This is part 0 of a series of blog posts about modelling stems and principal part lists, particularly for Attic Greek but hopefully more generally applicable. This is largely writing up work already done but I’m doing cleanup as I go along as well.

A research career requires publication in peer-reviewed journals but what if some of your scholarly output is in the form of software? The Journal of Open Source Software attempts to solve that by essentially wrapping peer-reviewed software packages up as lightweight papers. My pyuca library was just accepted for publication by the journal.

In my post Morphological Parts of Speech in Greek last year, I presented a model of five or six parts of speech based purely on what they inflect for. I just found out Varro suggested similar for Latin over two thousand years ago.

Over the last few years, I’ve worked on a number of iterations of code that can generate Ancient Greek verb forms. I’ve now broken out the Greek-specific pieces and released a generic library called inflexion.

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.