towards computational pr.ocedures in homeric...

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TOWARDS COMPUTATIONAL PR.OCEDURES IN HOMERIC SCHOLARSHIP The computer will not solve the major questions of Homeric enquiry, coeval as they are with the concept of scholarship, but its vast computational resources allow us to compile and coHate data on a seale far larger than has been possible for earlier generatiolls. Future scholars must learn what problems are computer-soluble, and what techniques of research are applicable to the computer, for we already look forward to a day when all classical texts will be available in machine-readable form and we need to be ready to make the best use of these resources. It is now four years since l first asked Professor Delatte if my questions about the functional role of certain stem-extensions in early Greek could be answered by computer, and l have been allowed by the se ycars of inactivity to ponder the uses of a tape of Homer rather fully and to watch the very rapid development of the disciplines involved in computer research in language texts. l am gratcful to Professor Anthony J. Podlecki and the Pennsylvania State University for two opportuni- ties earlier this year to discuss Homer and the computer with col- lcagues and in publicl, and the following notes are based on these addresses. .:--- l Extrait de la Revue (R.E.L.O.) III, 1 à 4, 1967. C.I.P.L. - Université de Liège - Tous droits réservés.

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TOWARDS COMPUTATIONALPR.OCEDURES IN HOMERIC SCHOLARSHIP

The computer will not solve the major questions of Homericenquiry, coeval as they are with the concept of scholarship, but itsvast computational resources allow us to compile and coHate dataon a seale far larger than has been possible for earlier generatiolls.Future scholars must learn what problems are computer-soluble,and what techniques of research are applicable to the computer,for we already look forward to a day when all classical texts willbe available in machine-readable form and we need to be ready tomake the best use of these resources. It is now four years since lfirst asked Professor Delatte if my questions about the functionalrole of certain stem-extensions in early Greek could be answeredby computer, and l have been allowed by these ycars of inactivityto ponder the uses of a tape of Homer rather fully and to watchthe very rapid development of the disciplines involved in computerresearch in language texts. l am gratcful to Professor Anthony J.Podlecki and the Pennsylvania State University for two opportuni­ties earlier this year to discuss Homer and the computer with col­lcagues and in publicl, and the following notes are based on theseaddresses.

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Extrait de la Revue (R.E.L.O.) III, 1 à 4, 1967. C.I.P.L. - Université de Liège - Tous droits réservés.

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The text of the lliad and Odyssey is now available in machine-rea·dable form from the Edinburgh Homer Experiment2 thanks to theenergy and enthusiasm of A.Q. Morton, supported by a successionof English and Scottish scholars. My copy is onpaper-tape usingan octal coding and 1 am currently converting it into binary codingon an IBM 800 BPI magnetic tape. 1 will work with a BCD codecompatible with print-out in Roman upper-case, using arbitrarysymbols for Greek letters usually transliterated by two letters orwith long marks. Print-out in Greek is available either by photocomposition on a Photon 713, available as a service on a commer·cial basis in this country from Rocapi, Inc., Swarthmore, Pennsyl­vania, or by linkage to a slow electric typewriter. However, thereare rapid advances in this area and there appears sorne hope thatthe newer versions of IBM Selectric typewriters or their rivaIs willoffer even more convenient ways of printing final material. Itappears that 1 will also be working for sorne purposes with IBMcards and that therefore 1 will need a further conversion programbetween the Ben and the punch cards. It would be useful to havean international standard for the Greek alphabet in the variouscodes, so that texts at different centers are compatible.

There is still, as 1 have said before in this journal, a need for seho·lars embarking on large projects such as the punching of Homer toconsult with the scholarly world as to how their job may most use·fully be done. It is a disappointing feature of the present tapesthat no one suggested that final elision marks would be necessary

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Extrait de la Revue (R.E.L.O.) III, 1 à 4, 1967. C.I.P.L. - Université de Liège - Tous droits réservés.

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for sorne of the tasks to be undertaken with the tapes, as it will in­volve a substantial program before 1 can construct the reserve indi­ces and concordance which are basic to work in computationallinguistics. 1 do not want to let this personal disappointment over­shadow the gratitude we owe the Edinburgh Homer Experiment,but it will be clear from the following section, written before re·ceipt of the tape, how great my disappointment was. We muststress over and over again : the International Organization exists sothat everyone interested in a given undertaking can discuss thetechnical procedures and goals at its inception, rather than waitingto criticize it at its conclusion.

The following sections deal in more detail with thé linguistic and.. metrical procedures 1am developing than was my purpose in Revue

1966/4, but they were prepared before receipt of the Edinburghtapes and none is implemented in machine language yet. 1 expectto apply a version of the automatic scansion program to the lastbook of the Odyssey as soon as the conversion to magnetic tape iscomplete. 1 plan to recall by a concordance program the occur­rences of T€, of -oc; and of those forms of the sigmatic verb whichare machine identifiable. The l'est of the automatic grammaticalanalysis will probably have to wait for the addition of elision marksand the construction of a complete reverse concordance, although1 plan to experiment a little on individual books with a simpledictionary to see what problems 1 have not yet foreseen. 1 alsoinclude sorne of the general remarks on editing Homer and on the

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Extrait de la Revue (R.E.L.O.) III, 1 à 4, 1967. C.I.P.L. - Université de Liège - Tous droits réservés.

future of the computer in classics from my two addresses. Thispaper should be considered as no more than a second edition ofthe prospects 1 see for computerized research in Homer.

A. PROCEDURES OF GRAMMATICAL ANALYSIS

At the present time grammatical information necessaryfor orde­ring index and lexicon entries or for compiling frequency statisticsis manually coded at LASLA according to the ingenious schemesof Bodson and Govaerts (Revue 1966/1, latin) and De Bie (1966/4.and 1967/1, Greek). However, a considerable amount of ingenuityis going into the development of programs analysing syntax auto­matically, and it appears likely that we can eventually adapt thetechniques i~ this, branch of com~utationallinguisticsto Latin andGreek.3 It lS unhkely that we WIll develop a program free enoughof errorin the near future to decree the LASLA scheme out of da­te, but the attempt to analyze structures with sorne sort of aut~­

matic program has three advantages over the manual method :' 3 biS

1) many common function words are mechanically processed, sa­ving a large amount of time;

2) the construction of a purely mechanical program makes us "askourselves which features of our grammatical description corres­pond to linguistic facts and which are purely logical categories(and what is the difference);

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3) the discussion of ambiguities and difficulties in developing theprogram is instructive in itself.

Ta these three points may be added a specifie point for HomericGreek. It is possible that the linguistic systems of Homeric Greekare not identical with those of classical Greek and that classicalgrammar has in sorne points applied false categories ta them.Among the peculiarities, already noticed are the sigmatic aorist andthe genitive of agent.

ln arder ta compile the data necessary for an automatic programwe may investigate several functioning programs. The best knownof the large-scale programs for English is the Harvard SyntacticAnalyzer.4" However, at least in the experimental stages it seemsmore useful ta work towards a more economical program needingless linkage for its memory core. The model 1 am taking for mywork is a COMIT program for English outlined recently by D.C.Clarke and R.E. Wall, which operates with a dictionary of less than1.000 entries. 5 The Clarke-Wall program consists of three basiccomponents : dictionary for look.up, grammar against which tatest for well·formedness, and a set of algorithms.

