Chrestomathy

Chrestomathy ( /krɛsˈtɒməθi/ kres-tom-ə-thee; from the Greek words khrestos, useful, and mathein, to know) is a collection of choice literary passages, used especially as an aid in learning a foreign language.

In philology or in the study of literature, it is a type of reader or anthology which presents a sequence of example texts, selected to demonstrate the development of language or literary style.

In computer programming, a program chrestomathy is a collection of similar programs written in various programming languages, for the purpose of demonstrating differences in syntax, semantics and idioms for each language. This term is thought^{[according to whom?]} to have been first used by Eric S. Raymond in the Retrocomputing Museum web site. It is used by analogy to a linguistic chrestomathy.

Examples

• Bernhard Dorn, A Chrestomathy of the Pushtu or Afghan language, St. Petersburg: 1847
• Mencken, H. L., A Mencken Chrestomathy, New York: Alfred P. Knopf, 1949
• Zamenhof, L. L., Fundamenta Krestomatio de la Lingvo Esperanto, Paris: Hachette, 1903
• Edward Ullendorff, A Tigrinya Chrestomathy, Stuttgart: Steiner Werlag Wiesbaden GmbH, 1985.
• A list of program chrestomathy efforts on Rosetta Code
• Bilingual Greek-Latin Grammar, by Georgios Dimitriou, 1785, that contained personal observations, Epistles and Maxims, as well as biographies of notable men.^[1]

See also

• Anthology

References

1. ^ Merry, Bruce (2004). Encyclopedia of modern Greek literature (1. publ. ed.). Westport, Conn. [u.a.]: Greenwood Press. pp. 70. ISBN 9780313308130. http://books.google.gr/books?id=Q-lr20SuvfIC&pg=PA394&dq=demetriou+marry+literature&hl=el&ei=MF6bTuHHFoiC4gTUuLmpBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CC4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=dimitriou&f=false.