This postI’ve decided to call this Welsh Book of Mormon digitization endeavor “Project Cymru.” (Cymru is the Welsh word for Wales.) The funny thing is that the name ends up being eerily similar to Project Cumorah, the reader’s edition of the Book of Mormon which I edited and published last August. Coincidence? ;)
Anyway, Rikker has kindly OCRed the whole text for me, and I’ve begun going through the text and marking where the verses need to go. Finished 1 Nephi last night and got a few chapters into 2 Nephi this morning. I originally thought it would be very simple, but I’d forgotten that the sentences don’t always correspond exactly. (We have sentence breaks where the Welsh often has semicolons, for example.)
To properly versify it, then, I’ve been skipping from proper noun to proper noun (it’s a very convenient thing that some name of Christ is mentioned every 1.7 verses — it’s my North Star as I try to figure out which verse ends where :)), occasionally using other words to get my bearings (”father” is a common one so far, and of course all the sentence beginners like “Behold” and “Nevertheless” and “Wherefore”). And when that fails, I go clause-by-clause. It’s slower that way but generally works.
Welsh is a cool language. I don’t know much about it, but already I’m starting to learn things (like vocabulary, but also some grammar). It is a good thing I knew about the consonant mutations, though, because otherwise I would’ve been utterly lost when looking for “Duw” (God) and finding “Dduw” or “Nuw” instead. (Yes, those are all the same word. And “mawr” and “fawr” are, too. Welcome to Welsh. :))
At any rate, I expect it’ll take a week or so to finish versifying, and then who knows how long to clean up the text. (Rikker used ABBYY, which seems to have done a fairly good job, but OCRing foreign languages is always going to end up with a lot of mistakes, especially 1850s Welsh. ;)) I’m keeping track of my progress with PBwiki:
And now I’ve got to run to work.