They define the function of the dictionary as "ta assign each wardof the input text ta one or more ward classes (traditionally suchcategories as noun, verb, adjective, etc.)... Our program uses acomputational dictionary of the type described by Klein and

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Simmons which makes word-c1ass assignments on the basis oforthographie features" (pp. 308-9). The dictionary contains aUcommon function words : prepositions, articles, conjunctions, etc.;word endings (e.g. oing, -ed, -ous, -tion) : and exceptions to theword ending rules such as thing or feed. The material for the lasttwo categories was compiled from a reverse index of English. Thedictionary is smaU enough to go into the core storage of an IBM7094 with the grammatical rules and programming instructions,and therefore each word of the text being parsed can he looked upin the dictionary in text order, a feature not possible in the large­scale analyzers. The computer assigns a code to each word it dis­covers in the dictionary and assigns noun/verb to those it does notso identify.

The grammar contains phrase-structure rules for combining classedwords into 9 types of phrase and 8 types of subordinate and relati­ve clauses. The phrase types are: nominal, pronominal, adjectival,past participial, present participial, prepositional, verbal, infinitiveand adverbial; and the clauses are distinguished according to theconjunction and the structure after each. The grammal' allows thecomputer to bracket phrases and to mark off clauses by clausemarkers.

The algorithms test for well-formedness of structure, assign wordclasses to words not yet assigned and check for well·formedness inthe resulting structures until they arrive at a satisfactory result.

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At this stage the computer may decide there is ambiguity or that itcannot analyze the sentence. More alarming are the cases where itsucceeds in analyzing a structure incorrectly. Clarke and Wallpoint out various inadequacies in their program, but show that theproblems discovered in its implementation are themselves linguisti­cally interesting. The average processing time for each word is0.179 seconds.

In adapting the Clark~-Wall program to Homeric Greek, we arestruck by how different a highly-inflected language like HomericGreek is from the syntax of English and the other lightly inflectedlanguages studied by modern generative grammarians and compu­tationallinguists.

Certain categories of words and endings can be entered simply intothe dictionary of hly Homeric syntactic program :

1) prepositions, distinguished by the case(s) possible with each;

2) modifiers, 8uch as negatives, intensifiers and grammatical modi­fiers such as av and" (e);

3) conjunctions, including among thesuhclasses Te (for which spe·cial rules must he written in the grammar) and other particleswhich must he coded as not normally affecting the phrase struc­ture in which they occur;

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4) the forms of the article (which often functions as nothing otherthan a phrase-boundary marker) and the relative (which someti­mes functions as a c1ause-boundary marker);

5) the pronouns;

6) the cardinal numbers;

7) other indeclinables;

8) the forms of the verb d'vat;

9) the adverbial suffixes -W" -8e, -(Je(v),-I{)i.

Problems begin when we attempt to identify noun, verb, adjective.It is clear we cannot operate with merely orthographie features,for this would lead to a hopeless degree of ambiguity with endings8uch as -os, -es, -on, -a, -tai. Examination of the statistics from areverse index to Homer may reveal sorne unambiguous orthogra­phie features and an expectancy ratio for other features. However,the endings of Greek words seldom serve to identify the word classof the word but rather the syntactic slot or grammatical relation­ship in which the word stands in its sentence, and it appears that,if we are to work with endings at aIl in the dictionary, we mustenter on defining the syntactic l'ole of the inflections and otherstem-extensions added to the root-moq:>hemes of Gl'eek. We needsorne sort of program 'yhich will determine, at least approximately,

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the morphemes of our words, and we may turn for such amorphe­micization program to Dan M. Matson's article on Telugu inGarvin-Spolsky. However, the theoretical hasis of such analysis ininflected languages has heen questioned hy Chomsky. He writes,6"1 know of no compensating advantage for the modern descripti­vist reanalysis of traditional paradigmatic formulations in terms ofmorpheme sequences. This seems, therefore, to he an ill-advisedtheoretical innovation... It seems that in inflectional systems, theparadigmatic analysis has many advantages and is to he preferred,though there may he cases where sorne compromise should he ma­de. It is difficult to say anything more definite, since there haveheen so few attempts to give precise and principled descriptions ofinflectional systems in a way that would have sorne hearing on thetheoretical issues involved here. If we assume now that the para­digmatic solution is the correct one, it follows that we must allowthe transformational component to contain mles that alter andexpand the matrix of features constituting a lexical item. Forexample, the feature (or features) of Case must in general he speci­fied hy mIes that apply after many transformational mIes have al­ready taken effect. Two classicallinguists, Hansjakoh Seiler7 andP.H. Mathews,8 have since attempted to define the inflectionalcomponent in languages such as classical Greek and Latin, whichhave traditionaUy heen regarded as having paradigms of this sort.Seiler suggests that the nominative is the base form of the noun

r' and that the other cases need ta he specified in the lexicon of thathase form.

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If this formulation applies to Homeric Greek, we cannot define thecase and word cIass of a given inflected form until we look it up inthe lexicon. For our automatic program we would need to havethe whole lexical inventory of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and theirinflected forms entered in the core-storage dictionary. This is im­possible on practicaI grounds, and we must search for simpler pro­cedures if we are ever to have a worthwhile anaIysis. Chomsky'stheoretical basis is not ,certain, moreover, and it is still worth in­vestigating whether, at least in Homer's day, both inflectionàl en­dings and stem-extensions did not play sorne sort of autonomousrule as markers of phrase structure 01' other functions, in the waythat tagmemics and other string analyses have cIaimed. The successor failure of our undertaking will have repercussions on the theore­tical issue between Chomskyan linguists and those he attacks, forit will require a "principled description" of the inflectional system.

In the second stage of the computational dictionary will be recog­nized four types of morphemes : (a) prefixes, (b) lexico-semanticroots, (c) stem-extensions, (d) inflectional endings. Sorne roots arepurely verbal (i.e. aIl non-verbal forms are derivative) and thesewill have to be specified in the dictionarYi all other roots will beassumed to be neutraI in respect to word cIass,9 and not listed atleast in the provisionaI dictionary. An exhaustive list of the otherthree categories will be entered. The computer will enter the se­cond stage of dictionary look-up only when a word has not beenlocated in the first stage, and it will pass the word first in reverse

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, order looking for unambiguous markers and prefixes and then, ifits identification proves incomplete, again left to right, letter byletter, producing alternative solutions to the morphemic structure,and the syntactic role, by examining the list of morphemes. Cer­tain morphemic structures will be rejected as impossible (e.g. whe­re less than two letters are left as root), and it should be possibleto program that where noun endings are found on the right to leftpass purely verbal morphemes such as the augment are rejected. Itis, or course, too early. to say just how this second-stage dictionarywill look, as it will need careful work with a reverse index, perhapseven concordance, and with the studies by Risch, Chantraine andothers before principles can be evolved.

