Chrestomathy

A chrestomathy (/krɛˈstɒməθi/ kreh-STOM-ə-thee; from the Ancient Greek χρηστομάθεια khrēstomátheia 'desire of learning', from χρηστός khrēstós 'useful' + μανθάνω manthánō '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.

A "phono-chrestomathy" of Tatar music

In philology or in the study of literature, it is a type of reader which presents a sequence of example texts, selected to demonstrate the development of language or literary style. It is different from an anthology 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, Fundamenta Krestomatio de la Lingvo Esperanto, Paris: Hachette, 1903^[1]
• Edward Ullendorff, A Tigrinya Chrestomathy, Stuttgart: Steiner Werlag Wiesbaden GmbH, 1985.
• Bilingual Greek-Latin Grammar,^[2] by Georgios Dimitriou, 1785, that contained personal observations, Epistles and Maxims, as well as biographies of notable men.^[3]
• Rosetta Code, "a programming chrestomathy site", which "present[s] solutions to the same task in as many different [computer] languages as possible".
• The Ibis Chrestomathy, dealing "solely with words that have a claim to naturalization within the English language".^[4]
• Heather Christle, The Crying Book, Catapult: 2019. Explores the subject of crying and tears in a numbered series of extremely short essays.

See also

• Lord's Prayer § Use as a language comparison tool
• Parallel text
• Text corpus

References

1. Zamenhof, L. L. (1 June 2005). "Fundamenta Krestomatio" – via Project Gutenberg.
2. "Anemi - Digital Library of Modern Greek Studies". anemi.lib.uoc.gr.
3. Merry, Bruce (2004). Encyclopedia of modern Greek literature (1. publ. ed.). Westport, Conn. [u.a.]: Greenwood Press. p. 70. ISBN 978-0-313-30813-0.
4. Ghosh, Amitav. "Chrestomathy". AmitavGhosh.com. Archived from the original on 2016-10-24. Retrieved 2016-10-14.