5. TRANSPARENT
Seasonal Stream
Information – a stream,
hindered, conceals; flowing, reveals
an invisible dance.
As flow disappears, life hibernates –
dry, sunburnt, dusty. . . . then
voices of waters rising, running -
beauty swimming in transparent music.
hindered, conceals; flowing, reveals
an invisible dance.
As flow disappears, life hibernates –
dry, sunburnt, dusty. . . . then
voices of waters rising, running -
beauty swimming in transparent music.
A semantically interrelated lexicon
The work progresses
The TENT Lexicon is currently a beta-version; which means, though all the words are translated, it is still being refined. But I find it even now incredibly useful. Over several years it has proven its worth - solving a number of long-standing NT textual problems and bringing to light long hidden gems.
Actual translation of The TENT [The Transparent Experimental New Testament] has been proceeding at the same time, not verse by verse, but word by word. As one translated word was added to The TENT Lexicon, it was also inserted in each of its forms and occurrences into a Strong's numbered and parsed TENT Source Text. This could never have been done before the advent of digital global search and replace functionality. But the verbs required special handling. Besides gender, number and case, each verb's parsing of voice, tense and mood had its own code, which must be batch translated into the equivalent English auxiliary words and verb forms.
Every word in The TENT translation is translated accurately according to all these known parameters by using this code along with global search and replace. As I populated the source text in this way, I also applied a format based code by which I could later extract a readable study version, including Strong's numbering and TVM parsings, as well as a further extraction for a more literary devotional version with just the text.
More than readable
But is it readable? What is truly astounding is that when the Greek word order is accurately translated into acceptable English word order, with the last analysis, everything falls into place. This confirmed to me, verse after verse, that the precision and economy of the biblical Greek is consistent and trustworthy.
Another benefit of this digital format is that it allows lexicon and text searches which reveal the related meanings between all NT words. One can do any English word search in all TENT versions as well as in The TENT Lexicon. One can also do a Strong's number or TVM number search in The TENT Source Text and The TENT Study Version.
Every TENT Lexicon entry not only has its own Strong's number, but if it is a compound word, it also has the Strong's numbers and meanings for every word making up that compound. In his Strong's Exhaustive Concordance, James Strong included Strong's numbers for each separate word making up every numbered compound word in his word list. Biblical Greek has many compound words. This means in each TENT Lexicon entry for a Greek compound word, one can immediately see the Strong's numbers, and also their TENT word meanings, from which the compound word came; for example, see NT22 below:
This compound word feature, originally in Strong's Concordance, added greatly to the available redundancy in The TENT Lexicon. By importing this feature and enhancing it with TENT word meanings, I discovered this different way to search that helped cross-reference the meanings of many words. I call this way "semantic search." It enabled me to make sure meanings were consistent throughout the NT text. A semantic search for any Strong's number in The TENT Lexicon finds all biblical Greek compounds using that word. However, it also finds wherever that Strong's number is used in any idioms. To see the value of semantic search through an example and how it works in detail, click the link above. A related search, what I call a "reference search," and using a different search term, would also find in The TENT Lexicon the places where that Strong's number is mentioned for any other reason, for instance, in comparing two words or in noting alternate translations. The reference search term for this is a colon between "NT" and the Strong's number, as in "NT:427". One can also search for parts-of-speech abbreviations (all abbreviations used in the TENT Lexicon are listed here), or grammar terms (see the Grammar Glossary), or Hebraisms found by searching the Lexicon for the term: Hebraism. I have tried to label and format everything consistently in The TENT Lexicon to enable these searches. All 2,091 NT compound words can be found using " + " (that is: space, plus-sign, space) as a search term which I used in every compound-word lexicon entry. A semantic search uses the Strong's number preceded by "NT" and follows the number with a space after the last digit (i.e. NT4278 ). Semantic search was a tremendous help in translating correctly because it makes related meanings in The TENT Lexicon completely transparent. Thank God for James Strong and his love of biblical Greek etymology! The Transparent Experimental New Testament is translated according to The TENT Lexicon which was created through the Natural Language Learning Redundancy (N2LR) translation method. For that reason it is consistently grammatically accurate, completely transparent, radically committed to biblical truth and readable. |
Semantic search for NT2564 finds all its occurrences in compounds:
Snippet from a search for "idiom:" returning 190 cells:
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