syllabify('ω̆ος') --> ['ω', '̆ος']

but

syllabify('εω̆ν') --> ['ε', 'ω̆ν']

ah! the short marker does not attach to the omega!

I love this library: apart from being awesomely written, it is very useful in plenty of applications and teaching activities!
With a slight extension, the sillabify module can be used to teach Greek meter as well. Along with the suggested functionality, I give you the full explanation below. Apologies if the post is very long, but I think that a bit of context might help.

In Greek poetry, syllables are scanned in a continuum called synapheia. In other words, the whole line, not the single word, is the string to syllabify. So for example Eur. Medea 1:

Εἴθ᾽ ὤφελ᾽ Ἀργοῦς μὴ διαπτάσθαι σκάφος

Becomes:

ειθωφελαργοῦςμηδιαπτασθαισκαφος

If syllabified with the current method, this long string in synapheia yields:

['ει', 'θω', 'φε', 'λαρ', 'γοῦς', 'μη', 'δι', 'α', 'πτα', 'σθαι', 'σκα', 'φος.']

It should be:

['ει', 'θω', 'φε', 'λαρ', 'γοῦς', 'μη', 'δι', 'απ', 'τασ', 'θαισ', 'κα', 'φος.']

The source of the problem is that the current module works (nicely!) with the ordinary scansion rules for single words: every consonant cluster that can be found at word's onset (e.g. 'σκα') is grouped together. This doesn't apply in poetic scansion. The following is the list of the valid consonant cluster in poetry:

        "δρ",
        "θλ", "θν", "θρ", "θμ",
        "κλ", "κν", "κρ",
        "πλ", "πν", "πρ",
        "τρ", "τμ", "τν",
        "φλ", "φρ",
        "χλ", "χρ"

By the way, Homer and the Attic tragedians use notoriously different rules for the consonant clusters muta cum liquida ("κλ", "κρ" etc.). Thus, it might be a sound design choice to turn this list into an argument that users may pass to the function... But that's an extra!

I needed a functionality that allows to change accent in oxytones to grave (or to add it, if there is no accent), and that checks if a word has such an accent, so I added them to your code. I called the new function in the accentuation module make_varia. You can check the code on my fork of greek-accentuation and maybe add it to the library.

I was testing out how this word would be accented, by adding this to docs.rst:

>>> persistent('Ἰάννης', 'Ἰάννης')
'Ἰάννης'

It returned something I didn't expect:

File "docs.rst", line 660, in docs.rst
Failed example:
    persistent('Ἰάννης', 'Ἰάννης')
Expected:
    'Ἰάννης'
Got:
    'Ἰά́ννης'

My initial impression is that this is a bug, but perhaps I am doing something wrong? 😀

Interestinglingly the Byzantine Text accents this word as Ἰαννῆς. Im not sure why.

I don't see a strip/simplify accent routine. Am I missing this?

The omega is specifically marked as short: εω̆ς -- so the accentuation routine should pick up on that.

I've often regretted that the three modules in greek-accentuation don't have a containing package.

What should it be called though? greek_accentuation?

This would mean

• characters would become greek_accentuation.characters
• accentuation would become greek_accentuation.accentuation
• syllabify would become greek_accentuation.syllabify

Any other name suggestions? The second seems a little awkward.

Might be a good final step before declaring 1.0.0 😄

I am getting error messages when I try to ask for the accent on a word with a grave accent.

from greek_accentuation.characters import *
from greek_accentuation.syllabify import *
from greek_accentuation.accentuation import *
display_accentuation(get_accentuation(('τὴν')))
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "", line 1, in
File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.8/lib/python3.8/site-packages/greek_accentuation/accentuation.py", line 68, in display_accentuation
return accentuation.name.lower()
AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'name'

I think you are missing some values in your is_diphthong and is_valid_consonant_cluster to give better results.
Edit: I just realized this is for ancient Greek and my use case is modern Greek, so I am not sure my changes will apply.
I also wrote a bad test to make sure I follow the consensus on syllabifying.

Let me know if you want a pull request, or I can just paste them here.

I want to create a pedagogical drill where I strip accents and then ask students to reaccent the words.

I could not find a "strip accent" function. Am I missing something? Its not hard to write but I want to make sure I am not missing something!

The library has a lot of functions which are obscure, experimental or mostly intended for internal use.

I'll establish what I think (with input from others if they so choose) the "core" API is and document that.

add_necessary_breathing to something like h gives

UnboundLocalError: local variable 'last_vowel' referenced before assignment

It appears the syllabifier sees αυ and decides it's a dipthong without checking ahead here: αυῖ is treated as a single syllable, instead of α-υῖ. There may be a few instances where αυ is indeed a dipthong, but if so they are rare.

Further info:
Example code:
In [3]: word="μεμαυῖα"
In [4]: syllabify(word)
Out[4]: ['με', 'μαυῖ', 'α']
(Should be: ['με', 'μα', 'υῖ', 'α'])

• Same problem with rarer αυί
• Same problem with ηυῖ (e.g. πεπτηυῖαν)
• Same behaviour with ευῖ, ουῖ, but there the fix is different (almost always should be ευ-ῖ, ου-ῖ).

Thanks for the tool, hopefully this will be a simple fix :-)

display_accentuation(get_accentuation('ἣ'))
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "", line 1, in
File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.8/lib/python3.8/site-packages/greek_accentuation/accentuation.py", line 68, in display_accentuation
return accentuation.name.lower()
AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'name'

Would be cool to have a test suite.

(This is a selfish feature request, as I'm working on something similar in JavaScript and I want to validate it also.)