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adyeths / u2o

USFM to OSIS bible format converter.
The Unlicense
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Acrostic stanza headings - propose include the foreign element #21

Open DavidHaslam opened 6 years ago

DavidHaslam commented 6 years ago

For the record this is what my u2o2.py does currently:

    # DFH: Added foreign element - as now used in the KJV module for Psalm 119 stanza headings
    r'\qa': (r'<title type="acrostic"><foreign xml:lang="hbo">', r'</foreign></title>'),

Any thoughts?

adyeths commented 6 years ago

Unless the qa tag is only ever supposed to be used in psalm 119 and will never be used anywhere else with any other language other than hebrew, then this is not something I'm comfortable doing.

DavidHaslam commented 6 years ago

There are other parts of the Hebrew OT which have acrostic poems.

Several other Psalms, Lamentations 1-4, Proverbs 31.

All of them are acrostics in the Ancient Hebrew!

Do you imagine that a translator would ever be able to mimic the acrostic pattern with 22 letters of another language and still provide a faithful translation ?

Or did you have some other use in mind for \qa?

adyeths commented 6 years ago

Is the qa tag only ever supposed to be used for hebrew acrostic titles?

DavidHaslam commented 6 years ago

The example of \qa_text... in the USFM User Reference is for Psalm 119.

cf. The example for the character level marker pair \qac_#\qac* is Lamentations 1.1,2 (Spanish TLA), yet to me at least it doesn't make sense!

This is defined as:

The letters thus marked are simply NOT acrostics in the Spanish text !

They are letters in the Latin alphabet used by the Spanish language that "merely happen to be" at the same initial location as a Hebrew letter is in the original text for each of the poetry lines in Lamentations 1.

I don't see there's any point in marking them like this, but that's just my view, and I've not discussed this with anyone involved in the UBS ICAP team.

Even so, the issue is really only about \qa_text and my observations about \qac_#\qac* don't really change that.

USFM is for Scripture. The only part of Scripture with Acrostic poetry is the Hebrew OT. There's no such acrostic in the Greek NT.