[sword-devel] seeking consensus on OSIS lemma best practice

[Daniel Owens]

Gary Holmlund and I are working on a problem related to the Westminster 
Hebrew Morphology (WHM) module. We need a consensus on markup practices 
for OSIS lemma.

I was having a problem getting natural Hebrew lemma to look up an entry 
and display it in the mag window. Gary discovered that if "H" is 
prefixed to lemma in WHM, the BibleTime mag window works with Hebrew 
lemma (as opposed to Strong's numbers).

My understanding is that this is not typical OSIS best practice but a 
SWORD convention. I resisted at first, but now I think there is some 
wisdom to using this method. We need some way to distinguish between 
Hebrew and Aramaic words, which can be identical in form but not in 
meaning. WHM uses @ for Hebrew and % for Aramaic. I suggested to Gary 
that we compromise and simply change @ to H and % to A, modifying 
BibleTime to strip A and H and use that to look for the entry in the 
correct lexicon.

The markup would look like this:

Hebrew (from Deuteronomy): <w lemma="whmlemma:Hאבד" 
morph="whmmorph:some_value">תֹּאבֵדוּן֮</w>

Aramaic (from Jeremiah): <w lemma="whmlemma:Aאבד" 
morph="whmmorph:some_value">יֵאבַ֧דוּ</w>

The main problem I see is that other front-ends may not follow the 
process of looking for G or H and then stripping the character before 
looking up the entry.

Could we come to a consensus on this?

Daniel