Seems a straightforward enough term but until I read this recent article on Biblical analysis, I hadn’t heard it.

http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2011/10/17/3341326.htm

It seems to be quite a common term, now (without the hyphen, often enough).

I’ve never heard un-munge, but munge is common enough in computing circles, so un-munge is utterly unsurprising. I don’t know the date, but it’s the Jargon File.

Well I dare say this is one of the first times the phrase has been used in the context of religious scholarship. I don’t think Christian Gottlob Wilke ever said it.

I don’t know that it’s the first time. The “Digital Humanities” is a growing phenom.

In my day that meant finger puppets.

OP Tipping - 20 October 2011 02:46 AM

Well I dare say this is one of the first times the phrase has been used in the context of religious scholarship. I don’t think Christian Gottlob Wilke ever said it.

This article is badly written in general. So the back-formation of munge is unnecessary and, in my view, inelegant. Moreover, there is no such thing as a “Christian Old Testament.” I suppose one could say “What Christians call the Old Testament” or some other construction. A more scholarly word would be “Hebrew Scriptures.”

edit: my last two points were arguments against the project itself, not the article in question. deleted.

Yes, I did notice that. Possibly the journalist was unqualified to write this piece$

But unmunged came from the researcher, not the journalist.

OP Tipping - 20 October 2011 04:47 PM

Yes, I did notice that. Possibly the journalist was unqualified to write this piece$

But unmunged came from the researcher, not the journalist.

I didn’t see that in my reading.  Can you point us to the original use of the word?

Actually, it’s linguist Mark Liberman, of Language Log fame, who uses the word:

University of Pennsylvania professor of linguistics Dr Mark Liberman, who wasn’t connected with the research, notes the big innovation was the use of synsets rather than just the location of words or their frequencies.

“The key to making such methods work is to hit on features (words or constructions or word-senses or whatever) that genuinely differentiate the authors,” he says. “In their experiment on un-munging Jeremiah and Ezekiel, they found that word distributions did not work well; but synonym choice (as estimated in a clever way) did work.”