One particularly intriguing question is what lexico-semantic rootsneed to be entered in the dictionary, and how they are to be spel­led. Preliminary work suggests that in most cases the root vowelof the elo alternation can be, and must be, specified as in vowelharmony with a word-class-marking ending, i.e. -0- plus -os, -on,etc., indicates noun from a root with no vowel; -e- plus -os indica­tes nominative 01' accusative of noun with root with no vowel, plus·es- extention; -e- plus -eos indicates genitive of the same; any othervo;Vel plus -os indicates genitive of the root given (provided rootand ending are not separated by a known stem-extension such as-nt-) or adjective. 10 It appears that one result of this work may bea list of the lexico-semantic roots clearly differentiated accordingto their liability to morphophonemic gradating. It would be parti­cularly useful here to begin putting Pokorny's Indo-European roots

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into machine-readable form, as the computer should allow us tosolve the very vexed question of the vowel in roots. 1 have deviseda coding in binary-octal form specifying the distinctive features ofthe six places of the lE root (prothesis, initial stop, off-glidc, so­nant, final stop, fcatures of the off-glide or glottal stop reflected incomposition), which may ultimately be a better way of specifyingthe lE base against which Greek or other words are to be checkedthan the traditionalletter spelling. 1 would be interested to hear ifother Indo-Europeanists are working with computers, as we mayhave quite exciting possibilities of reconstruction from a programcoordinated among scholars from each language. It is, however,too early to know whether the lE form will or will not prove to bethe form of the lexico-semantic root most usefully inserted intothe computational dictionary. Comparison with the morphemicstructure of the non-Indo-European elements in Mycenaean sug­gests there may be heavier admixture of substrate features in earlyGreek than we have allowed and that the lE roots may be less ac­curately reflected than traditional lE grammar teaches us.

Once dictionary look-up is complete, the automatic parsing pro­gram enters on its most interesting phase, the attempt to analysethe syntactic structure. First it attempts to bracket well-formedphrases; then it assembles them into a sentence structure. Eachmain verb located in the text will have assigned to it a number asBook X Syntactic Structure XXX Verb Phrase. It will he assumedthat the structure has an introductory connective, a Noun Phrase

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Subject (which may be a pronoun specified as such in the dictiona·ry or assumed to be that of the last SS) and one or more of thefollowing phrases and clauses: Noun Phrase Object; Noun PhraseDative; Genitive not assigned to another phrase; Adverb; Preposi­tional Phrase; Participial Phrase embedded to NPS, NPO, NPD orG (sorne problems will be caused here by prepositional phrases);Parenthetic Clause (introduced by sentence connective inside astructnre); Adverbial qause; Clause Embedded by phrase markersuch as article; Clause Embedded by Relative. The algorithms tes·ting for well·formedness will allow sorne ambiguities in word as·signments to be resolved. Particular care is going to have to be ta·ken in allowing for structural ambiguity such as often surroundsthe middle/passive voice. One of the most important questions tobe asked is which middle/passive verbs have both NPS and NPO.

From the final analysis, completed manually, will come a list of al!the Syntactic Structures in Homer, and it should be possible to askfor any given verb what its adverhs are, its NPS·NPO pairs and itsidiomatic relation to prepositions. Similar questions will he possi·ble for al! parts of speech. Hopefully this final analysis will forman important hasis for study of the development of Greek langua-

"\. ge and ideas after Homer.

Crossgrove has an interesting formulation of how syntactic struc­tures can be coded for Middle High German in his article in Garvin­Spolsky, and more detailed information on flowcharting for

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pushdown store of subordinate clauses can be found in Ranan B.Banerij's article in the same volume, "Sorne Studies in Syntax­Directed Parsing" (pp. 76-123).

This is still an early stage to do anything but formulate the goalsof such a program for Homer and refer others to the techmquesand parallels available fOf the program. But our work with compu­ters progresses by the sharing of ideas and knowledge, rather thanprivate and perhaps perverse constructions, and we have sorne reS­ponsibility to indicate the colleagues and students the directions inwhich the computer may be used in research. 1 hope this justifiesmy speculations above, and that 1 will soon have sufficient data todocument the matrices in which the stem-extensions. and inflec­tions seem to operate with syntactic function (or at least with or­dering of items on a logico-syntactic basis).

B. METRE

Almost any study of Homer, particularly a linguistic one, is depen.dent on an understanding of the Homeric hexameter, its laws andmetrical necessities.

I. ANALYSING THE DATA.

The first work done on Homer by computer was in this area. Ja­mes T. McDonough Jr. scanned each line of the Iliad manually,

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assigned H. N. Porter's metrical word-type numbers (hereafterMWTs) and punched these numbers on IBM cards. His output lis­ted for every MWT the lines in which it occurred. This data madeclear certain fundamentals of the Homeric hexameter, such as themetrical necessity of many "spondaic" lines and the compositionalbases giving rise to exceptions to the laws of Heinsius and Werni­cke. However, it proves still somewhat laborious to work withMcDonough's data. Th,ey do not contain words in the output,lland one may spend an infinite amount of time checking figures tofind that most instances of a given MWT are in fact the same word.Further, it does not give any criteria by which to distinguish wordsof a MWT beginning or ending with consonant, consonant c1uster,vowel (long or short), etc., and thus many of the words under agiven MWT will be words of very different shape.

McDonough provides information on what MWTs are found beforeeach caesura in the line, but no easy way of checking what word­types are common after or before any word one may examine. Hismaterial is of no use to those who wish to check patterns of spon­dee and dactyl.

~

Certain of the shortcomings in McDonough's work may now be re­medied by applying the followingprogram to the Edinburgh tapes:

1) punch for every MWT the lines of the IlÙld where it is found(from McDonough's data);

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2) select those MWTs which belong to thé beginning of the line,viz. 2 [-] 38%,7 [-'119.6%,10 [-115.7%, 21 [_v ....] 10.2~

28 [--1 8%, 33 [-"V-] 7.7%, 92, 99,132,128,131,137,154,161, and program for each type a search of the following sort:if 2 search for this line MWTs 22, 26, 35, 47, 54,86,88,94,98,etc.; if 7 search for this line MWTs 16, 17,64, 71, 79, 85, etc.;

3) write a program of this sort for every MWT;

4) tale each line of the printed text and, proceeding word by word(with an instruction to ignore aIl words of a single letter excepta~ l,11 (etc.), D, w) locate the line in the lists of MWTs (first tho­se which hegin the line and then in the search consequent oneach discovered MWT);

5) attach the MWT number to the word;

6) print out the MWT shape of each line;

7) list the actual words found for each MWT;

8) calculate for every MWT the MWTs aetually found hefore andafter it through the Iliad and the statistical prohabilities foreach.

9) This program could he used to tahulate the words or MWTs

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found after given words (or words after MWTs), or, more inte­restingly, after groups of words sharing features other than iden­tical word-shape, e.g. middle participles.

II. RECONSTRUCTING HOMER'S COMPOSITIONAL TECHNIQUES ANDTHE ROLE OF FORMULAE.

However, it is not clear. that this complicated program would fullyanswer the more interesting questions we have about the Homerichexameter. Since the work of Milman Parry our interest in thehexameter has Iain in its composition, the role of formulae andstock epithets, the question whether the virtuoso technique ofmuch of the verse composition is possible in oral composition (stillseriously doubted by H.]. Mette and others), and the actual pro­cess by which the composer worked. The study of compositiondemands data other than that achieved by IVlcDonough or to beachieved by the program suggested. There appear to be four stagesin the adaptation of word to line : .

