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What it does

Hiatus is one of the most studied phenomena in Greek verse euphony. Ancient metricians distinguished between permissible hiatus and infelicitous sequences that poets typically avoided through elision, crasis, or rearrangement. Detecting and tabulating hiatus across a long poem or corpus is a laborious task by hand; this tool automates it.

The detector handles Unicode Greek text with full polytonic diacritics, correctly distinguishing true diphthongs from vowel sequences resolved into two syllables by diaeresis (ἀΐδηλος), and a variety of other edge cases and scenarios.

Detection modes

How to use it

1. Upload a UTF-8 encoded .txt file of Greek text.
2. Select the hiatus types to detect (standard, at verse-end, etc.).
3. Click Run Detector.
4. Download the annotated HTML output and/or the CSV occurrence table.

What it does

Anaphora, the repetition of the same word or phrase at the beginning of successive verse lines, and epiphora (antistrophe), repetition at line-ends, are among the most powerful structural devices in Greek poetry, extensively discussed by ancient rhetorical theorists from Gorgias onward. This tool makes their systematic identification possible across extended texts.

A third mode, word repetition, detects phrase-initial repetition across clause boundaries delimited by punctuation (. · ; ,), capturing figures that recur across periods within and between lines.

A fourth mode, anadiplosis, detects the phrase ending one line repeated at the very beginning of the next. Because this figure is defined by strict line-to-line adjacency rather than proximity within a window, it does not use the distance-window setting; the phrase-length slider instead acts as a minimum, and the tool automatically extends the highlight to the full length of the repeated run, so a genuine three-word repetition is still found correctly even if the slider is set to one.

Stop-words (particles, articles, prepositions) are handled with philological care: they are "transparent" — skipped when determining the comparison phrase, but noted in the output table, so the scholar can see exactly what was elided from the matching logic. All normalisation steps (accent stripping, breathing removal, iota subscript, elision, nu-movable) are individually toggleable.

Detection modes

What it does

Assonance is the repetition of a vowel sound — a single vowel or a diphthong — anywhere within nearby words, not restricted to word-initial position. Consonance is the analogous phenomenon for consonant sounds. A sub-option restricts consonance to the strict classical definition of alliteration: only the word-initial consonant counts, and vowel-initial words simply do not participate.

Both figures are detected with the same sliding-window engine: the tool examines every run of N consecutive content words and flags a sound that recurs in at least a set minimum number of them. Diphthongs and single vowels are treated as one phonological unit, diaeresis correctly breaks a would-be diphthong in two, and an optional toggle can fold ω into ο and η into ε — the only two Greek vowel pairs with distinct short/long letterforms in the script.

Stop-words can be excluded entirely from consideration, so that common particles and articles neither trigger a match nor interrupt the span of content words being examined.

Detection modes