User-Defined Versification

[Walker]

Greetings,

 

A particularly useful function (if it exists already, I have not discovered it) would be to be able to set user-determined verse markers in a text. For instance, Mark 1.1–8 (ESV) is divided like this:

 

[1] The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. [2] As it is written in Isaiah the prophet, “Behold, I send my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way, [3] the voice of one crying in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight,’” [4] John appeared, baptizing in the wilderness and proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. [5] And all the country of Judea and all Jerusalem were going out to him and were being baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. [6] Now John was clothed with camel's hair and wore a leather belt around his waist and ate locusts and wild honey. [7] And he preached, saying, “After me comes he who is mightier than I, the strap of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie. [8] I have baptized you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”

 

 

It could be handy to be able to set my own verse markers; perhaps like this:

 

[1] The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. [2] As it is written in Isaiah the prophet, “Behold, I send my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way, the voice of one crying in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight,’” [3] John appeared, baptizing in the wilderness and proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And all the country of Judea and all Jerusalem were going out to him and were being baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. Now John was clothed with camel's hair and wore a leather belt around his waist and ate locusts and wild honey. [4] And he preached, saying, “After me comes he who is mightier than I, the strap of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie. I have baptized you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”

 

 

I know that searches could be constructed and saved to approximate such changes, but much larger groupings (making a paragraph a "verse", for instance) could be handy, especially for comparing sections of books. It would also solve the sentences-crossing-verse-breaks problem. I hope this is sufficiently clear. Thank you for your thoughts on the matter!

[Ken Simpson]

I must be having a blindness day, but I can’t see the difference between the two text excepts. I even copied and pasted them into deltawalker, and could find no difference.

 

I must be missing something...

[Walker]

Sorry for the lack of clarity. If you look at them, the versification is different in each; the text is divided into 8 verses in the first block, 4 in the second. Let me say this another way: the ability to mark off arbitrary blocks of text as "verses" would be useful. Thanks for looking.

[Ken Simpson]

Oh yeah! Talk about being blind...wonder why DW didn’t point that out...wait a minute - it did. D’oh!

 

I know of no way of doing this in Accordance, and I am a little unsure as to what sort of comparison you are thinking of making.

 

Can you delineate what you want to do (as an example) and I (and I am sure others) will have a think about it?

[Walker]

Some of the work I've been doing has involved looking for groupings of words in sentences/paragraphs/sectional units. For instance (and I'll just use English, and a simple example), the usage in Ecclesiastes of "wisdom", "madness", "foolishness", and "vanity" — places where they fall within the same sentence or unit, as pairs, triads, or the like. As I put together verses where these fell together, it became clear that there were some places that were connected as a thought-unit, but which were divided by verses. In 7.25–26 wisdom/foolishness/madness/God fall together — this was clear when I set verse-lists against each other — but had I not taken the time to compare those results, but stuck only to the verses spit back to me that contained those pairs, etc., it would have been missed that those were together in the thought-unit (that would have also been the result of laziness on my part, too...)

 

The ability to take a text — the GNT, for instance, and marking it on my own (this could be done in huge chunks, too; imagine breaking a book into three sections — 1-8.5 / 8.6–15.2a / 15.2b–30 —and then easily comparing word frequency between them; very fine-grained searches could also be done) — would be handy, as I could divvy up a book (or the whole NT, why not?) to my heart's content, and probably by argument/narrative unit rather than by chapter and verse. I do, however, see where this would be a real issue (there would have to be some sort of general editor for the placement/removal of divisions in the provided texts).

 

I hope that helps!

[Λύχνις Δαν]

Hey Walker,

 

  My first thought is a User Bible. You could re-versify the text externally and import it as a User Bible. There are some restrictions that you might hit. But if you are not increasing the verse count you would very likely be ok. Of course you need a copy of the text to work and then an editor. I'm not sure how many variations or how much of the bible you want to examine in this way. In addition, you would not have morph. tagging support so the kinds of searches you could do would be limited. Might be worth taking a chapter of interest and trying it out.

 

thx

D

[Walker]

That's a very possible solution — hadn't considered that possibility. I will give it a try. Thank you!