[B-Greek] Inaccurate electronic versions
James Tauber
jtauber at jtauber.com
Tue Jan 23 22:36:00 EST 2007
Silly me -- that should be http://morphgnt.org/ without the www :-)
James
On 23/01/2007, at 10:25 PM, James Tauber wrote:
> 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
>>
>>
>>
>> ---
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>
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