BibleTech 2008

I've pondered upon what to write about BibleTech 2008.

Most of the sessions are now available for downloading in mp3 format.

The first talk I attended was Tauber's talk "MorphGNT and the building of Linguistic Databases for New Testament Greek". It was gratifying to learn that he used basic Unix command line tools for his analysis, when he started the project. One other point is that he maintains a Greek morphological analysis dictionary based upon Strong's, which is in the public domain. So now I can point people to a text taht can be freely translated, if they want Strong's in a specific language.

Andy Wu's talk "Treebacks of Biblical Texts" was about something I'd wondered about creating for e-Sword. Specifically, if a tool that autogenerated Tree Diagrams would be useful after it created one for every verse. The answer here is "yes". The reason: Use the sentence diagrams to determine how closely a translation matches the source text. One thing I'm curious about, is how they created their rules for Chinese grammar.

Rick Brannan's "Locating New Testament Cross-References: Some Strategies" has a more practical effect. One resource that I think e-Sword lacks, is a comprehensive gratis set of cross-references. This talk gave me a set of starting points to create such a resource. I don't know if I'll be able to generate the 500 000 cross-references that one hard copy Bible claims to have.

There were several other very good talks. Those three are the ones that set me wondering about how to create their specific information into resources for e-Sword.