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How about the new Windows-style error messages, such as "Something went wrong."
The difficult we do right away...
...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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I got your back. If I get to work with MS on this, I will re-write the code to display a very well written descriptive message. Something like this:
Huh; that's weird.
"It is easy to decipher extraterrestrial signals after deciphering Javascript and VB6 themselves.", ISanti[ ^]
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+++Divide By Cucumber Error. Please Reinstall Universe And Reboot +++
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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"Syntax error near (."
They know there's a syntax error, but they can't tell me what it is?
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013
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if elephants get angry the show and shake their ears and lift their trunks and make noises.
I hope that you are mastering these tricks 
Press F1 for help or google it.
Greetings from Germany
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See, erm, that's what I thought I was doing by posting.
It always scares the dog when actually I show and shake my ears.
Cheers,
Mike Fidler
"I intend to live forever - so far, so good." Steven Wright
"I almost had a psychic girlfriend but she left me before we met." Also Steven Wright
"I'm addicted to placebos. I could quit, but it wouldn't matter." Steven Wright yet again.
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I am not searching for a plain, tradional concordance of a given Bible translation; I guess that could be easily found. What I want is a complete cross reference from a word used in a (say, Norwegian) translation, back to the word used in the original texts, and all the places that same original word is used. From this "hit list" it should be possible to click-navigate back to the corresponding location in the translated version, to see if it has been translated identically everywhere, or if the translators have made different decisions based on context. It would be very nice if I could also see what other translators, to other languages that I master (or in the same languages, but different translations) have decided.
Some translations (in particular older ones) are translated from other "intermediate" translations, not directly from the original text. Then it would be very useful to go both ways from this intermediate word in, say, a German translation, to see all the differnt translations of this German word to, say, Norwegian (and not only the translation alone, but all the verses where it occurs), and from the German word back to all the different original text words that have been transated to the same German word.
I do not master any of the original languages (not even Latin!), so I would be happy if there was some explanation or direct, isolated, single-word translation to a modern language (that would probably be English) of each original text term.
Obviously, translation is not done word-by-word. (A Bible tranlator once told that the original texts sometimes are so vulgar that they don't want to do that: The original "Those who piss on the wall" was translated to "men"  ). But I have got the "authorized" translation; if I have access to explanations of each original text word in an entire verse, to correlate with the translated words of that same verse, I would certainly find some correlation between the two - otherwise, I'd be sceptical. I have several times had verses explained to me by "manually created" word-by-word explanations of the original verse; I want that for the entire Bible!
Does anthing like this exist?
It obviously exists - the Bible translators simply must have had access to such tools for years. And since the great majority of the effort - the indexing mechanism and all analysis of the original text and translations to historic languages, whether as final translations or intermediaries for further translation - is independent of a specific modern language, so it should be made as an international joint effort project. The question is: Is the database and the search mechanism available to the public?
I am afraid that the church(es) don't want it to be... They don't want common man to peek, to discover where the church leaders have taken liberties. It is like the Tree of Knowledge; common man isn't meant to understand, just to accept and obey...
What do I want it for? I could give numerous examples. A few random picks:
The "secret" (by most churches: skipped) second commandment, that you shall make no picture or sculpture of the creation, and never worship it: One who read the original text told that the word used for "picture" is used a handful other places in the OT, always referring to a plain, secular picture. Yet many translations choose words like "idol" (Norwegian has distinct words for a secular idol, and an image that is used for religious worship). Also, I was told, the original text is quite clear: Making any image, that be secular or as a religious idol, is forbidden. I'd like to investigate this closer, e.g. see the other uses of the same original 'image' word.
I have been told that in the original texts, two different words are used for killing someone: One of them refers to killing one of your own people, the other is like 'herem', killing to honor God. In 'Thou shalt not kill', the 'kill one of your own people' is allegedly used; I'd like to check that up. Similar with other newspeak-like terms, where either you use different terms to give a completely different impression of what we from when they do exactly the same, or the interpretation of a word is quite different if it applies to us or to them.
