[sword-devel] Greek dictionary - input needed

[Chris Little]

Daniel Owens wrote:
> The other MAJOR problem is that the dictionary keys are always 
> capitalized, which makes it really awkward to use for Greek. Can I lobby 
> again for a change in that? How many Greek students are used to looking 
> up words in capitals? I was taught using lower case letters, and many of 
> the capitals are really fuzzy. When reading I can work them out based on 
> context sometimes because I have the rest of the word to clue me in. 
> Capitals also make accent marks look strange. Then there is the issue of 
> sort order again...

I quite agree. No casing language uses capital forms primarily. Capital 
letters are less recognizable and slow reading speed.

That said, I don't quite know how we ought to solve the issue. We can't 
simply lowercase the existing keys, since many would actually need to 
incorporate capitals (e.g. personal & place names). And we'll need to do 
some kind of case folding when we do key lookups.

Making keys be cased and doing case folding at runtime handles part of 
the issue. However, key sorting becomes more difficult and we have to 
guard against the possibility of keys that are identical except for 
casing (e.g. "a" and "A").

> What I am hearing from Eeli and Jonathan is a move toward lemma as the 
> key for dictionaries but a recognition that multiple keys could be 
> useful. Is there is a way to encode TEI dictionaries to have multiple 
> key options using n, key, and sortKey? I mean, why not encode 
> dictionaries with each entry assigned a Strong's number (n?) and a 
> StrongLemma (sortKey?)?

For TEI P5 documents, you can set any number of key values within the n 
attribute, separated by |. For example n="a|aa|123" would put the entry 
in "a" but link the keys "aa" and "123" to the main entry. This is 
implemented in tei2mod, however I believe there are bugs in libsword 
preventing correct encoding of entry links in modules.

--Chris