Needed - An Open, Trustworthy, Trusted Greek Text

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Jonathan Robie
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Re: Needed - An Open, Trustworthy, Trusted Greek Text

Post by Jonathan Robie »

James Spinti wrote: August 6th, 2018, 4:39 pm Why not the Tyndale House one? What's the license on that one? I haven't been able to discover one, but it is electronic.
They have said they want to license it "openly". If Tyndale came up with an appropriate open license, it would be an excellent choice. An appropriate license for SBLGNT would also do. Or even Goodrick and Kohlenberger, the text behind the NIV.
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Eeli Kaikkonen
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Re: Needed - An Open, Trustworthy, Trusted Greek Text

Post by Eeli Kaikkonen »

James Spinti wrote: August 6th, 2018, 4:39 pm Why not the Tyndale House one? What's the license on that one? I haven't been able to discover one, but it is electronic.
Read their FAQ and practice some deduction :) https://static.crossway.org/excerpt/esv ... use-nb.pdf
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Re: Needed - An Open, Trustworthy, Trusted Greek Text

Post by James Spinti »

Hmmm…it could be read either, "don't touch this unless Crossway agrees" or it could be read as "open to all."

Unfortunately, I'm afraid the first one is what they mean : (

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Re: Needed - An Open, Trustworthy, Trusted Greek Text

Post by Eeli Kaikkonen »

Jonathan Robie wrote: August 6th, 2018, 5:12 pm Or even Goodrick and Kohlenberger, the text behind the NIV.
If I wanted to sound cynical I would say that as soon as you read the first letter of the publisher's name you know this exists to make money, not to be free.
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Re: Needed - An Open, Trustworthy, Trusted Greek Text

Post by Jonathan Robie »

Eeli Kaikkonen wrote: August 6th, 2018, 5:31 pm
James Spinti wrote: August 6th, 2018, 4:39 pm Why not the Tyndale House one? What's the license on that one? I haven't been able to discover one, but it is electronic.
Read their FAQ and practice some deduction :) https://static.crossway.org/excerpt/esv ... use-nb.pdf
From earlier discussion, I think they actually want to make it open, but found this difficult.

But this is not open enough for the purposes we are discussing in this thread:
Will this text be made available digitally in any way?
This text will be available digitally and will be free for many uses around the world, in accord with the joint desire of both Tyndale House and Crossway to serve the global church in an open-handed way with the very best Greek text possible.
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Re: Needed - An Open, Trustworthy, Trusted Greek Text

Post by Eeli Kaikkonen »

In the older thread which I linked in a previous post in this thread we saw that Nestle 1904 was made mechanically by majority vote. So I ask again, why wouldn't that work today? Take NA27, SBLGNT and THGNT. Remove punctuation, paragraphs and capitalization. Somehow make them to use the same orthography. Compare. When they differ, if two of them agree, select that variant. If they all differ, look at the NET translation text and footnotes and see if it favors one option and select that. If it doesn't help, follow NIV (Zondervan Reader's GNT, 3rd edition) which may favor NA.

It would be very interesting to see how many differences there would be between the result and NA.
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Re: Needed - An Open, Trustworthy, Trusted Greek Text

Post by Stephen Carlson »

Jonathan Robie wrote: August 6th, 2018, 6:07 pm From earlier discussion, I think they actually want to make it open, but found this difficult.
Do you why?
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Jonathan Robie
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Re: Needed - An Open, Trustworthy, Trusted Greek Text

Post by Jonathan Robie »

Stephen Carlson wrote: August 6th, 2018, 9:07 pm
Jonathan Robie wrote: August 6th, 2018, 6:07 pm From earlier discussion, I think they actually want to make it open, but found this difficult.
Do you why?
I'm not sure. I should try to reopen the discussion with them. And perhaps stop discussing that particular question in public ;->

In general, I think that traditional publishers are rarely familiar with the questions and issues that surround open licensing of data or publications. They know their own licensing models very well and are comfortable with them. Any discussion that involves changes to licensing tends to involve lawyers and become very involved.
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Re: Needed - An Open, Trustworthy, Trusted Greek Text

Post by Jonathan Robie »

Eeli Kaikkonen wrote: August 6th, 2018, 7:08 pm In the older thread which I linked in a previous post in this thread we saw that Nestle 1904 was made mechanically by majority vote. So I ask again, why wouldn't that work today? Take NA27, SBLGNT and THGNT. Remove punctuation, paragraphs and capitalization. Somehow make them to use the same orthography. Compare. When they differ, if two of them agree, select that variant. If they all differ, look at the NET translation text and footnotes and see if it favors one option and select that. If it doesn't help, follow NIV (Zondervan Reader's GNT, 3rd edition) which may favor NA.

It would be very interesting to see how many differences there would be between the result and NA.
Alan Bunning did something like this working from all manuscripts before AD 400 and wound up with about 500 differences from NA. I imagine you could do something similar along the lines you suggest.

I'm no text critic, I can't really say what approaches would be best. Stephen Carlson's approach, Alan Bunning's approach, the approach you suggest ... there are quite a few plausible ways to create such a text that would probably be similar to the NA.

In some ways, the technical problem of producing a text is less difficult than the social problem of agreeing on a text across a wide enough community to make it useful for this purpose. Getting a free license for something like NA or TGNT or SBLGNT that already has street cred would be one great solution.

But suppose we go the other route and create a text. What would it take to get street cred so that it can be used in academic publications and translations?
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
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Eeli Kaikkonen
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Re: Needed - An Open, Trustworthy, Trusted Greek Text

Post by Eeli Kaikkonen »

Jonathan Robie wrote: August 7th, 2018, 10:28 am But suppose we go the other route and create a text. What would it take to get street cred so that it can be used in academic publications and translations?
We can re-interpret my question "why wouldn't that work today" to mean "if it produced a work with credibility then, why wouldn't it work in similar way today?"

Just think about it - NA is kind of a consensus and compromise in itself. We can suppose that people want actual textual criticism and scholarly informed decisions behind a text, whether it's necessary for their purposes or not. Having several ones to choose from (as much as the licences permit) is on the other hand great, but it may make the situation more difficult because if you don't know textual criticism yourself you're unsure about the choice. What would be a better option than to combine more scholarly opinions? Psychologically thinking NA+SBL+TH could feel even more trustworthy than NA alone. The situation isn't the same with combined manuscripts, whatever the real merits would be. And I think it's important to get a text with as few differences with NA as possible while still keeping the work none-derivative.

I think the biggest difference between then and today is that today anyone with some programming skills can do that, while back then it took a real scholar. That may have been a big factor in credibility, of course.

In practical level I might be interested in doing it. But are all the three texts available for free in a form which makes it possible to normalize them to a common lemma/parsing form to be compared? Plain text comparison is out of question because at least TH uses so much different spellings. Some manual work is of course always necessary.
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