Miscellaneous Language tools

 

Miscellaneous

 

• The US Consulate in Thessaloniki maintains a useful site.

• A good site for updates on general travel and culture in the Balkans is Balkanology. 

• Wikipedia has an entry on Thessaloniki.

• The Φοιτητική Λέσχη (student cafeteria) at Aristotle University posts its weekly menu as a PDF file (in Greek).

• Mac-heads may be interested in the user-created Greek localization of OS X. Greece has a Mac user group (in Greek), as does Thessaloniki (in Greek).

• Tales from a Small Planet, a resource site created for expatriates, has a collection of useful reports from Americans living in Greece, including Thessaloniki-specific ones.

• O brave new world! Inexplicably, you can order pizza online in Thessaloniki. It's pretty good, too.

• Sviato-Vvedensky Convent in Russia hosts the helpful Church Calendar Resource Page, whih includes New/Old Calendar calculations and keyword searches for determining a saint's feast day.

• Forthnet, a greek ISP, offers street-maps of Attica (the Athens area) and Thessaloniki with useful locations marked. Installing the Google Earth application is a fantastic way to get a perspective on the city—much better than a normal street-map. Downloading the Google Earth file for our City Map will let you see the points of interest we've marked (along with many others) from within Google Earth.

• Forthnet also offers a boat-schedule–search for a given date and route that claims to be virtually comprehensive, and in many cases offers links to book online a ticket for the itinerary you have found.

 

Language tools

 

• Translatium has a huge list of tools. Use the "Dictionaries" menu at the upper left to see all that the site has to offer. The links to specialty dictionaries are especially valuable. 

• Miscellaneous resources are available at Learn to Speak Greek: Greek Language Books, Programs and Courses.

• Theophilos Vamvakos maintains a simple page listing many idiomatic expressions in Greek and English.

• Lexilogos provides an interface to several Greek-English dictionaries, along with an interesting collection of resources.

• Neurolingo's Lexiscope is an interesting tool. It doesn't provide translations, but it will spell-check, give thesaurus entries, aid in hyphenating, and — most importantly — given an inflected word-form, it tells you the lemma it's formed from. That is to say, if you feed it κατέστη, it gives you back καθιστώ. (And, if there's more than one possibility, it tells you that, too.) In short, it's a Modern Greek version of the Perseus Project's morphological analysis tool.

• Speaking of the Perseus Project, it's worth mentioning their excellent Ancient Greek tools and the huge collection of texts they offer (including the New Testament), with every word linked to a morphological analysis and definition. (That's more relevant for Modern Greek than you might think — sometimes an ancient definition of a word (or its root) can give you important information about it.)

 

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