In the “Short Homeric Grammar” in Benner’s Selections from Homer’s Iliad, some stats are listed such as “The fifth foot, in particular, is generally a dactyl; yet here too a spondee is not uncommon; such lines are called spondaic lines, and are said to occur, in Homer, in the proportion of one to eighteen.” (Page 351.) There are other stats related to types of pauses and all that. Not only are such counting efforts admirable from a human discipline standpoint, but I’m going to guess there’s a decent chance that errors would occur.
Does anyone know of a computer generated list or calculation or some code that would output those types of stats?
Are there any lexically tagged electronic editions available of the Homeric literature?
Finally – and this is just for fun – AI text to speech has gotten pretty good. Are there any attempts to emulate tonal recitations of Homeric literature using AI voices?
I’m working on some software that compiles stats on the Greek corpus. In about 6 months I hope to be able to scan Homer and other Greek poets. I’m still working on coming up with a list of all possible correct spellings of words and to what lemma they belong to, so I’m not there yet. I’m also trying to come up with an algorithm that identifies which dialect a word belongs to. So, for example, the Hippocratic corpus has both Ionic and Attic dialects in it and possibly others and I was able to divide the writings into three categories: 1) those whose words were Ionic more than 2/3 of the time, those who were Attic more than 2/3 of the time and the rest. I had a list of 80 words where I knew how they were spelled in both dialects so I just counted how often the author used one rather than the other. Needless to say there are more than 80 words that are spelled differently in Ionic and Attic but you get the idea.
There is a fully parsed Iliad and Odyssey at Greek and Latin Metre. The author has talked about making it available on Github, but I don’t know if he has done that yet.
