Is anyone having trouble with Perseus?

Question

I started learning Ancient Greek about a year ago.

I discovered that Wiktionary is pretty useful for this, although pretty often it doesn't find the word you're looking for.

Then someone here pointed me to Perseus, which to begin with was an absolute godsend. It seems that they pointedly must have gone through most words in a lot of Ancient Greek authors to ensure that the tender neophyte is unlikely to find something missing.

Then it got worse. Very slow response, or no response, often a 503, "Backend fetch failed." And worse... and worse. I now actually dread using it most days. Is anyone else having any similar experiences?

To make matters (even) worse, when Perseus is going through a bad patch, and I go back to Wiktionary, if I try to click on an entry in LSJ (for example to find out the full definition of a verb, middle meanings and all), that's also failing me because LSJ is housed in with the same people/website/setup as Perseus.

Does anyone have any answers to this κονουνδρουμ? Maybe there are other ways to access a digital version of LSJ?

By the way, I'm in the UK. I doubt whether geography plays much part in this... I did in fact try accessing through a VPN with a US IP ... but it was just the same.

Answer 1

Just to fill in the details for anyone experiencing similar frustrations.

As cmw says, an alternative Perseus site is https://perseus.uchicago.edu/index.html.

Tab "logeion" proves to be the most promising for looking up a word and what possible meanings it might have. I put in "ἐπιορκῶν" for example.

If you hover the mouse over the Greek word appearing after "parsed as a form of" you get the possible inflection details. In this case "present active participle" ... "masculine nom."/"masculine voc." Following the link to "Μορφώ" gives these possible meanings in more digestible form. Probably more of a rigmarole than is strictly necessary.

Also ... this is not as useful as the Tufts "morphological tool", which also gives you non-verb possibilities: in this case ἐπίορκος adj.: sworn falsely. Addendum in fact this appears to be incorrect (re uchicago's Logeion): I just put in δόξας and it gave me a verb and a noun, 2 possibilities. Obviously I've no idea what the logic is here.

One might hope that before Hell freezes over the two arms of Perseus might actually engage with one another and come up with a Tufts-style morphological tool ... but on a non-dysfunctional server. Sounds like that hope is likely to be in the domain of myth however.