[sword-devel] seeking consensus on OSIS lemma best practice

[Chris Little]

On 10/12/2012 1:40 PM, Daniel Owens wrote:
> Gary Holmlund and I are working on a problem related to the Westminster
> Hebrew Morphology (WHM) module. We need a consensus on markup practices
> for OSIS lemma.
>
> I was having a problem getting natural Hebrew lemma to look up an entry
> and display it in the mag window. Gary discovered that if "H" is
> prefixed to lemma in WHM, the BibleTime mag window works with Hebrew
> lemma (as opposed to Strong's numbers).
>
> My understanding is that this is not typical OSIS best practice but a
> SWORD convention. I resisted at first, but now I think there is some
> wisdom to using this method. We need some way to distinguish between
> Hebrew and Aramaic words, which can be identical in form but not in
> meaning. WHM uses @ for Hebrew and % for Aramaic. I suggested to Gary
> that we compromise and simply change @ to H and % to A, modifying
> BibleTime to strip A and H and use that to look for the entry in the
> correct lexicon.
>
> The markup would look like this:
>
> Hebrew (from Deuteronomy): <w lemma="whmlemma:Hאבד"
> morph="whmmorph:some_value">תֹּאבֵדוּן֮</w>
>
> Aramaic (from Jeremiah): <w lemma="whmlemma:Aאבד"
> morph="whmmorph:some_value">יֵאבַ֧דוּ</w>
>
> The main problem I see is that other front-ends may not follow the
> process of looking for G or H and then stripping the character before
> looking up the entry.
>
> Could we come to a consensus on this?

Could you confirm that this is the behavior in some front end other than 
BibleTime? From my perspective it just sounds like a BibleTime bug.

This is certainly bad OSIS encoding. It is also not a Sword convention. 
If anything is implemented that requires a language prefix like this, it 
represents a bug, whether in Sword or in BibleTime.

--Chris