I have heard rumours about other commandments as well: The English "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour" is in Norwegian simplified to "You shall not lie" - and some say that neither is close to the original. There is also a question of interpretation: "Thou shalt not commit adultery" was, at least 50-100 years ago, interpreted as "You should be a virgin until you marry, and never ever have any erotic relationship to anyone but your single, lifelong, opposite-sex spouse". That certainly was not common practice when Moses came down from the mountain and in the centuries that followed. So what was the real meaning in those days?
The most recent Norwegian translation has changed the commandments in Leviticus 18 from previous versions, which said "You shall not have intercourse with ..." to "You shall not undress ...". I am not in doubt about the real meaning, and strongly suspect that this is similar to "those who piss on the wall" being translated to "men": Common man is not ready to accept frank speech from the Bible, he must be protected. I'd sure like to see other uses of the intercourse/undress term in the original text, to check how it is translated in other contexts.
I am too old to start learning the original text languages , making the index/database myself is not an option...
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Lots of interesting text here, but unfortunately not the meachanism for navigating between versions. Thanks for the link anyway!
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No, as I said I didn't know of any. And looking at the other responses it is unlikely that there is such a publication or website. Could be a work in progress of course.
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I do not know of translation - I'm reading the Bible (the Old Testament it is) in Hebrew and I can tell you that event the same word used in different places it does not mean the same thing. So probably in the translation will goes the same way...
The second commandment:
לֹא תַעֲשֶׂה (לְךָ) פֶסֶל וְכָל תְּמוּנָה (אֲשֶׁר …). לֹא תִשְׁתַּחֲוֶה לָהֶם וְלֹא תָעָבְדֵם
Do not do (for yourself) statue or any image (of ...). Do not bow to them and do not worship them.
The word used here is more 'image' (a bit like 'character') and not 'picture'...
About killing...
לֹא תִרְצָח
Do not kill
There is nothing here about 'your own' or any other condition. There are other places where killing are mentioned and part of them is about killing between jews, but here there are no condition...
All in all - if you look for a good explanation, you have to go back and look for books form the 10th-13th century - preferably written by jewish rabbi...
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge". Stephen Hawking, 1942- 2018
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Regarding image/character/picture: The more recent Norwegian translations use "avgudsbilde", which explicity means "an image of a false god", rather than the more general "bilde" which has no religious conntations by itself. So, if the word you translate to 'image' does not imply an image of a false god, then the translators have added something not in the original text. (Which is understandable - preaching a second commandment that makes any camera, any naturalistic painting, any TV set, into a grave sin, is not politicall correct nowadays...)
Then: kill. You may be killed by accident, is that covered by the word for 'kill'? What about killing to the honor of God, often called 'herem' in the Judeo-Chistian tradion, 'jihad' in the Moslem tradition? Does it cover killing other creatures, like slaughtering animals for food - or maybe hunting just for fun to bring home trophies? Does the commandment order us to become vegetarians? Is a death sentence as a punishment for other crimes against this commandment?
And so on. Different cultures have different interpretations of "kill". What was the meaning when this commandment was established - was it "Do not murder" more than "Become a vegetarian"? If I could obtain a list of all verses (in Norwegian) where this "kill" verb is used in the Hebrew version, I might come a little closer to understand what kind of killing is acceptable and which is not. (According to the Bible, of course - my personal opinion might differ.)
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Member 7989122 wrote: So, if the word you translate to 'image' does not imply an image of a false god
Not even close - the full sentence is about not making images of living or still around (in sky, on earth and in wather) and worship them. Other 'gods' are not even mentioned...
And the making of art is an other thing alltogether, as the 'do not' is in the context of worshiping...
Kill and be killed is not the same (not in Hebrew anyway). Here there is no differentiation based on the reason someone kills, there is a baseline that forbid killing. Of course there are exceptions, but all come later...
