[sword-devel] How about the OT's standard versification at Sword ?

[Chris Little]

Jonathon Blake wrote:
> Chris wrote:
> 
> 
>>Bibles all have (roughly) the same 66 books (give or take a testament).
> 
> 
> The standard protestant canon is 66 books in length.
> The Ethiopiac Canon is 81 books in Length,
> The Syriac Canon is 5 books in length.

Hence "roughly" and "give or take a testament" (see quotation above). I 
don't think I could have made the hedge more clear.

My point was that Bibles are composed of books, which are in turn 
composed of chapters, which are in turn composed of verses. And the 
books of any Bible come from a finite set of about 100 possible books 
(92 by one count).

>>So knowing or not knowing the language of the text is irrelevant.
> 
> When switching between verse systems, one has to know at least basic
> grammar and vocabulary, to know where to make the verse changes.

This is incorrect. First, as I mentioned, there are basically a finite 
set of major v11n systems. Identifying which is used is fairly trivial 
by inspecting which verses occur within a particular Bible document. 
Second, versification systems are genetic. Orthodox Bibles are based on 
LXX v11n. Catholic Bibles are based on Vulgate v11n. Etc. So identifying 
the church from which a translation comes will give you a strong 
indication of which v11n system is in use, even without going to the 
trouble of examining which verses occur.

>>actually have some  other v11n,
> 
> Wondering how many people can find Daniel 13 in a hard copy of the
> Duey Reims.(?sp).

Douay-Rheims. I don't think I understand the question.

Daniel 13 comes between Daniel 12 and Daniel 14. In the NRSV/KJV 
versification, Douay-Rheims Daniel 13 corresponds to Susanna.

>>altered to approximate the KJV v11n system.
> 
> So your claim is that it is better to have no Bible, than one with a
> possibly unexpected v11n?

No. Please don't put words in my mouth.

My argument is that it is better to use the CORRECT v11n than a 
mutilated Bible with a foreign v11n.

>>individuals who have never encoded a document in XML do not do a very good job the first time.
> 
> When you clean up document, write down what you had to do, and send it
> to the person who created the module.  That way they can learn what
> errors to not make.
> 
> The first couple of times it might take more of your time, than doing
> it from scratch. The end result will be a large team that can create
> modules correctly.

The process isn't the same for any two documents. If it were, the 
process would be scriptable. To the extend that it IS scriptable, 
scripts are used and applied to as many documents as possible.

>>We believe that decision was already made by its actual translators
> 
> 
> When the OSIS standard has clearly defined markup for v11n, and The
> Sword Project executables can utilize that markup, then insisting upon
> original  v11n makes sense.

OSIS HAS clearly defined markup for v11n. You can use ANY reference 
scheme, but you should make some effort to identify what it is, if it 
differs from the NRSV v11n. You can even use multiple reference schemes 
within a single document, marking individual elements with multiple 
reference IDs.

A proposal for formalizing mapping between OSIS reference systems was 
made a while back and we will probably use something like this for 
Sword, when we do alternative v11n.

>>it is not reasonable to believe that work done by hand will be
>>without mistakes.
> 
> There is an extremely long tradition of transcribing the TNK by hand,
> and error free.

Well, that's a nice thought, but transcriptional errors were still made. 
Focusing on the matter at hand, this statement is irrelevant. There is 
NOT any tradition at all of switching Bible v11n systems by hand.

>>When we support other v11n systems in Sword, 
> 
> And the timeline for this conversion is?

When it's done.

>>we will use that data to convert between systems rather than whatever
>>ad hoc methods you might be imagining.
> 
> The issue here is v11n markup. 
> 
> You can recast the Bible versions that don't use the KJV as KJV now,
> and be willing to change them back to the original v11n scheme, when
> The Sword Projects directly supports the scheme.

V11n mappings are not necessarily one-to-one and onto. Therefore they 
are not reversible.

--Chris