1) word-shape (WT),

2) compositional word-type (CWT),

3) MWT, and

4) the extension 0; composition of the word in its metrical word-

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type (word in MWT~ into one of the basic cola of the hexame­ter: verse, Tl, pl, h ,h2 appearing the commonest.l 2

1. Word-shape must he defined hy the following metrically significantcharacteristics :

a. the nature of the word initial :

i. single consonant (c),Il. consonant c1uster making position (cc),üi. consonant c1uster,not (necessarily) making position (cl),13IV. short vowel (v),v. long vowel or diphthong (vv),VI. possibility of augment (ec or ev as the case may he),VII. initial digamma (WC or WV as the case may he);

h. The nature of the word final:

1. short vowel hefore consonant (c),Il. long vowel before consonant (lc),Ill. short open vowel (v), where the absence of this vowel is

elision (e),IV. long open vowel or diphthong (vv), where the shortening

of this vowel is (v),14v. short vowel which may he either open or followed by

epenthetic nu (vn);

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c. the natural scansion of the word where the last syllable is scan·ned as if it were a line final, e.g. short vowel before consonant isscanned longi

d. certain other features such as potential tmesis may need to besignalled, but it is likely that any such information could beacquired from the morphological description of the word (sce Aabove). Sorne words' have more than one WT, e.g. the name ofAkhil(l)eus is either ,,[u - -jc or v[,",\J -jc, but this is to be accoun­ted for in the mctrical declension of the word (cf. II 4 below).

2. CWT. Certain word-shapes are impossible in the hexameter andmust be avoided or altered,l5 Other WTs are possible only undercertain junctures : e.g. [vv 1V must stand either before v[-](and beelided) or before cclor cl]. The fitting of WTs into metrically pos­sible shapes ma)' be called the creation of CWTs undcl' rules suchas these :

Therc are 20 CWTs in the hcxameter with fcwcr than three metri·cal pulses. 16

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3. Each CWT may be used as several different MWTs, although certainCWTs are more closeIy bound ta one particular MWT than others.This leads to the observation that a bound MWT is a deterrniningfactor in shaping a colon or verse. That particular CWT is houndto occur at this position. In every case of bound MWT it will befound that the exceptions normally occur when a whole colon is

• transposed from its norinal position to another (e.g. ",hen h2 isfound used as (! ...... .!'1). AlI WTs ending in - "'] may also he treatedas the corresponding CWT ending in --] in the MWT at the end ofthe hexameter. The 20 CWTs of the hexameter, with their l\1WTsand occurrences in the lliad are (statistics for l\IWTs from McDo­nough)

CWT 1 [-] x 18,252.,MWT 2 [-] x 5.957

2-4 [-] x 3,989

S-15 [-] x 1,795

135 - [-] x 1,165

2-38 -[-] x 1,098

39 [J] x 1,017

*At A639 "vil is illegitimate.

20

:1MWT 45 -[-] x 916

J46 [-] x 856

'"48 -[-) x 816, ('

53 -[!") x 603 (includes-["']),90 [-) x 79

151 not found*

Extrait de la Revue (R.E.L.O.) III, 1 à 4, 1967. C.I.P.L. - Université de Liège - Tous droits réservés.

CWT 2 ["'] x 11,6903

MWT 14-[U] xl,8762.

16 (U]-x 1,791:1

22 - [....] x 1,579

"24 [u]- x 1~501

S'29 - (V] x 1,244

~

MWT 31 -[ ....] x 1,233G

4.1 [V]-x 991S'

55 ("']- x 5903

59 [....]-x 513Ci

67 -[ ....] x 372

.-'

,CWT 3 [-...] x 11 ,096 (note [- V] is included here)*

, rMWT 3 [-~] x 4,614 MWT 58 [--] x 554

1 ~10 [--lx 2,468 70 [--] x 280

3 .2. .25 [--lx 1,382 76 [--] x 195

1 ,47 [--lx 819 118 [--] x 21

'151 [--] x 757 136 not found**

, ,* [- -] x 3,533, [- -] x 1,563

** The six examples of [l' -] are ilIegitimate, as van Leeuwen hadsuggested.

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3MWT 36 -[...... ] x 1,126

S"43 -[v ....] x 942

CWT 4 [-U] x 10,446 (note [- U] is include in 3)) t

MWT 5 [-u] x 3,817 MWT 44 [-v] x 9221 ~

7 [-v] x 3,075 no [_v] x 28')

9 [-v] x 2,604. ,CWT 5 [''''--] x 6,891, ["'- v .... ] x 2,110 (note ["'-'"'] is included here), .

MWT 1 ["'-1<] x 6,344 (aU but 553 instances)

"12 ru-v,",] x 2,048 (96.6% of instances)~ r

MWT 61 ['" --] x 495 MWT 100 ["'- VV

] x 441 ~

96 [..._-] x 58 108 [v-uv] x 28

CWT 6 [v .... ] x 7,318If

MWT 8 - [v V] x 2,644-1

26 _[U1V] x 1,332

2.-27 - ['" V] x 1,274

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CMWT 80 ["-] x 165

S'105 [v_] x 31

CWT 7 [l.I-] X 6,519 (58.1% MWT 6)

"MWT 6 [,,-] x 3,788

2-17 [v-] x 1,720

349 [v-]x815

CWT 8 [---] x 2,762,*, [_ ...... _] x 2,8201 ~

MWT 28 [---] x 1,256

" 1.

33 [_ ......_] x 1,215

1. ~

37 [_ ......_] x 1,112

2 340 [---] x 1,019

If S' 5"'MWT 74 [_ ......_] x 247 MWT 102 [---] x 39, 3 4

75 [--)( ] x 217* 103 [---] x 39f , "77 [- ... ,,-] x 188 112 [---] x 27

~ S' ~

81 [---] x 159 135 [---] x6

J y ,95 [_ ......_] x 58 * Including [- _... ]

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CWT 9 [_UV] x 5,54.2S'

MWT 11 [-UV] x 2,064.1

21 [- U.J ] X 1,595

"23 [- ......] x 1,536

.2.MWT 69 [- .....] x 346

149 notfound*

}~. At 0 18 the reading i:;KpéIJ.W [_"'V] is illegitimate.,

CWT 10 [...... - V] x 2,729, [-_ ....] x 2,162 (note [........ -V] is inc~ded under. 12, aud the rare [- .... ] uuder 8)

3 ~MWT 20 [VV-V] x 1,639 MWT 86 [--,,] x 99

3 ~32 [-- V] x 1,221 91 [...... -v] x 72

s y42 [.... -V] x 968 93 [-- '"'] x 70

s ~

50 [-- ",,] x 772 98 [",u-V] x 50

CWT Il [.... - ] x 4,627~ S-

MWT 18 [V"_] x 1,703 MWT 57 [u ... _] x 5841.{

,19 ["""-] x 1,655 89 ["''''-] x 83

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CWT 12 [''''''--] ~ 2,176, [vu_"'''''] x 1,003, [__ U"'] x 746,(cf. CWT 8 [-- -] and 10 [... ~- "'])*

"MWT 13 [VV_ x] . x 2,050 (aIl but 126 instances of [VV --])

'152 [........ _ ......] x 616 (61.4% of instances)

1(-63 [-- "'V] x 481 (64.5% of instances)

S'66 ("'''- ....... ] x 374

S'73 (-- "' ....] x 253

ft84 [""--] x 119

2-123 (... "'-v ....] x 13

~126 (-- .........] x 12

2..134 [w .... __] x7,

* Ali instances of [" ....- v] are included here.