I found 7 more occurrences of the word 'kill' and in all those verses it is about killing an other human being...
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge". Stephen Hawking, 1942- 2018
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What are the original texts ? Just curious, are you looking to the earliest writings ?
Member 7989122 wrote: What I want is a complete cross reference from a word used in a (say, Norwegian) translation, back to the word used in the original texts,
I think this is impossible.
If you go get a bible today, let's say in French, you'd need to ask the editor where he got the text from, was it translated or just picked from an earlier edition, and from there, find out where the older text comes from, and recurse back to some old latin and greek texts.
However, the received text of the New Testament is Greek and nearly all translations are based upon the Greek text- Wikipedia
It is even more complicated than that; every different major churches have their own little differences in translation and adaptation of the bible, sometimes they are innocent changes, sometimes they reflect some editorial point of view.
I'd rather be phishing!
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For all practical purposes: The earliest writings. Those that are in the language they were written down for the first time, rather than being a more recent translation of an older text. You always loose something in a translation; the fewer generations of translation, the less is lost. Even though the oldest complete Old Testament is in Hebrew, even Hebrew changes over the centures; you cannot assume that the modern use of a word is exactly as it was a thousand years ago. Even the old Hebew is a translation; some of the texts were in Aramic before translation, some in Greek.
We do not have access to the original writings of all the books - we know that even the earliest we have got is a translation (because we have even older versions of parts of it before translation, but not of all), so we must understand it as "the versions that have been throgh the fewest generations of translation".
All Norwegian Bible translations up to the 1930 version was a translation from other European languages, primarily German/Danish. For the 1978 version, the translators went down to the earliest, most original texts available, and it lead to a number of significant re-phrasings.
Ideally, I would like to trace a verse from the oldest Aramic or Greek, through Hebrew, then further to translations based on the Hebrew, I guess Latin would be one of them, translations based on the Latin, I guess old German/Danish translations were among those, up to the 1930 Norwegian version. Then see how it compares to the 1978 Norwegian version which is presumably based on the oldest available texts, to learn how and when the more or less subjective translation choices were made.
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A translation that links word(s) in the original to word(s) in the translation almost certainly does not (and cannot) exist. For one thing, a single word in Hebrew may translate to a phrase in English (and vice versa)
For example, the commandment "לֹא תִרְצָח" in Hebrew is translated to "Thou shalt not murder" in medieval English. In Hebrew, the "person" (first, second, third) is indicated as a modifier of the word "murder". This means that "Thou" and "murder" in English point to the same word - "תִרְצָח", while "shalt not" would point to the word "לֹא". How would your proposed translation handle such cases?
Even a Biblical Hebrew to modern Hebrew translation may run into such issues; some verb forms have disappeared from the modern language.
All in all the problem that you have posed is non-trivial...
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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As I tried to indicate, word-by-word translation in meaningless. But verse-by-verse translation should be reasonably meaningful. When your goal is not to make a translation, but see what lies behind an already existing translation of an entire verse, a word-by-word explanation of the original text can be quite useful.
To follow your "murder"-example: English has more than one word for causing someone's death, like "kill", "murder", "asassinate", ... In English, the choice of one of these expresses e.g. the degree of intent. Frequently, the target tanslation language does not have a word with exactly the same meaning - e.g. maybe the same target word is used for intended and acccidental killing. So a reader of the translation may want to see which term was used in the original: Was it a word expressing an intent to kill, or not? The reader doesn't need to be fluent in the original language; if he can match the entire verse (or sentence) to the original, with word-by-word explanations in, say, English, the explanation alone may reveal the degree of intent. If it does not, being able to display other verses where the same term is used, in the target translation language, can indicate (from showing a series of different contexts) what is the common use: If half of the verses where this term is used shows non-intent killing, the term is clearly not always "murder", but if all the uses are in contexts where the killing was clearly intended, the reader will know a little more.
