Greek” vs. just “Greek.” I can see other uses, for example I find it useful in Cantonese to include “in colloquial Cantonese” in the Story Bot prompt, to avoid getting a bunch of standard Chinese back. There are probably reasonable uses for Arabic too.

In another unrelated application I found an LLM quite unresponsive to the instruction “in Greek.” Greek specifically. I sometimes got English back. I had to change it to “in Greek language,” and that worked.