[sword-devel] Musings about the Cherokee NT module

[Greg Hellings]

I'm going to top post rather than find an appropriate spot within your
message to post my reply. There are two (relatively) straightforward
ways to do this that come to mind immediately:

1) Use ThML. <span style="font-size: 120%">j</span>esus or some such
should work great. You'd lose out support in BibleCS but... *shrug*
2) Implement a standard mapping between OSIS elements and their output
to a class="..." attribute in the produced HTML. Then convince
application developers to support per-module CSS files. You'd lose out
support in BibleCS but... *shrug*

Perhaps others can come up with other ways to do it?

--Greg

On Sat, Jun 30, 2012 at 9:42 AM, David Haslam <dfhmch at googlemail.com> wrote:
> A few weeks ago, I spent some time researching the Cherokee NT module
> Che1860.
>
> The source text comes from the *Cherokee New Testament* project at
> www.cherokeenewtestament.org
>
> The Cherokee New Testament was published in 1860 by the American Bible
> Society.
>
> The project's electronic edition is still undergoing proofreading.
> Our module is is based on the Feb 20, 2009 edition (downloaded 2009-05-13).
>
> The text is also available in PDF facsimile at
> http://books.google.com/books?id=v0MTAAAAYAAJ&oe=UTF-8.
>
> I tried to make contact with the project leader, but have not had any
> response so far.
> I have not yet found any evidence of further progress for the project since
> 2009.
>
> One of the interesting points about the Cherokee syllabary in Unicode is
> that there is no uppercase set of symbols.
> However, the historic practice during the 19th century was that proper names
> and the start of a sentence were printed with a symbol enlarged by 20%.
>
> I did download the PDF file from Google books, which confirmed this
> observation.
>
> The question arises therefore - were we to attain a position in text
> development whereby we could correctly identify all the places where
> enlarged characters were used in the 1860 edition, how might we encode this
> for presentational purposes using SWORD front-ends?
>
> As far as I can judge, we'd need to use a suitable XML construction in OSIS.
> Even USFM does not have a special character style marker to enlarge portions
> of text.
>
> So it would probably boil down to using a custom extension to OSIS
> attributes, in order to mark the symbols that should be enlarged by 20%.
>
> Of course we are a long way off from achieving the ostensible goal of
> implementing such an enhancement.
>
> The relative unfamiliarity of the Cherokee syllabary to non-Cherokee
> speakers presents an initial hurdle to be overcome.
>
> For that reason, I've developed a TextPipe filter to transliterate the
> Cherokee text to the Sequoyah Latin equivalents, using the information in
> the Wikipedia page about Cherokee.
>
> At least this provides the possibility whereby proper names in the English
> KJV could be mapped to the right words in the Cherokee translation
> (i.e. by fuzzy matching and manual editing, perhaps with some intelligent
> guesswork).
>
> This could pave the way for back-conversion from the Latin script to the
> Cherokee symbols, while at the same time converting the capitalized words to
> a suitable XML markup.
>
> I have already developed a method to back-convert (case-insensitive) Latin
> to Cherokee, which (along with the aforementioned filter) overcomes all the
> ambiguities that I identified during my researches.
>
> I don't wish to spend a lot more time on this, unless there might be a real
> prospect of enhancing SWORD to do what is necessary to enlarge individual
> symbols in scripts (such as Cherokee) that do not make any distinction
> between lowercase and uppercase in Unicode.
>
> Further details available on request.
>
> David Haslam
>
>
>
>
> --
> View this message in context: http://sword-dev.350566.n4.nabble.com/Musings-about-the-Cherokee-NT-module-tp4650474.html
> Sent from the SWORD Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>
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