@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.

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

I know very little about ancient Hebrew poetry. Assuming it has meter, which seems to be a debated question, the approach I use should work. First you need the syllabification and stress information for each word. Then you try to string that together to tell the pattern for the entire line. I have improved the English version in my post here to include machine learning, and that also should be transferable to Hebrew. As for transliteration, no, that does not seem to be a good way to apply my method to Hebrew.

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.

What would be a reasonable name for the function in the function repository (where all functions share a namespace)?

This is indeed a very interesting function, and it would be nice to have it.

It is clear now that it is specific to English and the implementation does not generalize to other languages in a straightforward manner (even the concept of WordData doesn't generalize well to an agglutinative language like Hungarian).

AnalyzeMeter would be a nice name, but what name would other language implementations use?

AnalyzeEnglishMeter is a bit too long and ugly for my taste ...

Would it make sense to split out the reusable parts, e.g. have a separate function that can take a line annotated with syllable boundaries and lengths, and visualize it? Then have a language specific function that takes a string and creates an annotated verse from it?

(I don't think it's a big deal even if it uses up a general name in this case, just thinking aloud ... as this is a more general issue with the function repo.)

Nice post! It would be interesting to do this for Hungarian. It is phonetically spelt, so parsing it easy. Vowel and consonant lengths are clearly marked. Finally, the language lends itself naturally to classical meters such as the hexameter.

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