Back in 2018 my computer crashed, requiring a full system reboot. This occurred right as I was starting up the computer at the beginning of an intensive four-day PhD seminar. Great timing. Not stressful at all. It topped off an already harrowing day which included having to run over a dead deer on the freeway at high speed—not a good situation. Anyway, thanks to the marvels of technological machinations I was able to recover all my personal files while restarting the computer. Then I spent the rest of the day re-downloading all my programs and three years’ worth of updates. After the dust settled, I found that I had lost one program for good. A nice program called Kalós: beautiful Greek software. Peering around the web—even on shady sounding eastern European web domains—I never could find the software again. It had vanished without a trace.

Kalós was a nice piece of software that fulfilled one function I have yet to find anywhere else: generating complete paradigms of Greek words. Perhaps other programs or websites do this, but I have never found one. Most programs for reading and engaging with Ancient Greek take a “passive” approach. They aim to parse a given form which occurs in a text. This is hugely helpful. However, it never allows seeing the whole paradigm. Of course, there are books that show entire paradigms, but in my experience they are either a) expensive, b) unwieldy, c) held in libraries that I do not have access to, or d) neither a computer program nor available online therefore I don’t immediately think of them.

Today I was wistfully remembering Kalós as I had need to see what the perfect forms of certain verbs would look like. One can speculate what they ought to be, but I find it reassuring when I can check my speculations against actual forms (without having to guess and check forms over and over again). On a whim, I probed around the internet in search of Kalós, the only tool I know of that would do this (without buying the full TLG access; holding off on that as long as I can). As fate would have it, Kalós does still live on in the dark reaches of the internet. Or rather, it is like a corpse on the internet that can be revivified via the WayBack Machine on Archive.org. To any who would have an interest in this little piece of software, here is where it can be found. Here is a screenshot of Kalós and one of the variety of paradigms it can generate.

Kalós is a standalone program, meaning it does not need any internet connection to work and it works reasonably quickly at what it does. As a bonus, it allows exporting of the paradigms in a variety of formats, such as .pdf, .xml, and Excel files.

Aside from generating paradigms, it also includes a basic lexicon and a parser. Here’s how it describes itself:

1. A Classic Greek dictionary in three languages (English/Spanish/French).

2. A Morphological analysis tool. Morphological analysis means finding out the dictionary form from an inflected form. For example, given πεπαιδεύκα, an inflected form, the morphological analysis finds out that its dictionary form is παιδεύω. Kalós is the best such tool in the market, period.

3. A generator of inflection charts. For example: it produces the full conjugation of any verb, or the full declension of any noun or adjective. The inflection of participles and infinitives is also given for all verbs.

I never found much use for functions 1. and 2. on this list, as there are many places online which do this job better. But, like I mentioned already, I have not found another paradigm generator with any sizable coverage of Ancient Greek (I have found the one on Verbix.com to have really spotty coverage). I have Randall Buth’s morphology, which is really helpful for what it covers, but its range is intentionally limited. Kalós helps fill in this gap, which is a major boost in helping with Greek composition as well as enabling studying and comparing complete paradigms (which are surprisingly hard to come by). For any teachers out there, it can also save a bunch of time typing up paradigms for examples! I hope others can find this beautiful software useful as well.