Gathering Evidence

There are many other characters on the BabelStone page, including some that are attributed to the Hakka Chinese Bible. Unfortunately, there aren’t chapter/verse references for when those characters are used. How am I supposed to find them?

When characters can’t be displayed in Unicode, one workaround is to use PUA codes. The Private Use Area is a section of Unicode where people can make their own custom fonts to show special characters. You don’t need to use inline JPGs like Lingshyang! That is how the BabelStone Han font works.

I guessed that the Hakka Bible might use these PUA codes. So I downloaded it from Bible.com, and parsed it as TXT. I combined all the text files together with the UNIX cat command. Then I used TextWrangler’s regex replace function to find & replace (.)(.) with (.)

(.), which adds a newline between each character. Finally, I used TextWrangler to remove duplicate lines to get a list of all the unique characters in the file.

As I’d hoped, some of the characters were PUA codes! It was then easy to find those in the Bible text to find the correct chapter/verse reference.

For the proposal, I needed scans of a printed Bible. So I got on my bike, went over to church, and took photos of the relevant pages. Then I tweaked the exposure to make it clearer.

An evidence image from my final proposal, taken with an iPhone 5 camera

Finding characters in the hymn book was harder. While browsing, I discovered a table of characters that the Presbyterian Church had been unable to type when they made the 2009 hymnal. But I didn’t know which hymns they were in. The PPT files used in church are images-on-slides, so they can’t be converted into TXT for search or copy-paste. But thankfully I was able to get the hymns in DOC format from Dexian church, so I could search for the romanisations and figure out which hymns used each character.

I don’t have a searchable version of the 2014 Hakka hymnal, although I do have JPG scans. If anybody is interested in helping me OCR that, then please get in touch! I’m sure we’ll find some more characters in there.

When I was about to leave Taiwan, I discovered that there’s a new Taiwanese translation of the New Testament (TTV). On the way to the airport, I asked my girlfriend to pass by the Christian bookstore so I could buy it, and I quickly took photos of the pages that have new characters.