@Khashan Khashan your images and ideas are interesting. It would be great if you could post you Wolfram Language code in these posts here, like Mark did and everyone else does on this form, without referencing to external documents. Then it would be very fun to reproduce and explore your results. I would love to see your code. You can also embed your notebook into the post or attach it to the post. Thank you for sharing ideas.

The graph plotting was done in this manner:

• create a grid on the coordinate plane {{{1,1}, {1,2}, {1,3}...}, {{2,1}, {2,2}, {2,3}}...}
• draw a line to the coordinate + {0, .5} for stressed syllables and + {0, -.5} for unstressed

This is a very simple thing to do in the Wolfram Language.

It is traditional in the sense that meter is traditionally thought of as a series of stressed and unstressed syllables, forming so many feet, in a predictable pattern. I don't recognize the foot as a unit though.

English syllables are stressed over a continuum from totally unstressed to undeniably stressed. In speech, the continuum of stresses become a nuance of pronunciation and musical intonation patterns. Our sense of rhythm in poetry though seems to rely on just two kinds of syllables: stressed and unstressed. Therefore, I try to boil every syllable down to either stressed (1) or unstressed (0). I use many factors to determine this, including the phonetic representation provided by WordData, whether there is a stop punctuation or end of line after the syllable, the consonant and vowel patterns, and some replacement rules that avoid too many consecutive stressed or unstressed syllables. I have also tried predicting what kind of rhythm it is, duple-meter or triple-meter, to resolve the remaining stresses, though my most recent version doesn't do this.

After that, I simply graph the 1's and 0's. In some ways what I'm doing is very traditional; in some ways not. I use Graphics[] to draw the output on a grid, but the lines are very much like an x-y plot of the stress values over time.

Khashan, the graphic produced by my code is a direct plot of the 1 and 0 values over time, wrapping at the end of each poetic line and aligned on the line's last stressed syllable. Then I put the orthographic representation of each syllable in the graphic so we humans can follow along. (In the new version I'm working on, I also put a tooltip of the IPA representation of each syllable.)

The Wolfram Language gives phonetic information on many English words with WordData[word, "PhoneticForm"]. This includes primary and secondary stress markers. Typical output of such an expressions is fənˈɛtɪks. This is a starting point for what I'm doing, but for many reasons it isn't enough to figure out the stress patterns in poetry. As you mentioned, word boundaries are not a consideration in determining metrical patterns. I would argue that the Greek feet should also not be considered. A major obstacle for me has been how to consistently divide up the syllables. Another has been what to do with undetermined syllables that can be either stressed or unstressed, depending on context (or sometimes depending on how the reader chooses to read the passage).

From what I can tell, there are many similarities from your approach in Arabic and mine in English. I have even used some of the same notation CVC, etc. As long as we keep the discussion relevant to programming in the Wolfram Language, I imagine that a rich conversation can be sustained on this topic.

I don't think that you have to worry about being kicked off this forum for giving Arabic examples. This is a very diverse community. And last time I checked, my friend Ahmed was the moderator. : )

Thanks for your quick response I feel that we are on the verge of an interesting dialogue Yes, programming is based on 1 and 0.T he question remains: why don't you plot the graph directly using these 1 and o?

Thank you for your tolerance. I was banned 0n/from an English forum for presenting the idea and comparison with Arabic. http://www.everypoet.org/pffa/showthread.php?16003-Does-it-work-in-English&s

Thanks, Daniel, for your response. I looked through my email and did not find one from Wolfram Research about the function. Perhaps it was sent to the wrong address. Mine is mgreenberg1520@gmail.com. I would like to see the results you were getting so I can diagnose the problem.

Mark, Please consider submitting this to the Wolfram Function Repository (at least a couple of us on the review team would like to see it there). PoeticMeterDiagram was one name that was suggested in some discussion.

I look forward to receiving it. Thanks.

- Congratulations! This post is now featured in our Staff Pick column as distinguished by a badge on your profile of a Featured Contributor! Thank you, keep it coming, and consider contributing your work to the The Notebook Archive!