Saturday, January 23, 2016

Concordance to the Homeric Poems

Concordance to the Homeric Poems
This is a minimal concordance without any morphological analysis, providing each form of each word in the context of its line. The text is taken from that at the WikiSource site, which is in the public domain; it has been modified to normalize orthography in a few places. I prepared it because a fairly cursory search online showed nothing like it that was complete, and I wanted to have this information available for my own research. If it duplicates someone else’s efforts, I apologize.
The concordance was generated by mechanical means (who would do it by hand nowadays?) using a sequence of grep functions with Bare Bones’ BBEdit program. There are a few peculiarities in consequence. There may be an occasional bit that got by indexed oddly, due (almost certainly) to deficiencies in my own regular expression formation, though I tried to eliminate them by scrutinizing the resultant files by hand. The sorting routines, moreover, do not distinguish accents, so various similar but non-identical forms may be interleaved. In very few cases will that result in any material confusion, however.

Perhaps more interestingly, I’m not sure what the conventions are for words repeated in a given line, but this concordance will give each a separate entry. Accordingly you may find two identical lines in a row, e.g.

: Iliad 22:200: οὔτ' ἄρ' ὃ τὸν δύναται ὑποφεύγειν οὔθ' ὃ διώκειν·
: Iliad 22:200: οὔτ' ἄρ' ὃ τὸν δύναται ὑποφεύγειν οὔθ' ὃ διώκειν·

This is not an error, but the first one is documenting the first in the line, and the second documenting the second. I find it useful for the kind of work I'm doing; if you don’t, it should not prove difficult to ignore.

Finally, some will surely find the size of the text rather small. This is because (for my purposes, at least) a critical function of such a concordance view is to provide a synoptic view of a lot of material rather than to set it out extensively for easy reading. Those who find it just too small, however, can enlarge the view by the conventional means (Command-+ on a Mac or Control-+ on a Windows machine). I have tried it with various magnifications and found that it seems to work reasonably well.
I am willing to share the code that created this, trivial though it is (only about four grep calls, applied iteratively, and a sort); I am also willing to entertain suggestions for emendations or revisions, provided they are presented civilly — feel free to write to me at [mcmenomy] [at] [dorthonion] [dot] [com].

Α Αλ Αν Αρ Ατ Β Γ Δ Δε Δη Ε Ει Εν Εξ Επ Ερ Ζ Η Θ Ι Κ Κε Λ Μ Με Μη Ν Ξ Ο Ον Π Πο Ρ Σ Τ Τη Το Τρ Υ Φ Χ Ψ Ω *

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