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CWT 13 [",- IIWl x 1,9101( S" 2. J

MWT 56 [V- __] x 590 MWT 71 [.... _"v_]x 270

" S" 3 ~62 ["'-"vi x 495 101 ["---] x 38

2. l "1 '"64 [U~' __ ] . x 482 104 ["'-~"-]x 35S" ,

CWT 14 [-~--] x 1,777,* [-~ _vu] x 9 (note [-~.. _u] isincluded here)

fi" c.MWT 30 [_v... _x] x 1,241

fi" ,60 [---x] x 527

1 2.132 (-".,--] x8

~ s-138 [_V.,_w.,] x 5

" fi"147 [- --......] x 212, .. " .., ~

once each : MWTs 154 [----1, 156 [ v .... ], 1621- .... .,- .....]., ,

* There are also 42 instances of [-- --] listed under CWT 18.

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,CWT 15 [.... -V] (note rU_V] is included under 5) x 1,600

3 ~l\·1WT 34. [... _,,] x 1,184 MWT 79 [u _ ...] x 166

~ ~

78 rU_V] x 180 97 ["'- "'] x 50S' ,

CWT 16 [-~-'1 x 1,165 (note [-~- ...] is included under 14)2.3· YS-

MWT 65 [---v] x403 MWT 83 [_ ..... _u] x132~ 3 1 ~

68 [_ ...v_,",] x370 92 [---v] x71

~ $ 1 2-82 [---u] x 140 99 [_wu_ w] x 49

CWT 17 [U -~ - v] x 490, cf. CWT 20.y r-

MWT 72 [.... _--v] x 267

1. 385 [" - - - u ] x 108

" r-MWT 87' [... - "u_,,] x 85

2. ::l>107 [U-u,",_V] x 30

2. \MWT 88 [UV_UU_] x 84

1. }94 [",U ] x 65

1 1CWT 18 ["'U_ ~-] x 240, [__ UV_] x 82, [-- - -] x 42 (cf. CWT 14

for [.!_..! -J).

2.. 3MWT 117 [__ u ...~ x 23

" S"120 [W_""'_] x 17

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If !i106 [__ VV_] x 31

II- S-109 [----] x 28

1{ S-III [V'" - - - J x 27

J ~.

114 [- - "''' -] .x 25S' c

115 ["''''-'''''-] x 25

CWT 19 [.....-~-~] x 82, [-- ~-~J x 47r ,

MWT 113 [UV ---xJ x 27 MWT

S"'c.116 [""_VII_X] x 22

L ~119 [''" v] x 17

s ,122 [__ V"_ xJ x 14

S' ,125 [----xJ x 13

y s-130 [""--- V] x 8

28

.l "121 [""- "''''-J x 14L ~

124 [----] x 13J '1

127 [........ - - i x 8f" ,

143 [-- ...... - J x 3

3 "158 [- - - - ] x 1

li r-133 [- _"'''_V] x 8

~ r139 ["'''.-'''''-IIJ x 5

1. .314.0 [--"'''-'''J x 4

~ r141 [---- 'J] X 4

1. :\145 [""'-"'''_L-IJ x 3

S' ,146 [---_v] x 3

Extrait de la Revue (R.E.L.O.) III, 1 à 4, 1967. C.I.P.L. - Université de Liège - Tous droits réservés.

CWT 20 ["-~-''''] x 11, ["- ~- x] x 5, (cf. CWT 17).'ir" If 5"

MWT 129 [v ..... ] x 8 . MWT 144. [u-......._ .."'] x 3

r , G' ,142 [... - -- x] x 4 150 [.... - ""'-x] x 1

Thus "le may show a compositional flow for any given "lord: Aga­memnon is

tWT v[....... --]c ~ CWT 12 • MWT 13 ["V-x] or(unlikely) 84 [" ... !! -l, 134 [..... .= -]. This name is virtually hound

to occur as MWT 13, and its occurrence therc should he defined asmetrically necessary rather than formulaic. Paris is

WT c[u_]c • (+v() CWT 6(+c[) CWT 7.

Therc are 8 common MWTs for this word, and 2 rare ones. Thisname is avaiIahIe for free composition in the hexameter and is infact used tcn times in 4 of these MWTs (6, 17, 27,49).

4. Composition illto cola and juncture: "InnerMetric". The mostinteresting featurcs of our compositional flow-charts for a givenword are the junctures and composition which develop it into a

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Extrait de la Revue (R.E.L.O.) III, 1 à 4, 1967. C.I.P.L. - Université de Liège - Tous droits réservés.

colon or verse. Sorne I\IWTs are themselves cola (e.g. CWTs 14, 19,20), but most nced ta be bullt into one of the major cola. It isclear from the McDonough data that the following cola should beregarded as basic compositional entities in the hexameter :

1 2.3 ~ soc L~ 'foTl [-~-~ -v] also found as [-~.... -~-x] and [-~-~-"'].17

1 !L. ~ .2. 1> '" 1 1( rpl [-~-~-], also found as [-~-~-] and [-~-~-].

r , 1 .2.b2 [-~ - x], also found as [-~- ...], etc.

S'" ~

Rarer as compositional cola are T2, p2, h2 ['::.::: - ~- x], and use isl' ~ 2 ~often made of smaU cola such as t [-~-] and e [~- x].

Each MWT (except the shortcst ones) has an established relation­ship ta one or more cola. Fol' example CWT 13 usually begins T2(and may be regarded as complcting words of MWT 13 or 75 to theT cacsura) or cnds pl (completed by an initial [..1 V]).

The most interesting aspect of our study will prove ta be if wc cananalyse and forecast thesc rules of juncture and composition.

Parry and others have drawn attention ta the declension of formu­lae or metrical dcclcnsion, and there is no need ta repeat here the\Vork showing how. the cpithets change through metricalneccssitywhen W1' [..... - - ] becomes in the genitive WT ("..u_......], or W1'

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Extrait de la Revue (R.E.L.O.) III, 1 à 4, 1967. C.I.P.L. - Université de Liège - Tous droits réservés.

(ii) U)' and (v)Tl (2, 511).

''"

["" -] hecomes WT ["V_V]. The computer offers hope that com­plete data on these metrical declensions will he available, and thelaws of metrical necessity will he spelled out clearly enough to heused in language, linguistic, semantic and literary discussions.However, the J\1cDonough approach is inadequate in one importantfeature. It does not mark the phonetic nature of initiais and finalsand therefore does not mark the aIl important distinction hetweenAgamemnôn and Diomêdês, or the variation permitted in wordssuch as (è){3atv(e(v», WTs v[V--]c, v[V-.'1v, c[-- ]c, c[- ....]v, v["-]c,c[-].

/These junctures are important not only in composition into colahut also at the Iinking between cola. In the simplest hexametercomposition, as exemplified hy the Boeotia,18 the mies dictatejuncture hetween half lines as follows :

Tl (v) may he comhined with : (i) Kat' and (v) Tl (x 18 : 2,496.498. 499. 532. 561. 573. 575. 583. 591. 593. 605. 606.615. 633. 639. 647. 656. 855);

. (ii) (c)T2 (x 12 : 2,497.502.533.537.560.571.582.584.648.655.711.739);

(iii) LOf and (cc)h2 (2,697).

