New Spanish Hyphenation/Syllabification Tool
  • In the vein of Juicio Brennan's Hyphenator, I've decided to open an internal tool of mine to the public that it might be of use to a few people. My version is for Spanish texts, and will show stressed syllables in addition to syllabifying the test. For those not as familiar with Spanish, it seems to be an oft-encountered problem to have the emphasis on the wrong syllable.

    I designed this tool when I was composing my Spanish psalter, initially depending on a manual dictionary, and now implementing the hyphenation engine from TeX, along with a number of additional processing steps to move from hyphenation to syllabification. At the core, it still relies first on a curated dictionary file, so if you ever observe any mistakes in the output, I'm able to override them. I've used this personally for a couple of years now, and feel it's likely stable enough to share, so here's the link:

    https://cerisier.net/syllabifier/

    A few usage notes:
    - as the intention is that you might want to process texts through this tool that you would then copy-paste into your engraving tool (as in Juicio's version for English), you are welcome to include all punctuation and even the underscore character for elisions. If you're setting a hymn in your engraving program, for example, you should be able to type in the hymn text (allows for easy spell checking), then paste it into my tool, and then move it directly into your score.

    - Each line of text is trimmed of leading and trailing white space and all numerals are stripped. This is to accommodate pasting in texts from less structured sources (such as Psalms from the USCCB website).

    It's not pretty, but it is functional. I know it isn't the most useful tool, but the other available tools online (that I'm aware of) process one word at a time, which is why I started working on it to start with.

    Do let me know if you have any questions, or notice areas that could be improved.
  • TLMlover
    Posts: 75
    Hi Marc,

    A question: does the tool only work when you type in words which have their corresponding accent marks? I submitted a partial text without any accent marks: the phrase "Apiadate de mi, Senor," and the tool incorrectly stressed the syllables. I re-entered the phrase using the correct accent marks, and it then correctly stressed syllables.

    Thanks for all your hard work! i regularly use the psalm verses in your Spanish Psalter to create a bilingual Responsorial Psalm for every Sunday Mass.
    Since I have your Psalter downloaded, it's easier for me than going online to access the USCCB's Spanish readings.
  • The meaning of Spanish can easily change by the absence or inclusion of accents even within a word that otherwise appears the same. My tool is intended for use with Spanish texts that include the necessary accents.
    Thanked by 1MatthewRoth