Comprehensive NWT Comparison Project (calling all technically skilled members) (page 18)

MeanMrMustard

@rip van winkle:

I did receive your PM - you have the links :)

MMM

fastJehu

Thanks MeanMrMustard for this awesome database.

Reading through the first bible verses I stopped with Genesis 1:20. I missed the word "souls" in the NWT 2013.

Asking the database gave the following answer:

NWT 1984: 780 times the word *soul*

NWT 2013: 59 times the word *soul*

braincleaned

THANK YOU!!! What a wonderful gift you offer here! Fantastic!

Very nice, MMM. I hope that people find some interesting changes as they read through this. If you could PM me both the PDF and the database, I would like to have those for the future when I hopefully have some time again. To answer your question about the capitalized words, the old NWT did in fact capitalize verbs when they were addressed to a plural audience in a non-obvious way, for the same reason they capitalized YOU, etc.

fastJehu: Yes, I think they addressed this change in the appendix. Since "soul" was used in ways that would be called "poetic" today, they substituted more direct words for what the writer meant in those verses, like "life" or "living being" or things to that effect. It's another example of a change that is probably reasonable, but goes against the literalist intent of the previous NWT.

MeanMrMustard

All,

I have one more document. Just a side-by-side document, since it seemed really easy to do with the old and new text in the database:

I'll supply the link to this download too if you like.

Thanks,
MMM

MeanMrMustard

@Apognophos:

"To answer your question about the capitalized words, the old NWT did in fact capitalize verbs when they were addressed to a plural audience in a non-obvious way, for the same reason they capitalized YOU, etc."

I do get the capital YOU as being plural. I am not sure I get TAKE (as a verb) in the case of Numbers 1:1-2.

(1) And Jehovah proceeded to speak to Moses in the wilderness of Si′nai, in the tent of meeting, on the first day of the second month in the second year of their coming out of the land of Egypt, and he said: (2) “TAKE the sum of the whole assembly of the sons of Israel according to their families, according to the house of their fathers, by the number of names, all the males, head by head of them,

God is speaking to Moses (singular) about taking a census. Moses is would be the subject here, I suppose - doing the "TAKING". Is the object of the verb plural, and that's why it is capitalized? If so, I would suspect that many more verbs would be capitalized. Or perhaps there are many more verbs capitalized than I ever noticed, and I never noticed because I zoned out during Bible time.

MMM

wallsofjericho

MMM

you are INCREDIIBLE!!!!!!!!!! this data is simply amazing!! better still, the template you have created could be used for all kinds of different analytical projects by others with the fortitude to take on the WTS

GOOD JOB!!!!!!

MeanMrMustard

@wallsofjericho,

Thanks. I think someone in another thread caught a possible use for the database. User wisdomfrombelow noticed that Jesus Christ was substituted over Christ Jesus. The database could be used to find all the occurances of such a switch.

Titus 2:13. Here is the diff log:

Diff(EQUAL,"while we wait for the happy hope and glorious manifestation of the great God and of ") Diff(DELETE,"[the]") Diff(INSERT,"our") Diff(EQUAL," Savior") Diff(DELETE," of us") Diff(EQUAL,", ") Diff(DELETE,"Christ") Diff(INSERT,"Jesus") Diff(EQUAL," ") Diff(DELETE,"Jesus") Diff(INSERT,"Christ") Diff(EQUAL,",")

That would be the pattern to search for... maybe I will do that just to see how useful this could be....

MMM

Apognophos

I do get the capital YOU as being plural. I am not sure I get TAKE (as a verb) in the case of Numbers 1:1-2.

Well, you'll notice that in verse 3 there, Aaron is helping Moses. Presumably the original Hebrew used the plural form of the verb, and because it looks like God is talking to Moses only, the Society decided the capitalization is deserved. It's a similar line of reasoning as what's behind the Society's occasional (very rare) use of "He", "His", etc. in reference to God in the literature; they only do it when the sentence otherwise might be ambiguous as to who the "he" is, God or another person being mentioned (e.g., "God commanded Paul to take care of His pet rock collection while He was away." tells us that it's God's pet rocks, not Paul's).

A regex search for " [A-X][A-Z][A-Z]" (with the leading space) will find most of the non-YOU-variety capitalizations in the 1984 edition. I get a total of only 57 results in the Bible for this search versus 8,278 results for "YOU".

Comprehensive NWT Comparison Project (calling all technically skilled members)

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