[sword-devel] Canonical Psalm titles and SWORD search?

Thu Jan 30 00:28:57 EST 2025

Thanks for the feedback.
What is the correct method to mark the introduction to the psalms then, but still searchable in inter alia Xiphos please?
Thank you,
Johan
From: sword-devel <sword-devel-bounces at crosswire.org> On Behalf Of Arnaud Vié
Sent: Wednesday, 29 January 2025 10:01
To: SWORD Developers' Collaboration Forum <sword-devel at crosswire.org>
Subject: Re: [sword-devel] Canonical Psalm titles and SWORD search?

Thanks DM for the answer !
The "OSIS pre-verse titles" wiki page mentioned that sword used x-preverse, but it wasn't clear to me if it was a requirement to have in the input document.
In doubt I added it when outputting OSIS from my bible-scraper, but now I know I can remove it safely :-)

Regarding the verse delimiters in the middle of psalm titles, as David mentioned it's the case in many french bibles, where psalm titles are all over the place.
The examples I know come from bibles that Cyrille scraped with my tool, and for which he had the issue.
In all of them, I worked around it by writing several <title> tags for a single psalm (each title fully contained within a verse) in each case.

For verse 1 starting in the middle of the psalm title, see Psalm 28 in https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/La_sainte_Bible_selon_la_Vulgate_(J.-B._Glaire)/Psaumes#PSAUME_28._(H%C3%A9br.,_XXIX).[292] , which I think Cyrille published as FreVulgGlaire. (I see it in AndBible, but for some reason it does not show up on the crosswire.org<http://crosswire.org> website library).
For psalm title spanning two verses, you can check verses 50, 51, 53, 59 and more of https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Traduction_de_la_Septante_et_du_Nouveau_Testament/Psaumes#PSAUME_L, which he published as FreLXXGiguet on the crosswire repo.

I can provide full OSIS documents with these use cases and without my workaround (so with the verse tags really written within a single title) - feel free to mail me directly if needed.

Regards,

Arnaud

Le mar. 28 janv. 2025 à 21:33, DM Smith <dmsmith at crosswire.org<mailto:dmsmith at crosswire.org>> a écrit :

On Jan 28, 2025, at 1:48 PM, Arnaud Vié <unas.zole+avie at gmail.com<mailto:unas.zole%2Bavie at gmail.com>> wrote:

Hi David,

The usage of "acrostic" in this case is indeed semantically incorrect.

According to the OSIS specification, the correct markup for a psalm canonical title is
<title type="psalm" canonical="true">
and it is perfectly allowed to occur before the first verse.
The crosswire wiki mentions that, in this case, sword requires an additional attribute subType="x-preverse" on the title tag, though I'm not sure what the purpose of this tag is and if it affects your issue with searching.

subType=“x-preverse” is added by osis2mod. No one writing OSIS should need to put that in. SWORD uses this to handle material that stands before the verse number.

Early on pre-verse material was a heading. Later it could be more complex.

In a SWORD frontend it does something like this pseudo code.
if (showingHeadings or verse.headingIsCanonical())
output( verse.getHeading() )
output( verse.getVerseNumber() )
output( verse.getContent() )

Note, the above does not care if the module is OSIS, ThML, GBF, plain text, …

As a side note, in many bibles, as you say, some psalm titles span several verses, and therefore the OSIS spec allows <verse/> tags in the middle of a psalm title - though currently sword does not support it because osis2mod does not transform the <title> tag to milestoned form.
Right. It doesn’t fit the pattern above.

What module exhibits this multi-verse title and in which Psalm? I’d like to take a look at it.

Regards,

Arnaud

Le mar. 28 janv. 2025, 13:12, David Haslam <dfhdfh at protonmail.com<mailto:dfhdfh at protonmail.com>> a écrit :
Thanks John,

Aside: I'm puzzled by the use of type="acrostic" when the 125 Psalms with canonical titles are nothing to do with acrostics, per se. Surely, that attribute should be reserved for the 22 stanza headings in Psalm 119 ?

There are Alternative Versifications in which the canonical Psalm titles are assigned to verse 1 (or in a few cases to verses 1 & 2) with subsequent verse numbers being offset by +1 (or +2).
I was not enquiring about modules that are for Bible versions like that.

In the KJV and many other modules, the Psalm titles proper are before the start of verse 1.

Best regards,

David

Sent with Proton Mail<https://proton.me/mail/home> secure email.

On Tuesday, January 28th, 2025 at 11:17 AM, Johan Marais <johan.marais at messianic.co.za<mailto:johan.marais at messianic.co.za>> wrote:

David.

In our translation I set Ps 6:1 as:

<image003.png>

And a ‘normal’ search in Xiphos 4.2.1 returns 7 results:

<image002.png>

Regards,

Johan Marais

________________________________

-----Original Message-----
From: sword-devel <sword-devel-bounces at crosswire.org<mailto:sword-devel-bounces at crosswire.org>> On Behalf Of David Haslam
Sent: Tuesday, 28 January 2025 10:45
To: sword-devel mailing list <sword-devel at crosswire.org<mailto:sword-devel at crosswire.org>>
Subject: [sword-devel] Canonical Psalm titles and SWORD search?

I just tried to search for the word 'Neginoth' using Xiphos.

There were no results found!

This word occurs in the canonical Psalm title for Ps.6 and five other Psalms.

"To the chief Musician on Neginoth upon Sheminith, A Psalm of David."

In view of the fact that canonical Psalm titles are translated from the original Hebrew, ought it not to be within the scope of SWORD search?

Or is this merely a shortcoming of Xiphos?

cf. Xiphos Advanced Search dialog allows search scope to look in footnotes, but there's no such option for titles.

Of course, many Bible versions have non-canonical headings throughout the  module, yet I'm not concerned with such in asking this question here.

Best regards,

David

Sent with Proton Mail secure email.

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