The Chinese Bible and Personal Books
Please forgive the length of this post. This
is my first appearance on the Logos forums.
I love Logos 4 and have already successfully
formatted and compiled a 100+ page book
using the Personal Books feature that looks and works great.
My thanks to the Logos people for providing such a
useful tool. I’ve also
created a few test documents in the Chinese language and these
personal books appear to function properly except
for one glaring difficulty.
I've run into a limitation with
Logos itself which did not become obvious until I tried to make a
Chinese-English dictionary in Personal Books for use with the Logos
Chinese Bible (The Holy Bible. Chinese
Union Version. Shangti Edition,
Traditional Script.). Normally the
Logos word-lookup feature allows you to right-click a word (in a
Bible or other book) and select a dictionary type
resource from the menu in order to jump to
its corresponding dictionary entry. For instance, in the ESV
Bible if I right-click the word "beginning" (Gen. 1:1), I
have the choice of looking this word up in
various Bible dictionaries or English dictionaries. This works
flawlessly in English because a single English word is a unique
lexical entry that can be matched to the
headword in a dictionary resource.
But in Chinese one character sometimes,
BUT NOT ALWAYS, equals a lexical entry. For instance the
character kuai4 (快)
used by itself means
“fast” and the character le4 (樂)
used by itself means “pleasure” but the two characters in
combination form a third word (快樂
kuai4 le4) which means “happy.”
This third meaning is different from—and independent of—its
component characters. Most Chinese words are formed in just this way
using two or more characters together in combination to form a unique
word. So one must distinguish between a character
(one single ideogram) and a word
(a lexical unit carrying a unique meaning) which may be just one
character or a combination of two or more characters.
The Chinese word for
“beginning” in Genesis 1:1 of the CUV is 起初
(two characters). If I right-click
the first of these characters (起),
I can select it and look up its meaning alone; if I right-click the
second character (初),
I can look up its separate meaning as well. But there is no way to
look up the combination 起初
which carries its true lexical
meaning.
This problem is seen
even more clearly with proper names in the Chinese Bible. The Chinese
translators followed the principle of transliteration
to translate names from Hebrew into Chinese. Therefore most names in
the Chinese Bible are composed of multiple characters (most Hebrew
names are polysyllabic). For instance Methuselah (Gen. 5:21), which
is just one word in the English Bible, is in the CUV 瑪土撒拉
(ma3 tu3 sa la), a four character
combination. It appears that at present Logos has no means of being
able to distinguish a multi-character name or word in order to
initiate a lookup in a corresponding language dictionary resource. I
suspect that it may require some kind of markup in the Bible version
itself ???
Of course there are
currently no other Chinese language resources (lexicons,
dictionaries, etc.) available to use with the Chinese Bible in Logos,
but I would like to compile a Chinese-English dictionary in personal
books. I’ve already created a short
test dictionary and (voila) it appeared as
a resource in the right-click menu (when I select a character which
is contained in my test dictionary). The dictionary lookup feature
works fine for single-character words (Logos opens the test
dictionary and jumps to the correct location) but
there is no way to look up multi-character words,
which make up, in fact, the majority of the words in the Chinese
language.
So
it appears that at present there is no way to construct a Chinese
dictionary for use with Logos!
Comments
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" but I would like to compile a Chinese-English dictionary in personal books."
静候佳音[:D]
2 Peter 3:18 But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be the glory both now and to the day of eternity. Amen.
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I am preparing to study Chinese and I know enough already to see your issue. My question is, when you compile the dictionary, can you pass it along to me. I'll be happy to donate to the cause.
Eric
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As a follow-up, here is the sample Chinese dictionary I'm using in .docx format. open it up and read the instructions, then compile it in PBB. (I hope this attachment works).
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This is a known issue in the program in general. I've added a link to your thread in the existing case, but I don't have any information about when the issue will be addressed.
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Thanks Tonya! I guess this project will have to go on the back burner until the technology catches up.
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