Tl (c) may he comhined with : (i) (v)T2 (x 6 : 2, 501. 505. 546.569. 570. 824);

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may be combined with : (i) (x)p2 (x 19 : 2, 506. 508. 519.523. 531. 536. 538. 559. 562. 603. 640. 646. 682. 696.730. 734. 735. 868);

(ii) Kat' and (c)Tl (x 13 : 2,503.520. 594. 607. 608. 632. 695. 716. 738. 757. 829. 835.853);

(iii) fzl)' and (v)Tl (x 8: 2,500.504.539.574.585.634.635.683);

(iv) Kat' and (v)T2 (x 4 : 2, 521.712. 717. 729).

pl

Interchange between the cola is made available, in the cause of ra·pid composition, by the word [àM<P(E)]VÉMOVT(od and its semanticequivalents €xOV and elxov. The cola T2 and P are in 16 of theiroccurrences merely completive (i.e. containing no new names), me·trical phrases suitabIe to fill in Iines when the coming names couIdnot be entered easily into the remaining half·Iine. However, themore interesting part of the examination is the study of the epi·thets whieh are used to extend names into half·Iines, and beforethese l'Ules are written we must have data on the phonetic qualityof word·initiaIs and word-finals.

For a satisfaetory anaIysis of these features of the "inner metrie"we must reject the computer procedures so far applied to the outermetric and deveIop a new approach.

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III. AUTOMATIC SCANSION.

A new approach to metrical problems is now available with NathanGrcenberg's scansion program for the Latin hexameter (Revue1967/3). The Homer program is more complicated and more cost·ly in storage space and computer time, yet it appears it will elimi·nate most of the problems which have beset stucients of the "innermetric" of Homer. The program to be implemented is as follows :

Pass one:Convert

IIrLl8KMTIL Tt.Î!XANPZZ'l'elision (if marked)EüHUITA

Pass two :Convert

1} {AA3 before BA4 BB

C (incl.ACBC)

'1'0ABCE1234

'1'0

2

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Extrait de la Revue (R.E.L.O.) III, 1 à 4, 1967. C.I.P.L. - Université de Liège - Tous droits réservés.

Pass thrce :

Replace spaces betwecn words (and at verse beginning) as follows :

~JFor space before

+ {~acc

;} + HAA or C

AB

Print

s

T

tJ

v

34

1

2

+ {A~pace

+ {AB·Cspace

w

x

Extrait de la Revue (R.E.L.O.) III, 1 à 4, 1967. C.I.P.L. - Université de Liège - Tous droits réservés.

13 or 43 Y

:} +{~ Z

Store

Pass four:Convert 1'0

li} beforef 55/

43 Y 5/Z

Pass five :Convert 1'0

13 or 43 6/

Pass six:

Ignore letters and /.Convert 3,4, 5, 6 in thc following eontexts

If immediatcly betwecn 2 and 2 Then 2

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Extrait de la Revue (R.E.L.O.) III, 1 à 4, 1967. C.I.P.L. - Université de Liège - Tous droits réservés.

If immediately hetween Il and 2.. .. .. 2" Il.. " .. 21" 2.. .. .. 12" 1

Pass seven :

Convert 6 to 2... 5 to 1.

Pass cight :

Then.......2211

Repeat pass six, instituting a check for well-formedness. Print outas rejections alllines not well-formed (until a procedure can he de­veloped io deal with them - a 1 in the first syllahle will he acceptedas well·formed). .

Print-out :

Print out the pattern of 1 and 2, adding the letters S through Zfrom storagc after pass three.Print under each numher the foot numhers to the following code:

vu-v",,_..Jv-"'u-u""'_x

IJK2JK3JK4JK5JK6M

1

. 36

L 2 L 3 L 4 L 5 L 6 M

Extrait de la Revue (R.E.L.O.) III, 1 à 4, 1967. C.I.P.L. - Université de Liège - Tous droits réservés.

Describe each word (i.e. each element beginning with a letter withO-zoning) as a pattern of l, 2, J, K, L, M, and translate into MWT.Describe each line as a pattern of MWTs, including elided monosyl­lables with their O-zoning initial and no MWT.A program can then be devised to attach the MWT to each word ofthe text and hence to write an index of the words used in eachMWT, sorted according to the O-zonings.

As a result of such programs it could be specified for any word orWT with what words or WTs it is found. It would be less easy andrequire a separate program to record information about the phone­tic characteristics of word finals. But this study cano probably beundertaken at the stage when we are analysing for a given wordthe words which can be used before it. We can then specify in thelook-up to discover only those words of the preceding MWTswhich have satisfactory phonetic finals.

This information will be the basis of describing oral composition,formulae and substitution in a more accurate way than has beenpossible before. .

C. VARIAE LECTIüNES

For an accurate recording of text variants a specially accurate formof idcntifying each word is necessary. My identification code isbased on the Liège code and is intended to occupy columns 39"53

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of an IBM punch card, identified as card one (in column one), foreach word (indu ding non-syllabic enclitics).

Columns 39-41, the work :

IL . Iliad (+no. of book - see Appendix)OD - Odyssey (+no. of book· see Appendix)HEE· Hesiod, ErgaHET· Hesiod, Theogony, ed. WestHEF· Hesiod, Fragmenta, ed. Merkelbach and WestHYI . Homeric Hymns 1·9HIO - Homeric Hymns 10 and 50 on.

Columns 42-44

The line number of the reference.

Column 45

Any annotation of added line - a, b, c, d, etc.

Athetized line marked Y - AristarchusZ - Zenodotus

Column 46

No. of the word in line.

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Column 47 : information on status of reading :

Under zoning 12 (A-I) reading in text used;Under zoning 11 (J-R) rcading in MS, but not in text;Under zoning 0 (/.Z) rcading conjectured, but not in text :

A - MSS unanimously;B· cditor's choice among variants;C - editor's choice among conjectures;D· editor's rcading from scholia, lexica or late 1\IS;E - reading correcting apparent error in MSS.

J - rejected reading, in all better MSS;K - rejected common variant;L - rejected conjecture;M - rejected from scholia, lexica or late MS;N - papyrus reading.

/ . rejected modern conjecture;S . conjectured original dialcct form (other than Aeolic);T - possible Aeolic form (Fick).

Columns 48-53 blank, but available for recording exact MS of rea­dings, exact papyrus or name of conjecturer, if so desired. Aisoperhaps the nature of error, e.g. unmetrical, or false dialect form.

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Information might be recorded here by textual_critics wanting tocollate the families of lVISS and extend T. W. Allen's unfinished

. work. At the moment of writing thi8 would still be a laboriouswork, though perhaps less laborious than manual collation of themany MSS involved. It may he that, with the eventual develop.ment of scanning (Le. rcading) machines likely, the rcadings ofwell·written MSS could he automatically read and recorded.

There are very interesting prospects here for work with fragmentsand papyri also.

