[sword-devel] Greek dictionary - input needed

[Daniel Owens]

Chris Little wrote:
> Daniel Owens wrote:
>> The other MAJOR problem is that the dictionary keys are always 
>> capitalized, which makes it really awkward to use for Greek. Can I 
>> lobby again for a change in that? How many Greek students are used to 
>> looking up words in capitals? I was taught using lower case letters, 
>> and many of the capitals are really fuzzy. When reading I can work 
>> them out based on context sometimes because I have the rest of the 
>> word to clue me in. Capitals also make accent marks look strange. Then 
>> there is the issue of sort order again...
> 
> I quite agree. No casing language uses capital forms primarily. Capital 
> letters are less recognizable and slow reading speed.
> 
> That said, I don't quite know how we ought to solve the issue. We can't 
> simply lowercase the existing keys, since many would actually need to 
> incorporate capitals (e.g. personal & place names). And we'll need to do 
> some kind of case folding when we do key lookups.
> 
> Making keys be cased and doing case folding at runtime handles part of 
> the issue. However, key sorting becomes more difficult and we have to 
> guard against the possibility of keys that are identical except for 
> casing (e.g. "a" and "A").
> 
Would it be possible to have a display key that is distinct from the 
actual sort key? What I mean is there could be parts of the compiled 
module that the engine and front-ends use for different purposes. One 
could be for sort order (using numbers?), one for lookup (in caps), and 
one for display (original n).

>> What I am hearing from Eeli and Jonathan is a move toward lemma as the 
>> key for dictionaries but a recognition that multiple keys could be 
>> useful. Is there is a way to encode TEI dictionaries to have multiple 
>> key options using n, key, and sortKey? I mean, why not encode 
>> dictionaries with each entry assigned a Strong's number (n?) and a 
>> StrongLemma (sortKey?)?
> 
> For TEI P5 documents, you can set any number of key values within the n 
> attribute, separated by |. For example n="a|aa|123" would put the entry 
> in "a" but link the keys "aa" and "123" to the main entry. This is 
> implemented in tei2mod, however I believe there are bugs in libsword 
> preventing correct encoding of entry links in modules.
> 
> --Chris
> 
Excellent, thanks for the tip. I guessed you knew, but I couldn't figure 
it out myself from the TEI P5 documentation online.

Daniel
> 
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