by Apognophos 223 Replies latest watchtower bible
@88JM:
Very impressive stuff MeanMrMustard - I know I would have given up by now.
I almost did, and I stopped for a while yesterday because I had other work to do. But it was calling me, "Mr. Mustard, you know you want to figure this out... what, did the problem beat you?"
MMM
@slimfatboy:
Ask bethel already. Those people are there to help with Bible education. It's their raison d'être.
I don't think they would give it to us. They would probably say that they have a PDF out there for us to read and "learn"... the topic of our thread isn't exactly about Bible education.
MMM
So, I've asked this question a few times, and it is worth asking again. Imagine that we had, right now, all the information we want. Imagine we have the two NWT versions and we do a WinMerge on each verse, producing an awesome outout detailing the differences with each verse - QUESTION: what do you want to do with that? Since there are differences in pretty much each verse, what should we do with our "difference database"? How do we categorize these differences in order to come up with meaningful changes?
This is the critical question.
Most of what I have seen is just changing the sentance structure to read more easily and feel more like modern English. All the changes are now in footnotes so you can refer back to altered meanings. This exercise could be alot of effort for pretty much no payback other than interest's sake.
I suspect we are not going to know what the really meaningful changes are for months if not years as the WTS brings out updates to doctrine.
@konceptual99:
This exercise could be alot of effort for pretty much no payback other than interest's sake.
It could be. You are right. But I find it interesting.. so, the cost/benefit analysis for me is already figured out :) But, honestly, if there is something to be gained from this, then I have no problem with that. I've already mentioned that dropping the brackets around words not in the original is very bad. I think that would be one interesting stat: the list of scriptures where inserted words are assumed to be in the original.
MMM
Yes, that would be one category. Basically my intention was to make the complete list of changes available to everyone, but to highlight certain categories with a small number of interesting changes, while others would just be dumping bins for the many minor syntactical changes. We could sort the dropped plural "YOU"s and "YOUR"s into one list (which few people are likely to want to see), the removed brackets into another, the changed tenses into another, and then we just have to look at what's left. I really don't think we can know how to group the remaining changes until we see them. If we knew exactly what they changed already, this exercise would be pointless, right? :-)
What I'd like to know is how we can arrange the changes in a way that they can be sorted by patterns/queries. Then, once we have the changeset, we'll be able to work on it over time, categorizing and perhaps re-categorizing as we go from Genesis to Revelation and learn more about the changes. My intention was to perform this sorting on my own HD using Unix commands to quickly act upon text files. Since the final product would contain all the NWT changes, I didn't see a problem with doing the work privately since people would then be able to look at the results and be sure they're not missing anything.
But if other people want to get in on the sorting, then we would want some kind of collaborative online environment for the sorting process. Personally I figured that it might be faster and simpler to do it myself, then let other people comment, then change the categorization if, say, someone pointed out that a certain kind of removed bracket situation is more significant and should be set apart from the rest (like the removal of brackets around "other" in certain NT verses). I'm not sure that it's worth the trouble to make an online space, especially since it will slow us down. How do you feel about just dumping the changed verses into text files like I described before on page 1 (search for "Genesis001" to find the post)?
I have not been following every bit of the tech side of this convo but couldn't you just generate a two-column document that has each translation matching up verse for verse next to each other like a parallel Bible?
As long as they lined up fairly close then people could quickly scrutinize the two and find the interesting differences.
Let me ask you this: I noticed the code you pasted above is an INSERT statment. Can you just do a select on the bible_verse table and paste the hex string for one of those verses? I wonder if I can send it through some functions to see if it comes out with actual text.
I will send the hex as soon as I can but the hex I sent was the last verse of the Bible (Rev 22:21) but I think without the key it's difficult to decipher. Most of my work is stored on another computer so I need to copy it over when I get a chance and then I'll send more text.
I believe I'm getting closer (I didn't stop looking at it) as I believe the key is stored somewhere in a table (found some code that reference it). The app needs to decrypt it, so the key must be stored somewhere either in the xml files, the code or the database. I don't understand why they tried to encrypt it as it's not worth the effort, eventually someone with enough perseverance will figure it out.
Oh and about phoning the bethel boys club, they will just tell me to chat to the elders again. Sorry but I'd rather run around in the decipher hamster wheel than the circular logic wheel, thank you very much.
I have not been following every bit of the tech side of this convo but couldn't you just generate a two-column document that has each translation matching up verse for verse next to each other like a parallel Bible?
Unfortunately we won't be able to legally distribute that since it will be composed of the Society's copyrighted material. I'm still brainstorming on how to distribute a final product, but a couple possibilities are:
A. Just the changes, e.g.
Genesis 1:1 | "the earth" => "stuff"
Genesis 1:2 | "formless and void" => "a big mess"
But this will of course be very hard to read for most scriptures because the changed words won't make sense unless you look up the verse yourself.
B. Some kind of overlay that sits on top of a copy of the Revised or Original NWT PDF that you would have already obtained from the Society's web site, which highlights the changes.
Apognophos,
Exactly. I was throwing it out there for anyone else - if you can think of something that should be tracked or something that would be interesting, then let us know.
:)
I am going to hold off on the PDF parse until we eliminate the method that castthefirststone described. If that works out, it will be highly preferable to a PDF parse.
MMM
@castthefirststone:
I will send the hex as soon as I can but the hex I sent was the last verse of the Bible (Rev 22:21) but I think without the key it's difficult to decipher. Most of my work is stored on another computer so I need to copy it over when I get a chance and then I'll send more text.
I believe I'm getting closer (I didn't stop looking at it) as I believe the key is stored somewhere in a table (found some code that reference it). The app needs to decrypt it, so the key must be stored somewhere either in the xml files, the code or the database. I don't understand why they tried to encrypt it as it's not worth the effort, eventually someone with enough perseverance will figure it out.
Oh and about phoning the bethel boys club, they will just tell me to chat to the elders again. Sorry but I'd rather run around in the decipher hamster wheel than the circular logic wheel, thank you very much.
What I was suggesting was right along with your thinking - there is no reason to encrypt it. They might want to encode those special characters though. One way to do that is just encode the two bytes as "hex" (two ASCII characters). There are standard ways of doing this, and to decode the text, you don't need any sort of key. You might be looking for a key and never find one because you don't need one at all.
Let me take that text you posted and see if I can decode it.
MMM