D. EDITING HOMER.

My generation reads the signs of the times and wonders if any trulygreat cditio maior of an early Greek text will be published afterEdward Fraenkel's Agamemnon. The secondary literature on Ho­mer has grown ta a size tao great for any one man ta cape with,even if he were ,villing ta devote his full time ta it. Yet the necdfor editiones maiores ta the Homeric cpics is seen more and moreevery year. Even with H.]. Mette's invaluable bibliography ta Ho­mer (Lu.strum l, 1956), a grcat deal of important earlier handlingsgo unread by the creators of this year's theories and articles, sothat points are raised and discussed over and over again. The com­puter's potential as a gigantic filing system here suggests a new sortof edition. We can bcgin to plan for editions by computer, whichwould not be designed for output as printed books but for

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Extrait de la Revue (R.E.L.O.) III, 1 à 4, 1967. C.I.P.L. - Université de Liège - Tous droits réservés.

computer print-out on reql1est. They would thus be open-ended,and continually expanded with new literature, the results of newresearch and with new editorial summaries of debated points. 1 be­lieve that aIl our editiones maiores of the future will be of this sortand the result of cooperative organisation rather than individualand often tendentious programs. This willleave the original scho­lar free to devote his time to analysis of difficulties and to synthe­sis, while much of the ~ork of computer editing can be done byjunior scholars and key-punch operators.

The style of computer editions will have to be established by oneor more congresses, as it will be essential that each is fully compa­tible with others, so that cross-references can be checked automa­tically. It appears that the Bonn congress in 1969 would he a sui­table place to arrive at an international style.

As a first suggestion 1 put forward the following style:

Column 1 :

identification of the card as an edition cardo

Columns 2-7 :

line rcfcrence (cf. under E above). Cards refcrring to a whole Bookwill be markcd (with B in col. 5 (e.g. ILKB-reference to allIliad K).

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Columns 8-10 :

the symbol in column 8 identifies the extent of the reference :/ indicatcs it applies to a group of lines beginning here and is

followcd in 9-10 by a number of lines up to 99 or by FFjL indicates a whole line,and is followcd in 9 by the number of wOl'ds in the line,in 10 by the characteristics of the line : narrative, simile, human

speaking, god speaking, catalogue;a number in eolumn 8 indicates the eal'd belongs to one word

only, indicated by its word number in the line,. and is followed in 9 by an indication of the authority of the l'ea­

ding (cf. column 47 in C above),in 10 by the frequency of the form in I-Iomer (if less than 10) ­

zoning 0 indicates Odysscy only, zoning Il indicates Hiad,zoning 12 indicates not gcnuinely Homel'ic Of post-Homel'ic;

Column 11 gives the code of the cditorial comment to follow. Thefollowing code applies to book or line references (cf. the LfgrEabbrcviations) :

zoning 12

1 Archaeology2 B (meaning)3 Cf. (cross references)

42

zoning Il

Litcrature

zoning 0

SyntaxText

Extrait de la Revue (R.E.L.O.) III, 1 à 4, 1967. C.I.P.L. - Université de Liège - Tous droits réservés.

4 Dialect5 Etymology6 Forms7 Geography89 Influences

Metre

PunctuationQ (Authenticity)Repetition (formulae)

X (scholia)

Certain codes will apply only after certain codes in column 11, e.g.immediately after Repetîtion will be a list of aIl identicai or near·identicai lines; after Dialect will be a code for the various dialectsactually attributing a given word in its diaiect; aftel' Metre for aword will be its WT, CWT, MWT, and for a line its outer metric andMWT shape; after Etymology will be in column 12 a symbol indi·cating the number of major and minor morphemes in the word, therelationship of each major morpheme to common lE and the mor­phemes themselves either spelled out in a phonemically accurateform or given by its minor-morpheme number; after Syntax: willbe, for a line, the seriaI numbers of the structures found in that li­ne (cf. A above), and, for a word, the seriaI numbers of the struc­ture(s) to which it belongs, its membership of this/these, and itscount number in the superstructure (= sentence) to which it be­longs.

Naturally it would be a long time before such information couidbe coded in, although much of it would be a simple matter of au­tomatic card-punching of information from other cards. The bulk

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of the edition cards wouId be key-punched material of a bibliogra­phical sort, simply recording that a line or word is discussed in agiven book or article.

Periodically an editor wouId analyse the refel'ences for a givenbook or passage in the comment areas in which he had experienceand write a brief account of the questions at issue in it.

Certain criteria of lateness or earliness in language, archaeologicalrefcrence, ctc., should also be coded, so that areas of density couldbe located on spccially abbreviated cards for cach book, paragraph,speech and similc showing what important unusual fcatures hadbeen discussed. This is probably best achievcd by leaving 2 spacesin front of each bibliographieal entry on which the editaI' mightmark (\Vith codcs such as XX, Xl\l) Unimportant, Derivative, Non­Homcric, Late, Mycenacan, Exceptional. Ail cards could be readand only requested items such as Late or Mycenaean printed out.

Editorial errors will bc more easily corrected in this form than Îllbook form and younger scholars working in the output shouldfind many problems on which to exercise their ingenuity and pro­ve, in this publication-conscious generation, their publicacity.

E. GENERAL REFLECTIüNS.

There are two extreme reactions possible to the computer in clas-

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sics. One is horror at the profanation of our ancient tribal customs- a horror not unjustified by sorne of the undertakings, - theother is the belief that we are evolving a new discipline in classics,worthy perhaps of canonization in L'Année Philologique. The pro­per attitude must lie between. Sorne routine jobs of writing con­cordances and collecting statistics of occurrences in related workshave already been done and have made eompletely out-of-date cer·tain of the most tedious aspects of classical scholarship. But weare still exploring at a very early stage whether the computer canbe used to assist us in the more analytic aspects of our work. 1 donot believe wc are developing a new discipline but rather that weare exploring a new research technique which we. will want toteach our students. The responsibility of what work is done andwhat use is made of the results lies squarely with the scholar wor­king in a field he knows. No doubt the computer appeals more inthese early days to those of us with an inclination to keep themost basic assumptions of our field undcr constant and radical re­view, but we have a responsibility to sketch areas where researchwith the new techniques may prove interesting and to assess cons·tantly whcre real progress is being made.

We cannot work in isolation. LASLA has an incalculable advanta­ge in having trained programmers, for most of us work with whatspare time our program mers at the research centers can spare fromthe quite different problems of science, mathematics, bibliographyand statistics. There is a real need for more centers like LASLA

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which can afford to employa programmer in the humanities whocan keep abreast of the new machine languages bcing dcvelopedfor the algorithms of our area, such as SNOBOL and COI\HT. Sucha center also needs a computational linguist working in its depart­ment of linguistics or of computer sciences. With such a set-up andseveral humanists engagcd on computer projects in the humanitiesone can cngender a place in which students and other young scho­lars can take courses in programming, computational linguistics(including a language such as SNOBOL) and statistics, without dc­parting out of the classical disciplines. The active departments ofclassical research will aU look like this next century, 1 am sure, andour progress now is much linkcd to how weU and sanely we cantame the computcr to new and intcresting techniques in our re­search.Fol' after aU our wOl'k will still be judged not by how wehave done it but by what we have achicved. This sort of achieve­ment will be the result of cooperation between groups of scholarsand skilled specialists in computer programming and computatio­nallinguistics, and thus our dcpartments and our projects will lookless like the present humanist departments and more like those inthe sciences.

It is idle to speculate just where the new compilations of Homericdata will lead us, and wc will certainly be able to ask and checkmuch more hypothetical projections than we have dal'ed in thepasto Let us remember, however, that with the computer evenmore than with our filing cards we necd cxperience to know what

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questions to ask and to assess the data we collect, expericnce bothwith the techniques we use and the problems of the area in whichwe are working.

Robert R. DyerIndiana University

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NOTES.

