[sword-devel] lemma html markup lack, and dictionary sorting

[Daniel Owens]

Daniel

Karl Kleinpaste wrote:
> I had a request this morning to add what could be a very nice feature in
> Xiphos: When hovering or clicking on a lemma, look it up in my
> dictionary module InvStrongsRealGreek.  This module is the conversion of
> my StrongsRealGreek module to inverted keying, that is, keyed by word
> instead of by Strong's ref.
>
>   

The idea of hovering on a lemma to look up a word is exactly the kind of 
functionality I would love to see (similar to BibleTime's mag window but 
perhaps showing in the dictionary window). Another way to access it 
could be double-clicking on a word or right-clicking and choosing "Look 
up '<word>'" such as BPBible does. How is not so important as long as 
access is quick and obvious.

I am working on a project that does just what you did with Strong's but 
will work toward updating Strong's with modern scholarship behind it. 
I'll announce the project in a week or so, but I mention it to give some 
context here.

> In principle, this is a nifty idea, and seems very obvious in hindsight.
> I've implemented a 1st pass of the feature -- it was trivial -- but I
> have 2 problems.
>
> [1] When looking up an ordinary Strong's ref, the URL that gets dumped
> into the markup by the engine is of this form:
>      passagestudy.jsp?action=showStrongs&type=Greek&value=423
> Note the presence of "type=Greek".  The similar URL for a lemma is:
>      passagestudy.jsp?action=showStrongs&type=&value=%E1%BC%80%CE%BD%CE%B5%CF%80%CE%AF%CE%BB%CE%B7%CF%80%CF%84%CE%BF%CF%82
> Note "type=" with empty content.  There is no indication of the language
> to be looked up.
>
> Now, as it happens, right now we have no Hebrew modules with
> lemmatization, so for the time being I've implemented the feature
> aggressively so as to pick InvStrongsRealGreek alone, based purely on
> noticing the lack of a language type, as the discriminant between a
> normal Strong's numeric lookup and a lemma lookup.  This will need some
> kind of enhancement in the future so as to make it possible to determine
> what dictionary should be consulted, if we ever gain Hebrew with lemmas.
> (I have InvStrongsRealHebrew, too.)
>
>   

I want to know if the Westminster Morphology module will include lemma 
when it is completed.

> [2] The bigger problem is that the lookup is quite poor, because (it
> appears to me, and I'm wide open to re-education on this) the nature of
> the key sort in InvStrongsRealGreek is badly warped by, it seems, the
> failure of diacriticals to sort well.  So in 1Tim 3:2, when looking up
> references on "ανεπιλημπτον", the normal Strong's number reference
> (above) works fine, and I get G423 as expected.  But when I then try to
> get the lemma lookup, the dictionary reference into the inverted module
> misses the mark, returning "ανεξικακος", which is actually G420.
>
> This is a comparatively mild example -- at least the first few
> characters match well.  But other match failures are much worse.
> Looking at "λογος", G3056, the lookup of exactly that word coughs up
> "Κως", G2972.  This is at best distracting and at worst outright
> misleading.
>
>   

This is the same result that I have been getting with the same sort of 
module.

> Is there something I should have done differently when generating
> InvStrongsRealGreek so as to get better keying, or is there a more
> fundamental problem in how to get the correct sort in such keys?
>
>   
I think the issue is with the key structure and the use of the index of 
entries. Stripping accents from the key in the module might be a 
solution in the short-term, but at some point I think the engine needs 
to support correct indexing (read: publication order) of entries with 
any unicode character.

Daniel
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