[B-Greek] Transliteration (Was RE: Is there a downloadable file of all B-Greek emails, etc?)

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Wed Apr 28 14:42:03 EDT 2004


At 10:25 AM -0500 4/28/04, Curtis Hinson wrote:
>It would be really nice if B-Greek or another website had an entire GNT in
>B-Greek transliteration.  Like the online bibles, where one can put in a
>verse and get the text, which could be pasted into messages.  I think a
>fairly simple Perlscript or shellscript could parse the widely available
>NA26 texts into the BGreek transliteration scheme, then any of a number of
>free online bible CGIs could serve up the results.  I have a server if
>anyone is willing to help me with the scripting.
>
>I have the Sword bible program in addition to Bibleworks and Gramcord for
>the reason that Sword claims to have a B-Greek transliteration.  However, in
>my experience with it, it is not the "usual" B-Greek scheme.
>
>The actual B-Greek guidelines state "This is just one way to transliterate
>Greek, and members of this list use several different schemes, but we always
>manage to figure out what is meant."  However I have noticed that some folks
>feel a need to apologize if they use another scheme than the usual or
>suggested one, and that occasionally someone else will express discontent if
>another scheme is used.
>
>It would seem helpful if one way or the other was made clear.  Either the
>"usual" scheme has become the unwritten dogma, so the rules need to be
>clarified, or else there should be tolerance for different transliteration
>schemes.

Here's the opening paragraph of the guidelines on transliteration:

	"B-Greek has from the beginning allowed every poster to use
	any scheme he/she found comfortable, since we all could usually
	figure out what text was meant.     For those who wish some
	guidance, a generally accepted scheme has evolved on the List,
	with two or three matters still not fully settled."

These guidelines were first published on the list in a message by the
at-that-time-Chair of the list, Edward Hobbs on Wed, 24 Jul 1996 and have
not been altered in the eight years since then.

Although it may have seemed otherwise to some subscribers, we have never
rigidly enforced any single scheme of transliteration, although we have
frequently asked posters to be fully consistent in the scheme of
transliteration they employ and attempt to be as clear as possible, above
all NOT to paste in Greek text from a Bible program so that the program's
Greek font appears as a sort of gobbledygook when converted to plain-text
ASCII in list-messages.

When we adopted that standardized scheme in 1996 there was compromise on
the part of all parties to the development; I certainly had to make several
adjustments with keystrokes differing from those I had used for several
years in my own teaching and writing. The scheme has since been employed by
other Biblical lists that have a regular need to represent Greek
characters. It is true that some lists allow for Greek and Hebrew fonts to
be used--and that works well enough for those who have those fonts
installed in their own systems but it creates gobbledygook on the screen
for those who do NOT have those fonts in their own systems. Jonathan,
Carlton and I have agreed that for the time being we should continue to
insist upon plain-text ASCII as the preferred standard format for B-Greek
messages, and incoming styled text is regularly converted by our list
software into plain-text ASCII before the messages are distributed to the
list.

The upshot of this: we ask list-members first and foremost to be fully
CONSISTENT in their transliteration scheme: Theta may be spelled with a TH
or with a Q, but it should be noted that a TH may be interpreted by some as
Tau-Eta; Nu may be represented by an upper-case N, but a mixture of
upper-case N and upper-case V, particular in a single word, can be quite
confusing; the lower-case "v" makes more sense because it looks more like a
script (lower-case) Mu. So CONSISTENCY is the primary concern in
transliteration; conformity to a single common scheme probably makes it
easier for every list-member reading messages to understand the Greek text
intended, but consistency in practice is the more important consideration.
Pasting-in of a text from a Greek font converted into plain-text ASCII
characters is easy enough to do, but it seems to me to be discourteous when
one is asking the advice of others about a Greek text that they must take
pains to decipher. These are reasons why adherence to a shared standard
transliteration seems preferable in practice, although any transliteration
scheme that is both consistent and readily intelligible will be acceptable.


>-----Original Message-----
>From: b-greek-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org
>[mailto:b-greek-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Carl W. Conrad
>Sent: Tuesday, April 27, 2004 7:52 AM
>To: Oun Kwon
>Cc: b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org
>Subject: Re: [B-Greek] Is there a downloadable file of all B-Greek emails,
>etc?
>
>
>At 8:30 AM -0400 4/27/04, Oun Kwon wrote:
>>Thanks for info.
>>
>>What format is this downloadable file?  HTML?
>>How I can read it once downloaded?  Through a web browser?
>
>No, it is not HTML; it is a text file compressed--GZipped; when uncompressed
>it contains all the messages (with headers) of an entire month or the
>current month-to-date. I use Eudora as my mail program and have found it a
>snap to convert the expanded text file into a Eudora mailbox allowing me to
>see dates, senders, sizes, subject-headers of all the individual messages of
>the archive file.
>
>Perhaps it may be useful to know that the archives of B-Greek are maintained
>as ASCII-text files, not HTML; even if you send a message to the list in
>HTML, as many mail programs do, it is converted by our list-software into
>ASCII plain-text, which is why attempts to paste Greek fonts into messages
>sent to the list regularly fail and result in gobbledygook and why we urge
>people (a) not to paste Greek text from a Bible program into messages but
>rather to use our conventional transliteration scheme, and (b) not to paste
>text from a word-processor into messages--because diacritical marks and
>punctuation marks generally come out garbled in the resultant text of
>messages distributed to list-members.

-- 

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/



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