counting number of words, verses, chapters

Thanks.

It turns to another problem. Differences in no. of words are easy to understand. But why is it so in versification? There is no standard? Then how should we implement it in a program?

Kolen, may I ask why you are interested in word and verse count?

What I can think of are:

Word counts:

1) compare the original word ratio to the translation ratio. e.g. I did such thing in Chinese already. And in Chinese it is approximately 1 to 2. So, for the language structure of Chinese, we need two Chinese character to translate one single Greek.

2) to compare the ratio between different translations. It gives the information about which one is more wordy or concise.

3) I was asked by an elder brother yesterday about how many words there are in the Chinese Union Version. Such information might be useful to new believers (or the one who still haven't read the Bible once) to estimate how much they need to read (by comparing to the word counts to a typical fiction).

4) It is also interesting to compare that with other literatures.

5) word counts statistics on different books are the most accurate comparison of the lengths of the books. e.g. Luke has fewer chapters than Matthew but actually longer than that. And no. of verse might help but no. of verse can be misleading too (it is not by divine inspiration, and the length can be very different too).

6) word counts between different textform can help to get a feeling on how different the textform can be (of course the percentage of difference are much better, if it could be done).

7) similar to (5), word counts give us a way to compare the ratio between OT and NT.

And I am just brain storming about what it can do. Feel free to keep brain storming on it.

Verse count:

It is lesser important since it is not of divine inspiration. But information like "the staff from Logos find 70 different versification" is useful to see the difficulties of versification. And the actual statistics I am interested in is the sentence count. But that can be difficult too. I think (I don't know Greek well) that the sentence division can be very much be determined from the grammar except for some difficult passages. e.g. 1Th 5:16 might be the shortest sentence, having only two Greek words, and Eph 1:3-14 might be the longest one. So, how many sentences a book have, the distribution of the no. of words (the mean and standard deviation) and so on can help too. e.g. I suspect that the mean and standard deviation of the writings between Paul and John should be very different. And for the same Paul, the Ephesus and the Philippians can be very different too. It helps to understand the complexity of the sentences involved. etc.