[sword-devel] Font size specification inside <divinename></divinename>

[David (Mailing List Addy)]

On Saturday, June 25, 2011 11:37:29 PM Jonathan Morgan wrote:
> Is there anything in the print Bible to distinguish divine name from
> non-divine name?  I assume the use case for this feature was to note a
> difference between divine name and non-divine name in the source text.  In
> English Bibles that distinction is present: typically the difference between
> small caps and ordinary words.  If it is not present in a different form
> then I am not sure that you would want to mark it up as divine name
> (whereas if it is present but the expected formatting is different then
> maybe we would have to reconsider something).

I believe there may be come confusion as to what <divinename> does. The divine 
name tag is, in my understanding, specifically for cases of the tetragrammaton 
(the YHWH personal name of God) and not for any other occurrence of a name of 
God.

The tetragrammaton is traditionally translated as Lord in English, since the 
LXX uses Adonai (IIRC) because of a Jewish tradition of not pronouncing the 
name but saying Adonai (Lord) when coming to it in scripture. LORD (or it's 
small-caps version) is used in many English translations (possibly other 
languages?) to distinguish uses of Lord that refer to the tetragrammaton vs 
those that in the original are merely the word lord. So, for instance the tag 
shouldn't be an issue in Hebrew, that doesn't have small-caps since the 
tetragrammaton appears as such in the text. The most that would be done is 
vowel points for Adonai added, but that can be done in text and doesn't need a 
tag. The HNV in English would, similarly, not use the divine name tag, as it's 
not needed (unless the author of the module wanted for some reason to make the 
divine name stand out even more).

So for Arabic, or Chinese, or whatever language that doesn't have small-caps 
or would otherwise make small caps inappropriate the rendering of the divine 
name tag may well be moot as it may not be used at all if those texts don't 
distinguish LORD from Lord (or don't even render YHWH as lord for that 
matter). This issue only would affect modules that would use that tag. And even 
in that case I think I have a solution, but I'll put that in another email as 
I've rambled enough for this one.