I’m current in Vienna for the International Morphology Meeting.

In Polytonic Greek Unicode Still Isn’t Perfect, I enumerated various challenges that still exist with using Polytonic Greek when vowel length needs to be marked. I now have a better appreciation of what solutions are actually realistic.

Whether we’re talking about fonts, programming languages, keyboard entry or even the command-line, support for polytonic Greek has greatly improved even in the last 10 years much less the 23 years since I’ve been doing computational analysis of Greek texts.

While I write and release a lot of Python code for working with Ancient Greek, it tends to be either throwaway code for data wrangling or fairly specialized code for things like accentuation or inflectional morphology.

I decided there needed to be a place to put lightweight utilities that can be used by a range of different projects. This is the motivation for greek-utils.

As part of my explicit annotation of the normalization column in MorphGNT, I started down the rabbit hole of capitalization conventions which led to an interesting experiment with direct speech and the GBI syntax trees.

The latest release of MorphGNT (with a corresponding release of the Python library py-sblgnt) fixes some lemmatization issues along with a couple of accent and part-of-speech changes.

I recently found out about François Gouin, a sort of proto-Charles Berlitz who wrote (in French) a book called The art of teaching and studying languages, published in 1880 and then translated and published in English in 1892.

I’ve only skimmed the book so far but it looks like it contains some real gems relating to the teaching of Greek.

I’m heading off to the LSA’s annual meeting for the first time.

Often it’s useful to see whether certain columns in a table can be entirely determined by others. For example, can you unambigously get the lemma from just the form (the answer is no so a more useful question is which forms are ambiguous as to lemma)? Does knowing the part-of-speech help? Here we provide some code and give some examples.

Ten years ago, when Ulrik Sandborg-Petersen and I started collaborating, we came up with a way of referencing lexemes that would satisfy both the lumpers and splitters. At the time we wrote a paper that we circulated to a small audience but now it’s finally up on Academia.edu.