[sword-devel] clean bible or bad phantasy?

[Daniel Russell]

There's nothing wrong with letting people read the scripture without the 
vowel marks or accents. If that's how the scripture was written, then a 
person should certainly be able to read it. Otherwise, you are 
essentially forcing that person to ONLY see the second-hand scripture 
with textual criticism, which you must admit is NOT 100% correct. There 
are some passages with unresolved word breaks and vowels where the 
meaning of the passage is changed enough to make some difference (for a 
scholar at least).

Textual-criticism is useful and of course the vowel marks and accents 
are good for the most part. I don't think we should treat them as bad or 
unholy :P. However, i also think that the more powerful a tool is for 
letting me, the scholar, study it, the better! So when anyone wants to 
add more features, i say AMEN to that! Features and bloat are never a 
bad thing unless they slow down a system or are there just because of 
some bad planning or legacy features (not really features!).

I would say that if you can take out the accents and vowel marks, you 
ought also to be able to hide the word breaks. It would be great if 
someday the scholar could have a small note on questionable passages 
where multiple renderings are possible... and with the touch of a 
button, the words could reorganize themselves across breaks or change 
their vowels/accents. Why the heck not? if someone wants to do it, 
that's great!