AtticGreek package registered

Version 0.1.0 of a new AtticGreek package is available today from the Julia registry.

This first release is limited, but it does implement the OrthographicSystem interface from the Orthography package, so you can use this version to validate and tokenize strings encoded for the alphabet used in Athenian public documents before the reforms of the archonship of Euclid, in 403 BCE.

The highlighted text in this formulaic inscription illustrates the main differences from literary Greek orthography:

• rough breathing is explicitly indicated, but smooth breathing is unmarked

• there are only five vowels: no eta or omega, and all iotas are adscript

• there are no compound consonants zeta, xi or psi

• the "spurious diphthongs" are spelled with a single epsilon or omicron

• there are no accents

Let's examine the Unicode codepoints that AtticGreek accepts.

using AtticGreek, Orthography
attic = atticGreek()
cps = codepoints(attic)
@show(cps)

cps = "αβγδεζθικλμνοπρστυφχςάέίόύὰὲὶὸὺᾶêῖôῦh \t\n"

AtticGreek mostly follows conventions used in traditional epigraphic print publications. Where the glyphs of the Attic alphabet can be easiliy mapped on to codepoints for standard literary Greek characters, those are used.Latin h indicates rough breathing; Latin e and o are used when necessary to add a circumflex (since Unicode does not support circumflex on epsilon or omicron characters).

We can now use our Attic orthography to validate a transcription of the phrase highlighted above. (We'll use the Orthography package's nfkc function to normalize our typing to Unicode form :NFKC).

using AtticGreek, Orthography
attic = atticGreek()
s = nfkc("έδοχσεν τêι βολêι καὶ τôι δέμοι")
@show(validstring(attic, s))

validstring(attic, s) = true

We can also tokenize Attic strings.

using AtticGreek, Orthography
attic = atticGreek()
s = nfkc("hο δêμος")
tokens = Orthography.tokenize(attic, s)
@show(tokens)

tokens = Orthography.OrthographicToken[Orthography.OrthographicToken("hο", Orthography.LexicalToken()), Orthography.OrthographicToken("δêμος", Orthography.LexicalToken())]

• See documentation for the AtticGreek package

Next steps

In version 0.2, I plan to implement the GreekOrthography interface to support accentuation, syllabification and sorting. This will make it possible to implement morphological parsers using the Kanones package with an AtticGreek orthography.

© Neel Smith. Last modified: April 02, 2021.
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