[sword-devel] Greek and Hebrew Esther in joint text

[Chris Little]

Peter von Kaehne wrote:
> I am looking at the Portuguese Bible by the Capuchin monks which will
> hopefully soon become a new module.
> 
> Esther is interesting as the text is a joint Greek/Hebrew Esther but
> with letters for Greek chapters and numbers for hebrew ones.

I believe that the Greek portions also belong to numbered chapters. This 
is just off the top of my head, so I'll check once I get home and can 
check my NRSVA, but I believe that the whole of Esther (when it contains 
both Greek & Hebrew text in this manner) has numbered chapters, though 
they are not entirely in numeric order. The Greek-only portions are 
lettered parts. (It's possible I'm confusing or conflating the KJV way 
of naming the Greek bits with the NRSV way.)

> On at least one chapter the Greek text is in the mid of the Hebrew text.
> 
> Verse numbers are consecutive only in each part.
> 
> So chapter 3 runs like this:
> 
> Ch 3 vs 1-13
> 	Chapter B vs 1-7
> Ch 3 vs 14+15
> 
> What would be the appropriate way of marking this up in OSIS?

Do you really want to know how to mark this in OSIS or how to mark this 
in OSIS so that osis2mod has a hope of processing it correctly?

The best OSIS will simply name each book, chapter, & verse segment 
according to its name as given in the translation and place them in the 
order given by the translation.
So Esther chapter B verse 5 is osisID="Esth.B.5".
If the chapters are all really numeric as I suggest above, then the 
naming conventions hold, but you'll have a number of out-of-order 
chapters and discontinuous chapters with intervening chapter parts.

osis2mod should choke on chapters with letter values. If there's no 
indication of these chapters' numeric equivalents, it might be necessary 
to assign them by hand. (An NRSVA should definitely help with this, if 
you have one on hand.)

GenBook Bibles might support the lettered chapters better, but I'm not 
even certain that they can handle discontinuous chapters. (You could 
test it with xml2gbs if you feel motivated.)

--Chris