Even in fairly closely realted languages, you have numerous such examples, usually more difficult to handle. One example often used in textbooks is in personal relations: A friend, buddy, acquaintance, close friend, girlfriend, lover, partner, one you know of, ... there is almost never a one-to-one correspondence between such terms in different languages. Seing which was the original term may reveal important details.
I have been pondering how a system like the one I ask for should be designed, and I am tempted to start a hobby project, with a basic, language-independent mechanism, and then add on top the languages for which I can obtain the scriptures in machine-readable form. English is readily available, Norwegian "somewhat", some others may be available as well. So I parse each language version into books, chapters, verses.
I navigate to a given verse in the Norwegian version, and request the same verse displayed in the English version. Say the verse is something about killing. Reading the English text, even without understanding (all) the words, I can right click to send the English word to a dictionary service that provides an explanation. Say that I didn't know the word "assasinate", but the dictionary lookup makes it quite clear that this is the word that has been translated to "drepe", and it is certainly not by any accident, the killing was intended, and for a specific purpose.
If I have got five different language versions, I will display them all (or a selection), one below the other, to see them side by side (I can make some sense of German or Dutch, Danish and Swedish is simple, but even different English translations can be truly different!) Ideally, I could for each language right click and select lookup in a dictionary of that language.
And, even if "assassinate" is an unknown term to me, I can request: Show me all verses where that term is used! and I get a list of those verses in Norwegian (optionally with the English version underneath). I could do this with words not found in a dictionary; the dictionary is great for helping me select the right word for the backwards lookup, though.
When parsing the text to build the database structure, I will for each new word have the option to link to a base form of that word, independent of grammatical variant (such as singular/plural or verb tense). Yes, I know this is a huge task, so I say "option"; it can come with time. Then, when searching for other uses of a term, the user can select "all forms", so that every word with the same base form will be considered a hit.
Programming the mechanisms for this would certainly be doable as a hobby project, it doesn't have to be that complex to be useful. Even cross-referencing between modern Western languages can help a lot in understanding the true meanings, and not the least: Which (sometimes very different) translation alternatives have been selected by various translators.
The big problem is obtaining the texts and have them parsed for the database, and either getting hold of a proper dictionary or add term explanations to the word list. And most of all: Doing the grammatical tagging of each form and identify the base form. That is what I was hoping that someone already had done - especially for languages that I do not master at all.
The mechanism is trivial, massaging the input to fit into the mechaism is certainly non-trivial!
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I was hoping to see a TL;DR here.
I am not the one who knocks. I never knock.
In fact, I hate knocking.
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Hint: You can see it from the number of lines in the posting.
Then you can simply go on to the next thread, without wasting your time on commenting on the long one.
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Not sure such an index exists, but here are some tools that might help:
Interlinear Scripture Analyser
You can also try eSword with Strongs / Thayer / Brown-Driver-Briggs installed.
BPBible Portable In the KJV with Strongs you can right click the Hebrew word (in blue) and search for it in the Bible and it will show you all occurrences of it.
There are also more literal translations like that of Jay P. Green
Btw, I'm not a fan of the modern over-translated versions either, I can understand that they want to make it easier for people to understand, but they also take away from the original meaning.
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I guess that is partly because they don't want common man to understand the original meaning.
Quite a few passages, in particular in the Old Testament, reflect a moral and (dis)respect for both other humans and life as such, that you do not want others to associate that with your God. You better make some soft, romantic padding around it.
And you do not want common man to see all the contradictions and logical problems in the Bible - then they might start questioning the valitidity of it as a whole. Which isn't good for the religion.
Better give people a soft, cozy version that noone would ever think of questioning.
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There are some apparent contradictions... but they can all be explained and there are sites dedicated to answering questions like that
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The Bible quite obviously is a large collection of tales and random rumours from different sources. Some may have a common origin, or are quite universal in nature, others have completely independent origin and believers try to twist the details to weld it together to something that can be presented as if it was one coherent story.
