Ancient Greek - GoKawiil

Austrian Academy of Science launches Apollo, an AI model for reading Ancient Greek papyri

The Austrian Academy of Science, working with French AI lab Mistral and tech firm Sail Reply, has released Apollo, described as the first large language model built specifically for Ancient Greek. Trained on roughly 600 million words from manuscripts, papyri and inscriptions, it will be offered free to scholars through a chatbot interface to help them locate relevant fragments and reconstruct damaged texts.

wired.com · 2026-09-22

Linguists identify roughly 1,000 pre-Greek words with no Indo-European origin

Researchers have long noted that about 1,000 Ancient Greek words—including labyrinthos, elaia, and names like Odysseus, Athens, and Corinth—cannot be traced to Proto-Indo-European or any known neighboring tongue. A newsletter from linguist Danny Hieber revisits this puzzle, arguing these terms likely survive from a lost 'Pre-Greek' substrate language spoken in the region before Greek speakers arrived.

linguisticdiscovery.com · 2026-09-18