A chrestomathy ( ; from the

Ancient Greek Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic pe ...

(, “desire of learning”) = (, “useful”) + (, “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. In

philology Philology () is the study of language in oral and written historical sources; it is the intersection of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics (with especially strong ties to etymology). Philology is also defined as ...

or in the study of

literature Literature is any collection of Writing, written work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings specifically considered to be an art form, especially prose fiction, drama, and poetry. In recent centuries, the definition has expanded to ...

, it is a type of reader which presents a sequence of example texts, selected to demonstrate the development of

language Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of ...

or literary style. It is different from an

anthology In book publishing, an anthology is a collection of literary works chosen by the compiler; it may be a collection of plays, poems, short stories, songs or excerpts by different authors. In genre fiction, the term ''anthology'' typically cate ...

because of its didactic purpose.

Examples

* Bernhard Dorn, ''A Chrestomathy of the Pushtu or Afghan language'', St. Petersburg: 1847 * Mencken, H. L., ''A Mencken Chrestomathy, His Own Selection of his Choicest Writing'', 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. * ''Bilingual Greek-Latin Grammar'', by Georgios Dimitriou, 1785, that contained personal observations,

Epistles An epistle (; el, ἐπιστολή, ''epistolē,'' "letter") is a writing directed or sent to a person or group of people, usually an elegant and formal didactic letter. The epistle genre of letter-writing was common in ancient Egypt as par ...

and Maxims, as well as biographies of notable men. *

Rosetta Code Rosetta Code is a wiki-based programming website with implementations of common algorithms and solutions to various programming problems in many different programming languages. It is named for the Rosetta Stone, which has the same text inscri ...

, "a programming chrestomathy site," which "present solutions to the same task in as many different omputerlanguages as possible." * ''The Ibis Chrestomathy'', dealing "solely with words that have a claim to naturalization within the English language." * Heather Christle, ''The Crying Book'', Catapult: 2019. Explores the subject of crying and tears in a numbered series of extremely short essays.

References

{{reflist Anthologies

Examples

See also

References