Some of those things are "explained" by saying that "For God, everything is possible". Contradictions are not contradictions. The Father, the Son and the Spirit is one; Christianity is a monoteistic religion, where the god talks to himself, the Son praying to God. So maybe that for God, it is possible that Jesus was both born before 4BC (when Herod died) and after 6AD (when Augustus ordered the census to be held). That they both traveled back home to Nazareth and had to flee to Egypt and stay there for years, because they didn't dare to return to their home town Bethlehem - even when they returned, Bethlemen was too dangerous, so at that point in time did they settle in Nazareth. Or these two Jesus boys are exactly that: Two boys, two stories, that has beeen collected from two storeytelling traditions and (unsuccessfully) merged into one.
Or, Jesus is God, speaking Truth, so when he proclaims that before daybreak, Peter will deny him three times, that will happen. Yet, we are told, Peter still has his freedom not to deny Jesus, regardless of the Truth Jesus proclaimed. To common sense, Peter has no freedom - if he had, and had chosen to use it to stay by Jesus' side, he would have made Jesus a falsesayer, not a truthsaying God. Whether Peter makes use of this option (we all know that he did not) doesn't matter: If he had that option, he had the power to reduce Jesus from God to a pure guesser. You either must accept that Peter had this power, or that he did not have the freedom to stand by Jesus.
For God it may be possible that humans were his last creation, after the animals, but also that he created Adam first and then the animals. Or there were two indpendent mythological traditions that both handed in their bids for a creation story to the editors, who couldn't make a choice and included both, to get a little variation.
It is of course possible that Abraham (/Abram) when young tried to bluff Faraoh to think that his wife was his sister, causing some fuzz. Then, later played the same trick again with King Abimeleik when Sarah was in her 90s, from fear that they otherwise might rape the old lady. And then for the third time, his son Isak played the same trick with his wife, for the same king... They never learn! Or maybe that is one story that has gone three ways, through three different tradition. Just like when you play the whisper game, some elements are preserved (Abraham, along one path, king Abimeleik along another), but when collected, hundred of years later, the stories have dispersed so much that they are taken to be three different ones.
Sometimes the stories are preserved as distinct stories. You know how Lot told the mob to use his virgin daughters as they pleased, but leave Lot's guests untouched. Then, in Judges 19, you find a story about an unnamed man housing a couple guests, the mob comes to attack the guests, but the host gives them his virgin daughter to use as they please. 80% the same story could of course have reapeated at a different time, a different place. A much more probable explanation is that the whisper game has been going on for so long that time and place for the event has changes, the number of daughters, whether the guests were winged or not... The common core of the stories is so peculiar that you might think it really is the same story, and you can decide for yourself whether you pick the winged variant or not, one or two daughter or not.
And so on. The Bible is a huge collection of "urban legends", mouth-to-mouth stories that come in lots of conflicting varieties. A number of modern legends, I came to know as true stories, from reliable sources, and I told them to others. Then, years later, I hear very similar stories from another continent, certainly not from Norway. I got into a discussion on Internet; then others got in an objected: BS - that was neither in the US nor Norway, it happened here in Australia! BS yourself, it was in England... And so on. This was in then 1990s; later I have had several other "true stories" debunked the same way. I have bought books on the subject, killing more true stories that I had taken seriously. The more you dig into the varieties of a given story, the more it becomes clear that even though it might have a tiny little speck of truth to the core, the numerous variants of the same story cannot all be true. To be frank: None of them can be picked out as The True Account of What Really Happened, when that variant, just as much as the others, have been through many centuries of whisper game before being written down.
So I accept the conflicts and contradictions of the Bible. I see the Bible as a collection of, not urban myths, but with similar variation and (un)reliabity, for the same reasons. You might as well advise me to a web site dedicated to explain and help me solve contradiction between variations in given urban myths, of the kind you can read in the newspapers to fill the pages when nothing of great importance has happened the last 24h.
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Please do not discuss religion in The Lounge.
Thanks,
Sean Ewington
CodeProject
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