USFM marker for geographical location names

Question

Is there a USFM marker for geographical location names? Some quick examples are Bethel and Haran (which, incidentally is both a proper name of a person [Gen 11:26, et. al.] and a place name [Gen. 11:32, 12:4, 12:5]). Maybe I just can’t find the USFM marker, but it’s already there.

I thought for sure I saw such a marker documented somewhere, but I’ve searched and searched the USFM documentation and can’t find one.

Seems this would be helpful for creating a list of place names and for map creation and for simply checking for consistency. In the many cases where a place name is spelled identically to a person’s name, it seems to me that it would be helpful to have them marked differently.

Is the common practice just to use \pn for proper name (personal or geographical) and then sort it out later (for, e.g., a personal names index or place names index or maps)?

Thanks!

Answer 1

There’s no marker for this, but that’s because there is a better way in Paratext. It is called the Biblical Terms Tool (in the Tools menu). Once you pick which Biblical Terms list (or portion of a list) you wish to use with your project Paratext will help you identify which words or phrases you have used for a term wherever it appears. There are many categories, extending beyond names and places. The huge advantages of this tool over manually marking these terms with USFM are that you don’t end up with heaps of USFM bloating your text and the Biblical Terms tool already knows where every term ought to appear (and whether they’re the person or the place of the same name). So where you or I would forget to mark something up or miss a term, the computer won’t forget. You can go to those places and check whether the rendering of each term is consistent, or specify acceptable variations. Biblical Terms allows you to generate a glossary too.

It’s a hefty tool, check the Help and Guides in Paratext for information on how to get started.

Comments

Thank you, IanH!

That’s just what I needed to know.

Answer 2

There is another reason for adding USFM mark up for geographical names. When reading certain languages it can be quite difficult to recognize strange names for people and for places. Native readers, especially new readers, may read a bit of text several times through without understanding it because they didn’t realize they were looking at a transliterated name. For these, it can be very helpful to use special formatting to indicate that “this string of text is a person’s name” or “this string of text is a place name”. Examples I’ve seen used a dotted underscore, a single underscore, and/or a double underscore for these designations. The most obvious way to get that effect in print is to insert USFM markers, such as:
\nd, \tl, \pn - Name of Deity, Transliterated word, Proper name
An additional marker \gn Geographical name has also been requested for addition to the USFM standard.

If this kind of USFM mark up is in the text, it is trivial of course to set the style attributes as desired.

If there is a better way to handle this need, and at the same time avoid the text “bloat” effect, that would be better of course.