[B-Greek] Inaccurate electronic versions
James Tauber
jtauber at jtauber.com
Tue Jan 23 22:25:39 EST 2007
Alan,
Are you aware of the texts available at www.morphgnt.org and the
continuing work of Ulrik Petersen and myself that may overlap
considerably with your SGNTI?
I have spent the last twelve years maintaining and correcting the
morphological analysis and lemmatization of the UBS text originally
provided by CCAT. Unfortunately, very old versions of this work
continue to be distributed. As far as I can tell, your work only
references these older and more erroneous versions.
Your input to Ulrik and my work would be most welcome as I'm sure you
have dealt with many of the same issues that we continue to deal with.
James
On 20/01/2007, at 10:59 AM, Alan Bunning wrote:
> I got tired of the myriad of inaccuracies, sloppy scholarship, and
> proprietary nature associated with the New Testament Greek texts
> and decided
> to start collecting my own accurate electronic versions. I have
> gone through
> hundreds of websites and several Bible programs collecting copies
> of the
> various Greek texts. After I obtained several copies of a certain
> text, such
> as Stephanus 1550 for example, I then normalized them all to the
> same format
> and then had the computer compare them for differences. To my
> surprise, all
> of them contained differences from each other. After a while, I
> could see
> who was copying their electronic texts from whom and could distinguish
> several root lines that were repeatedly being utilized. I then
> recorded all
> of the differences and consulted with the printed version in various
> libraries to determine which electronic version might be right. To my
> surprise, NO SINGLE TEXT of any of the texts I collected was
> entirely right
> -- some had most things right and but then would have other things
> wrong. I
> repeated this process for each of the following texts so far:
>
>
>
> Stephanus 1550
>
> Westcott and Hort 1881
>
> Scrivener 1891
>
> Byzantine Majority 1991
>
> Nestle-Aland 27/UBS4
>
>
>
> Common sources such as the Online Bible, Broman, Unbound Bible, and
> CCAT all
> had various errors. Not one single text for any version I examined was
> entirely correct, although a few were really close. I have recorded
> where
> each of the major texts I collected differed so that the providers
> could
> correct their texts, and also have contacted a few of them. In some
> cases,
> the providers did not actually have the text they claimed to have. The
> corrected texts and the differences are all available on my website
> under
> the "Greek Texts" link at:
>
>
>
> http://mysite.verizon.net/bunning/SGNTI/
>
>
>
> I would point out that this process of mine does not guarantee that
> the
> texts I have placed on my website are error free, but only that
> they are
> more accurate than all of the other texts I have compared. They are
> now at
> least correct in all the areas where any of the texts differed from
> each
> other.
>
>
>
> I have since begun looking at the morphological parsings and links
> to root
> words, and am even more appalled at the magnitude of errors. It is
> far, far
> worse than I ever imagined. I am not talking about alternatives in
> the way a
> word could be parsed by different interpreters, I am talking about
> internal
> errors and wrong links to root words within the same text, and then
> those by
> the same author across texts. What a mess! (There are also errors
> in verse
> numbering that I am still working on).
>
>
>
> If you believe you have an electronic copy of a Greek text that you
> believe
> is correct AND you have compared it with the errors I already
> recorded (in
> other words, it is not just another copy of one of the main copies
> I already
> evaluated), I would be happy to compare it with the texts that I have.
> Perhaps someone has also done some of this and can save me some
> trouble. I
> would also be curious to see if the big money programs like
> Libronix, also
> have the same errors because they copied from these other texts as
> their
> source.
>
>
>
> Alan Bunning
>
> bunning at verizon.net
>
>
>
> ---
> B-Greek home page: http://www.ibiblio.org/bgreek
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