1. The first paper was read at a one-day conference, Classics andComputers, held on April 29, 196'7, at the Nittany Lion Inn,University Park; the second a public lecture, October 2, 1967.

2. See Revue 1966/4, p. 30, and Calculi, Sept./Nov. 1967, for de­tails.

3. The most generally available introduction to computationallin­guistics is Computation in Linguistics, a Case Book, ed. Paul L.Garvin and Bernard Spolsky (Indiana University Studies in thel-listol'Y and Theol'Y of Linguistics), Bloomington, 1966. This isparticularly useful for classicists as it exemplifies programs ap­plicd ta other inflected languages. The most interesting articlefor our purposes is by W.C. Croosgrove on Middle High German,in which he draws attention to the fact that traditional gram­mars do not give us adequate information on which to base au­tomatic analysis. This is perhaps merely to say that we musttoday write a new sort of syntax, one based on the physical evi·dence available to the computcr as input rather than on logicalcategories.. There is an interesting comparison between the twosorts of grammar in Francis P. Dinneen, S.J, An Introductl:ontà General Linguistics (New York, 1967), pp. 166·174 ("Tradi­tional Grammar versus Linguistics"), cf. p. 1 ff. and his full ac­count of the history of traditional grammar and its logical bases.

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3 bis. 1 must point out that, at the present moment, the LASLAuses, for the treatment of Latin, a program of automatic mor­phological parsing which it elaborated sorne time ago and which,for each form of a given text, proposes the possible morphologi­cal parsing or parsings, without taking the context into account.This parsing is obtained by looking up the form in a computa­tional dictionary of isolated forms (whether invariable or irre­ducible to a paradigm), in another dictionary giving the stem ofwords with regular inflexion, in a table of word-endings, and ina table of preverbs. This program is described at length in thereview Revue, 1966, 2, pp. 17-46. The reader will notice that,in its morphological part, the program which is discussed in thenext pages follows a process very similar to that of the latin pro­gram of the LASLA.

4. A.G. Oettinger, lUathematical Lingllistics and Automatic Trans­lation Report to the National Science Foundation No. NSF-S,Harvard Computation Laboratory, Cambridge, Mass. (Jan. 1963)cf. eund., "Automatic Syntactic Analysis and the PushdownStore", Proceed,:ngs of the Twelfth Symposium in Applied Ma­thematics, American Mathematical Society, 1961. See also C.D.Johnson, "The Berkeley Parser", Annllal Meeting of the Asso­ciation for Machine Translation and Computational Linguistic,Bl09mington, 1964.

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5. "An Economie Program for Limited Parsing of English", Pro­ceddings of the Fall Joint Computer Conference 1965, pp. 307­316.

6. Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theor)' of Syntax (M.LT. Press,1965), p. 174. Chomsky is the leader of a new approach togrammatical problems known as generative grammer. It is con­cerned with the grammatical mIes which allow the speaker togenerate new sentences, particularly the mIes for embedding(including subordination) and transformation. Howcver, he dis­eusses inflection and derivation among sorne residual problemsin Aspects, pp. 170-192.

7. "On paradigmatic and syntagmatic similarity," Lingua 18, 1967,35-79.

8. "The inflectional component of a word-and-paradigm gram­mar", Journal of Linguistics l, 1965, 139-171.

9. For a discussion of the relationship between roots and wordclasses see the article on Ancient Greek by Fred W. Householderin Ward Classes (Lingua 17, 1966) pp. 103-128.

10. Allowance must also be made for the stem-extensions -mo-,-no-, -1'0-, -l,o-.

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Il. There is a similar shortcoming in the work of Frank P. Jones(TAPhA 97, 1966, 275-280), who has developed a simplehinary-octal code to descrihe the "outer metric" (term fromE,G. O'Neil, Jr., "Word-Accents and Final Syllables in LatinVerse", TAPhA 71, 1940, 335-359) of the hexameter line.The code gives the shape of a line in terms of dactyls andspondees, without recording words or word-ends. Jone's re­sults have their own importance, hut do not hear directly onthe "inner metric" or compositional technique discussed he­low.

12. For the terminology of hexameter cola see H.J. l'dette, "DieStruktur des iiltesten daktylischen Hexameters", CloUa 35,1956, 1-17.

13. This includes consonants such as the initial of. *neph-.

14. More correctly (c), as the shortening of a diphthong impliesthe consonantalisation of the final sonant (and perhaps thesame for final schwa of long vowels).

15. The hexameter does not seem ta have heen developed fromthe rhythms of Indo-European Greek and may he related tathe word shapes of the non-Indo-European elements in My­cenaean, which may. frequen tly he reconstructed as [.., - v ],[vv-v].

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16. In 24 instances in the Iliad (2, 541. 706; 3, 238. 250; 4, 448.464; 6, 28. 496; 8, 62. 348; 9, 579; 11, 427. 547; 13, 534;

.14,156;15,527;16,192.718; 17, 109;21,249.492;22,72.221; 23, 562) a word has the same shape as the pl colon[.!~.!:.~~], in ail but two cases (ùPIPL1r€plarpwlPa 8, 34~, andAaop€oOvnOJ)71 3, 250) actually occupying the pl colon;and in one instance (1l'arpo/wat'Yvhrow 21, 469, cf. plavro/wat'-yVf/roc; 2, 706) a word occupies the Tl colon. Forthe purposes of completeness words == pl may be caIled CWT21, and =Tl CWT 22.

17. With the result that a CWT normally bound to a J\lWT in onemay be tl'ansferred into an unusuallVlWT when the whole co­lon is so transfcrred. Although aIl these transformations aretheoretically possible, the word-ending ~V] is very rare exceptbefore enclitic or partic1e.

18. The lines examined are those containing place-names belon­ging to the catalogues. It would appeal' that the innel' metricof the Boeotia propel' does not conform to that of Homer ge­nerally, but 1 am not yet able to test the statistical probabilityinvolved.

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CODING FOR THE BOOKS OF HOMER

Unfortunately it is impracticable to use the Greek alphabet for thenumbers of the books of Homer, as they need to be ordered alongwith the Latin alphabet. The alternatives are to use the Arabie nu­merals or to translate the books into the Latin alphabet. It muy beperverse butI am using for the books 1-24 of the Iliad and Odysseythe following code, which will appear on my working print-out :

A (i) A N (xiii) NB (ii) B 2: (xiv) 0r (iii) C o (xv) PÂ (iv) D Il (xvi) QE (v) E P (xvii) RZ (vi) G ~ (xviii) ·SH (vii) H T (xix) Te (viii) I T (xx) U1 (ix) J cp (xxi) VK (x) K X (xxii) XA (xi) L 'lJ (xxiii) YM (xii) M n (xxiv) Z

This code is going to be unfortunately misleading in its use of l, 0,P, Y, Z. However, for final print-out the following instructions can

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be given :

After OD or IL convert : C ta rj D ta Âj G ta Zj 1 ta Elj J ta Ij Lta Aj 0 ta 2:j P ta 0; Q ta fI; R ta Pj S ta ~j U ta '1'; V ta (J!j Y ta'lJ j Z ta n. Nine symbols can remain and the books will appear intheir correct arder in any indexing or sorting routines using thenormal alphabetic sort. However, it is going ta be irritating ta ha­ve ta remember in working that ODO stands for Odyssey ~ and not0, and l would be grateful for other suggestions.

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