[sword-devel] morphem separation

Chris Little chrislit at crosswire.org
Mon Feb 16 15:57:44 MST 2009



Karl Kleinpaste wrote:
> Peter von Kaehne <refdoc at gmx.net> writes:
>> What exactly is it, why is it useful to have in a  Bible study
>> programme? And yes, is it something done by the engine? To what extent
>> and which languages. Does it require specially marked up modules or is
>> it simply there? Do we have modules on which it could be tested? What
>> should I look out for?
> 
> I don't know anything about it, either, but I went digging a bit.
> 
> Looking at the source in src/modules/filters/osismorphsegmentation.cpp,
> it's an OSIS capability requiring <seg></seg> markup.  I could add it to
> Xiphos in an hour, if I knew it was useful enough to bother with.
> 
> I poked around a few modules, finding it only in KJV (but I wasn't being
> comprehensive), where it used always to bracket divineName usage, e.g.,
>         <seg><divineName>Lord</divineName></seg>
> So far, this doesn't convince me that it's adequately useful to justify
> even that hour.

(Just working from memory here.)

OSISMorphSegmentation came from BibleTime, and is used only in the WLC. 
It hides/shows the OSIS tags <seg type="x-morpheme">HEBREW</seg> (or 
something with similar semantics).

This is only useful if you then do some kind of rendering distinction 
between versions of the text with/without that tag. You couls separate 
the morphemes with a space or hyphen. Or you could color each successive 
morpheme of a word differently (black->blue->red->green->...) or try to 
guess which are roots (maybe the longest morpheme?) and color those 
black, all prefixes blue, all suffixes red, etc. I don't remember any of 
the Hebrew I once studied, so someone else could probably give you 
better advice there.

And example of a morpheme break within a word is in the first word of 
Genesis, bereshit (coarsly transliterated), which would be separated as 
be-reshit.

--Chris



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