[sword-devel] LXX verse numbering with alphanumeric character

[Arnaud Vié]

 Hi all,

David, the OSIS ID "!" extensions that you mention are not really a good
way to handle this in theory, as they are "work-specific" and they are ways
to reference portions of verses : by nature, they might be used for
internal references (a note text referencing a subverse in the same
document) but they will completely break the verse mapping features across
bibles.

Usually, when you have lettered verse numbers in a text, these denote
actual verses that were included from a different text source. They should
still have a unique OSIS ID, and be mappable individually.
The typical use case I reported a while ago is the deuterocanonical
contents in Daniel and Esther : in pretty much all french catholic bibles,
the verses that are present in LXX but not in the hebrew sources are using
lettered verse numbers (eg. Esth 3:13a to 13g containing the text of the
letter, etc.)

There are two possible ways of handling it :

1/ The sword-compatible hack : Ignore the lettered verse numbers, and
consider the text of all these verses as suffix of the previous verse.
(eg. Esth 3:13 becomes one very long verse).
Then, this huge verse is a mess, but the mapping of the rest of the text
keeps working.
I think that's what Cyrille has been using in the past, and according to
Troy's answer above, this is what osis2mod might generate if you do use
work-specific suffixes in your source OSIS.

2/ The correct OSIS way, unsupported by sword : Declare all verses
individually in sequence.
(eg. Esth 3:13a gets the OSIS ID Esth.3.14, etc.).
Then, your chapter will have many more verses than what the sword
versifications allow, therefore osis2mod will merge all the end of the book
into the last verse.
This is what Pierre's example shows : the end of the 1Kgs 2 has been merged
into the last verse 46.

The good solution would be for Sword to provide a correct versification for
this bible.

Given that here we're talking about the official LXX module, which contains
one of the most well-known and influential versions of the bible, for sure
we should have a versification defined that exactly matches this base text.
Either updating the LXX versification, or defining a new one if we're
worried about breaking other existing modules that might use the current
LXX versification.

(and for lesser known bibles where we don't want to maintain a hardcoded
versification in sword, I've already proposed a strategy to allow dynamic
and modular versifications, but I'll sound like a broken record if I keep
mentioning it again - if you are interested we have a private mail thread
with DM Smith and a few other people to discuss the necessary changes.)

Cheers,

Arnaud

PS : On an unrelated note, would it be possible to configure the DNS
blacklist of this mailing list to be a bit less agressive ? Every time I
write to this mailing list, I have to retry 2, 3, 4 times or more until it
goes through, because "droneBL" seems to have blacklisted 70% of GMail's
SMTP servers...


Le jeu. 20 févr. 2025 à 13:57, Troy A. Griffitts <scribe at crosswire.org> a
écrit :

> Just a quick note:
>
> The engine parser has a 'suffix' concept so it understand John 3:16a ->
> John 3:16 (suffix a)
>
> I don't remember what osis2mod does, but I think it (or another of our
> tools, e.g., imp2vs) may join all the suffix parts of a verse together
> and place a literal (a), (b), (c)... at the start of the section.  This
> is only for the benefit of the user and not anything which is separate
> in the engine.  None of this is ideal, but just an small effort to meet
> these exceptions with some kind of reasoning (even if not ideal).
>
> On 2/20/25 12:28 PM, pierre amadio wrote:
> > Hi there.
> >
> > Cyrille informed me about this issue:
> > https://github.com/crosswire/xiphos/issues/1172
> >
> > According to Karl,
> > """
> > The deeper problem causing this mess is that LXX 1Kings 2 is pretty
> > braindamaged. Do mod2imp LXX > /tmp/lxx.imp and look at 1Kings 2. The
> > markup ends with a ridiculously long single verse 2:46, with nothing
> > thereafter intervening from vv. 47-71 and 3:1, then picks up normally
> > again at 3:2. Somebody botched this one pretty badly.
> > """
> >
> > In the source file used to build the module, 1Kings ends with some
> > verse that have a funny index: it contain alphanumeric entry:
> >
> > 2:46
> > 2:46a
> > 2:46b
> > 2:46c
> > ... and so on until the end of the chapter.
> >
> > And chapter 3 starts directly with verse 2
> >
> http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/gopher/text/religion/biblical/lxxmorph/14.1Kings.mlxx
> >
> > It is the same on a paper version (Septuaginta, A Reader's Edition),
> > so I am assuming it is not a mistake.
> >
> > I can rebuild a LXX module with empty verses where there are missing
> > ones such as in 1Kings 3:1 (that is already the case for Odes which is
> > dealt with already. I plan to make a global check for all books and
> > chapters, just to be safe).
> >
> > What about the alphanumerical verse numbering ?
> > Right now, i simply ignore any alphabetical character when switching
> > from  the imp format to the xml one:
> >
> > https://github.com/pierre-amadio/LXX/blob/main/bin/imp2xml.py#L48
> >
> > This ends up with several verse nodes having the same osisID in the
> > final xml file.
> >
> > What should be the ideal way to deal with those ?
> >
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