[sword-devel] Glossary vs. Dictionary

[Troy A. Griffitts]

It's ok-- you're all allowed to call Chris the smart-allec that we all 
know him to be.

Apparently Chris is creating a glossary series of modules that have 
simple 1 or 2 word 'glosses' for each entry, instead of a full 
definition.  They are tagged with a property in their .conf file that 
lets us know they are 'glossaries' so we can do special stuff with them. 
  I think they will be pretty cool for stuff like, reading a French 
translation of the Bible (not my first language), and hovering over a 
French word to get a 1 or 2 word English gloss of that word.  Same with 
Hebrew, Greek, etc.



Chris Little wrote:
> On Mon, 26 Aug 2002, Christian Renz wrote:
> 
> 
>>>You won't find the latest help file much help with that. As far as I know, 
>>>there are no glossaries to test. So I didn't have any results to document.
>>
>>This option always confused me... Can somebody give me a quick
>>definition and an example for "Glossary"(as opposed to dictionary)  in
>>a Sword context? Thanks!
> 
> 
>>From Websters:
> 
> glossary: a collection of textual glosses or of specialized terms with 
> their meanings
> 
> gloss[3]: a brief explanation (as in the margin or between the lines of a 
> text) of a difficult or obscure word or expression
> 
> dictionary: A book containing the words of a language, arranged
> alphabetically, with explanations of their meanings; a lexicon; a
> vocabulary; a wordbook.
> 
> 
> 
> Lexica & dictionaries are really the same.  For Sword, we tend to label 
> dictionaries of biblical languages lexica and dictionaries of modern 
> vernacular languages dictionaries.  Dictionaries with long entries may be 
> labeled encyclopedias.  Thus Thayer's, BDB, or Louw-Nida would all be 
> "lexica" by our usage while Webster's, Smith's Bible Dictionary, or the 
> Anchor Bible Dictionary would be "dictionaries".
> 
> Glossaries are collections of glosses, which are short (one- or two-word 
> usually) definitions of words.  For our purposes thus far, they are always 
> between two different languages, e.g. German and English or English and 
> Latin.
> 
> There are a hundred or so glossaries in the beta area but they are all 
> broken right now because of a change Troy made to BibleCS.  They'll work 
> fine in any other frontend right now, but they will eventually be fixed.
> 
> --Chris
>