[sword-devel] Lexical fields

[Chris Little]

On 08/19/2013 02:53 PM, Chris Burrell wrote:
> Tyndale House (Cambridge) have devised an automatic way of
> transliterating both Greek and Hebrew with syllable markers in the
> Hebrew. STEP uses this as part of searches and auto completes as well as
> interlinears. The scheme is still in beta and being refined but shout if
> you want the code and I can point you to it. Or shout if you want examples.

Sword natively supports transliteration via ICU. This facilitates rather 
more useful transliteration paths, such as 
Syriac/Arabic/Phoenician/Ugaritc to Hebrew or Coptic/Gothic to Greek or 
any of these to Latin or Cyrillic. (I say this is more useful because 
anyone likely to make sense of Greek or Hebrew can probably read the 
scripts, but users of these languages might be able to make some sense 
of some words in Syriac, Ugaritic, etc. if they could only read the 
scripts.) Likewise, it can transform Korean or Chinese or Devanagari to 
Latin. Or between any of a couple dozen other languages (or the reverse, 
or chained through additional transliterators, or by means of variant 
transliteration schemes e.g. ISO, ALA/LC, SBL, UNGEGN, and assorted 
scholarly/journal schemes.).

And you could run partial words (as when doing input) through a 
transliterator prior to writing on the screen.

None of this is the least bit beta quality. It's been shipping with 
Sword for over a decade and is built on ICU, which is even older and is 
actively maintained by quite capable people, some of whom likely work on 
ICU for the company that developed your PC, phone, and/or OS.

Sword also has an input method class, though only Michigan-Claremont 
encoding is currently supported and it's never been built as a standard 
part of the library by default.

--Chris