2. Prose word order

Once you have entered the edited verse text, you can then reorder it for the prose word order. The verse text is displayed on this form in a series of boxes, one box per word. Underneath the verse text is a series of empty boxes which correspond to the words in the verse, with intervening boxes for punctuation.

In order to construct the prose word order, click on the words in the verse in the order in which they should appear in the prose. The words are inserted one by one into the lower boxes as you click on the upper ones. This system is designed to maintain a link between each word in the prose and verse orderings. The form won't let you add the same word twice. Proceed through the words in the prose order until all words have been clicked. If you make a mistake, use the ‘clear last word’ button to delete words from the lower boxes until you reach the point at which you made the mistake, and start again from there (the button can be clicked multiple times to go back any number of words).

Once you have clicked on all words, you can then adjust capitalisation and punctuation in the prose word order. Normally, this involves making the first letter a capital and removing the capital of the first letter of the verse word order (if the prose and verse orders start with a different word and that word is not a proper name). Use the intervening boxes to add punctuation. Note that these boxes by default have an underscore in them, representing a space - do not remove the underscore unless you do not want a space between the words. The underscores will be converted to spaces for storing and display by the database. You should add brackets for kennings here: use curly brackets as described in the Editors’ Manual and Supplement (and below). Note that emendations carry over from the verse text and will be marked by angle brackets (<…>) in the prose word order: they should be left in place.

If you delete the underscore (space) in the punctuation box, the words will appear directly next to one another. Likewise, if you want the punctuation to appear adjacent to the previous word, you must enter it before the underscore. Therefore: commas, full-stops and question marks go before the underscore (e.g. ,_ / ._ / ?_); intercalary dashes go between two underscores (e.g. _—_); and quotation marks, round brackets and brackets for kennings go after the underscore when they start (e.g. _' / _{) and before the underscore when they end (e.g. '_ / }_).

Click on the ‘update entry’ button to commit the changes to the database and to proceed to the next stage.

If you subsequently make changes to the word order (by using the re-ordering mechanism described above) you must also re-enter the translation at the next stage (2.3). If you make changes to the location of kenning brackets, you must also make the corresponding changes to the brackets in the translation (stage 2.3) and re-enter the kenning referents (stage 2.4).

If you have not clicked on all the words in the verse, the database will not be updated and you will have to start the process again (or try using the ‘back’ button in your browser to resume where you finished).

References