[sword-devel] Greek dictionary - input needed

[Daniel Owens]

I am putting together a team of people to do a collaborative Greek (and 
later Hebrew) dictionary to have a more modern alternative to Strong's 
but that is released under an Creative Commons attribution-share alike 
license. The concept would mirror the collaboration which takes place 
for open source software development but would be focused on content. 
Part of the goal is to make it easily translatable so it can be used 
freely worldwide.

I have a technical question, though. We will be using SIL's MDF markers 
(similar to USFM) for the source file which can then be transformed into 
TEI or other formats for various uses. I am thinking that each entry 
should include Strong's number(s), the lexical form, and 
Goodrick-Kohlenberger number(s). The G-K numbers seem to be a modern 
replacement for Strong's.

My question is this--does anyone have a sense for the future of the use 
of numbers in SWORD for dictionary lookup for Greek and Hebrew? If we 
decide to divide entries according to G-K, would it be possible to have 
a mapping scheme to map between Strong's and G-K numbers and 
StrongLemma's to allow for dictionaries to be keyed differently but 
still be able to look up the correct entry? I know there would be 
problems/conflicts for some entries, but it would be nice if all Greek 
NT dictionaries could generally find their way to the right entry based 
on a text which used any one of the three systems. Links could be used 
for entries which create conflicts so that the user would never be more 
than two clicks away from the right entry.

I imagine there are tables out there which map the two numbering 
systems, but I haven't found one just yet. We may need to generate our 
own for the purpose of the dictionary. Looking at various modules in 
SWORD, it seems that for NT Greek in SWORD, modules either use the 
Strong's number (KJV, TR, and the majority of other Greek texts) or 
lexical form (MorphGNT, which uses lemma="StrongLemma:..."). For the 
StrongLemma, do those correspond to Strong's numbers? In other words, 
would the StrongLemma have an equal number of distinct entries as 
Strong's numbers?

If anyone knows of a table that already exists mapping between any of 
the three systems (Strong's, G-K, or the MorphGNT StrongLemma), I'd 
appreciate knowing how to obtain it so we don't have to do it ourselves. 
If we do generate such a table, would that be useful for the engine?

Daniel