Since my student days in the late 1960s, I have had a lifelong interest in evangelical missionary work in France, which gives the personal background for writing this memo.
Is there a case for having a new versification scheme called *French*, just like we already do for *German*? I believe there is..... It looks as though none of the defined versification schemes listed in http://crosswire.org/wiki/DevTools:conf_Files is 100% appropriate for many French Bibles. Apart from the well-known difference in versification of all those Psalms with canonical titles (in which the title is verse 1, and the rest are offset by +1), there is a significant number of chapters in various books where French Protestant Bibles contain more numbered verses than the KJV. During the past 3 weeks, I've been looking at the *David Martin 1744* translation, and examining an alternative text source to trace errors and omissions in our existing *FreMartin* module. cf. This is a bit like what DM Smith did for project KJV2003 => KJV2006. This has been a useful exercise, but is somewhat hampered by the observation that even in our existing module (which does contain significant textual problems), there are some chapters where the last verse contains the text for several verses, due to having been squeezed into the default KJV versification mould. Moreover, of the three French Bibles now moved into the CrossWire av11n repo, two of them do not include a specified versification in their .conf files. These are FreSegond & FreCrampon. Both modules have deuterocanonicals added, and both were sourced from VulSearch, and are designated version 2.0 - I've already written to Chris about one of these. In the course of French Church history, *La Bible David Martin* was a very significant Protestant Bible, with just the 66 books, and there are other important historical editions besides the 1744 edition, namely the earlier 1707, and the later revision of 1855. For both of these there are digitized electronic texts online. Furthermore, there are many other historical French Bibles which have essentially the same versification as the Martin translation. e.g. My own printed copy of the 1962 Version Synodale is clearly a linear descendant. I think there is now a strong case to have a French versification scheme for developers to use. Best regards, David -- View this message in context: http://sword-dev.350566.n4.nabble.com/Alternate-Versification-for-Protestant-French-Bibles-tp3653812p3653812.html Sent from the SWORD Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ sword-devel mailing list: sword-devel@crosswire.org http://www.crosswire.org/mailman/listinfo/sword-devel Instructions to unsubscribe/change your settings at above page
