[sword-devel] osis2mod debugging/titles

[Greg Hellings]

On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 8:21 AM, Peter von Kaehne <refdoc at gmx.net> wrote:
> On 17/11/10 13:42, DM Smith wrote:
>>
>> On Nov 17, 2010, at 7:06 AM, Peter von Kaehne wrote:
>>
>>> BTW are these canonical titles or are they added in to show what is lost in translation?
>>
>> WRT OSIS, canonical is not meant to be a theological statement. It is meant to be what is in the book.
>
> yes, I appreciate this. My question was exactly this - do acrostic
> psalms like 119 have headings in form of a single letter indicating the
> acrostic nature in the Hebrew source or is this simply the way
> translators have marked up the text to indicate a poetic feature
> otherwise lost in the translation.
>
> Former would be "canonical", latter would be "non-canonical" according
> to my understanding of the OSIS definition in question.

That's different from how DM is stating it.  The Hebrew does not have
the single character headers, they are inserted by the translators so
that those English speakers who are unaware of the acrostic nature of
the material or who have trouble counting by multiples of 8 all the
way to 176 can keep track of which Hebrew character they are in.  So
in the normal, English sense the titles are not canonical.

However, since the titles are actually present in the translator's
rendering of the text, they should always be preserved in the output.
According to DM's statement "It is meant to be what is in the book"
then these titles _are_ canonical regarding the way OSIS uses that
term.

If DM is correct and I'm understanding him correctly, I consider that
a very unfortunate corruption of the meaning of "canonical" by OSIS
and especially unfortunate when canonical has such a specific meaning
in the context of scripture already.

--Greg