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Tuesday, 29 May 2018

Status - what have I changed?

It might be considered that a blog post once posted is gone. But that is not how I am using this blog. The posts are all connected through the page Bob's Bible. If I change something in the database, I manually change it in the text of my reading in the post also. The posts therefore represent and include the latest changes forced on me as I consider more of the puzzle.

Over the past year, every book has changed. It is too much data to see at once. But here is a high level summary of new work and changes over the past 12 months. [I don't have data from prior years any more. I had to restore my data from backup last May and I lost all the audit dates on the text table. I should have turned off auditing, which date and time stamps every change I make, during the restore operation, but I didn't. This is the first time I have been able to see the answer to this question, What have I changed in the last year?]

Verses changed: Jun-17 Jul-17 Aug-17 Sep-17 Oct-17 Nov-17 Dec-17 Jan-18 Feb-18 Mar-18 Apr-18 May-18 Totals
Torah 333 443 370 219 398 235 364 229 170 194 131 145 3231
Former Prophets 75 43 178 161 236 41 101 67 188 164 253 232 1739
Latter Prophets 32 115 40 26 146 259 214 146 199 315 213 249 1954
The 12 8 6 13 8 184 13 7 7 7 11 5 16 285
Books of Truth 149 228 138 137 65 54 9 7 13 9 6 19 834
Five Scrolls 9 7 20 2 7 20 4 6 0 2 1 4 82
Other 51 14 75 20 102 105 75 137 212 179 137 130 1237
Totals 657 856 834 573 1138 727 774 599 789 874 746 795 9362

There are several classes of word: 
  • words I have allowed to overlap, this includes common human actions like go, come, walk, bring, etc. I seldom revisit these, but it is not impossible.
  • words where I have managed a one-to-one relationship between the Hebrew and English stems. When a new nuance arises for one of these, I have to consider if I missed it earlier, so all uses are reviewed.
  • words that are rarely used in Hebrew. These are words where the 'meaning' of the Hebrew may be in doubt because there is too little information on its usage. Finding a unique English gloss is sometimes difficult. 
  • words that are one to many, where one Hebrew stem can have many differing English stems. The Hebrew words are homonyms. The English stems have no relation to each other in sound. So play is lost in translation. A new situation may result in reviewing these, especially for English senses that appear only once. With this class of words, changes happen when I have been too free, when I have allowed the use of unnecessary synonyms in English. Then I come across a word where I have a new Hebrew stem and I need the English synonym that I have 'carelessly' used earlier for another stem. 
  • words that were in common usage in earlier translations that I have decided to eliminate. Atonement and loving-kindness were eliminated just under a year ago. You can see the bulge in changes to the psalms which were otherwise 'completed' in 2013. Such a thing could happen again if I were to find a good solution to נפשׁ for instance.
  • Sometimes I find errors in my derivation of the Hebrew stem, especially for those that are similar and I have to check forwards into unknowns and backwards. I wonder how close my high level stem dictionary will be when I am done. This was what I wanted when I began. The concordances of the 19th century concentrated on words. I am interested in the question of similarities and differences between words and their origins. So I have driven all words back to their stem with a few exceptions and for these, like צדך and צדיך, the connection is clear. I have yet to figure out the best ways to display all this raw data.
I have wondered if I would come to a crashing stop in this process as if the language were not subject to such usage analysis. So far, so good, though there are several times when I have been, at least temporarily, stumped. And as noted, some 'solutions' are interim.

The changes by book are below. These numbers will continue to change of course, but they give an idea of the volume of work on each book. There are just over 23000 verses in this canonical text, so the rate of work this year would allow for a complete revision to the puzzle - (children always do a puzzle more than once) - over a two and a half year span.

Verses changed: Jun-17 Jul-17 Aug-17 Sep-17 Oct-17 Nov-17 Dec-17 Jan-18 Feb-18 Mar-18 Apr-18 May-18 Totals
Genesis 89 26 20 1 30 83 93 109 44 88 78 89 750
Exodus 119 146 108 137 86 13 82 25 35 3 5 25 784
Leviticus 81 133 1 22 167 102 130 40 21 66 8 13 784
Numbers 4 133 180 53 38 30 37 53 66 33 32 12 671
Deuteronomy 40 5 61 6 77 7 22 2 4 4 8 6 242
Joshua 2 6 38 2 91 11 47 1 2 41 6 10 257
Judges 19 2 31 4 3 1 2 23 36 55 115 291
1 Samuel 20 16 1 100 16 26 20 24 23 55 52 353
2 Samuel 16 35 3 2 36 2 22 1 23 29 98 49 316
1 Kings 5 1 85 124 3 5 3 20 111 9 8 2 376
2 Kings 13 1 34 1 2 4 2 23 5 26 31 4 146
Isaiah 16 76 8 4 112 98 62 38 135 76 69 50 744
Jeremiah 11 36 15 4 10 10 2 4 26 135 71 120 444
Ezekiel 5 3 17 18 24 151 150 104 38 104 73 79 766
Hosea 1 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 5 18
Joel 1 2 1 2 1 2 9
Amos 1 115 2 1 1 2 2 124
Obadiah 19 1 20
Jonah 2 1 1 1 5
Micah 2 1 4 1 1 2 1 2 14
Nahum 37 4 1 1 43
Habakkuk 1 2 9 1 1 1 15
Zephaniah 1 1 2 1 1 6
Haggai 5 5
Zechariah 1 2 1 2 1 1 3 2 2 2 2 19
Malachi 1 2 1 1 2 7
Psalms 9 104 30 4 7 20 5 2 5 1 5 11 203
Proverbs 132 115 87 127 44 13 2 2 3 2 2 529
Job 8 9 21 6 14 21 2 3 5 6 1 6 102
Song 1 3 1 3 3 1 1 13
Ruth 1 4 1 1 1 1 9
Lamentations 2 2 5 5 2 2 1 1 20
Qohelet 1 8 2 7 1 2 1 1 23
Esther 5 1 2 1 2 4 1 1 17
Daniel 1 1 37 40 35 3 5 122
Ezra 2 3 16 17 70 15 1 1 125
Nehemiah 2 6 1 1 73 20 2 15 120
1 Chronicles 18 6 7 2 37 61 29 27 16 93 129 67 492
2 Chronicles 30 3 67 18 6 26 46 69 18 51 2 42 378
Totals 657 856 834 573 1138 727 774 599 789 874 746 795 9362

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