Chrestomathy
A chrestomathy is a collection of selected literary passages ; 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 or in the study of literature, it is a type of reader that 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
- Edward Ullendorff, A Tigrinya Chrestomathy, Stuttgart: Steiner Werlag Wiesbaden GmbH, 1985.Bilingual Greek-Latin Grammar, by Georgios Dimitriou, 1785, that contained personal observations, Epistles and Maxims, as well as biographies of notable men.Rosetta Code, "a programming chrestomathy site", which "present solutions to the same task in as many different languages 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.