Searching for all the forms derived from a Hebrew root

I am new to Logos on Windows (6 months or so), coming from Accordance on the Macintosh. I set out several hours ago to find all the occurrences in the Hebrew Bible of the root ZKR in all its derivations (i.e. as a verb in its many forms, as the noun ZIKRON, as the proper name Zechariah, and so forth). After a couple of hours of trying on my own I could not find any way of doing this. I looked in the tutorial videos and found nothing to help. I have looked through forum messages and found a confusing and contradictory set of replies.

Apparently the only way to do this is to search for every lemma derived from the root ZKR as an independent search (or as a complex search using the OR command).

Is there someone from Logos who can clarify whether it is possible to search for all the instances of all the lemmas derived from a Hebrew root, such as ZKR, in a simple way or not?

David L. Adams

(By the way, I went back to Accordance on the Mac and managed to figure out how to do this search in less than 2 minutes (having not tried it before there), so I can't believe that there is no way to do this in Logos!)

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Comments

Kevin Becker

Logos doesn't handle Hebrew words by roots, rather by lemma, or dictionary forms.

This thread http://community.logos.com/forums/t/15169.aspx contains some ways to get the various form of a root.

David L Adams

Yes. I read that thread. It was one of the confusing and contradictory items that I referred to.

So, I take it that the simple answer is NO. There is no simple and straightforward way to find all the derivatives from a single root in Logos. How disappointing! Well, I guess it is a good thing that I have kept my ancient hardform copy of Mandelkern's Hebrew Concordance after all.

dla

Kevin Becker

Sorry about the disappointing no [:(]

What did you find confusing or contradictory? Perhaps I (or someone else) could help clarify some things.

David L Adams

I re-read the thread and understood it fine. I think that my 'confusing and contradictory' comment was not so much pointed to that particular thread but to the collection of several different threads that attempted to address the general topic of searching for roots. That is probably because the several persons who contributed to the thread were not using terminology consistently.

That particular issue aside, in general I am finding the interface for morphological searching to a real pain in Logos. It is perfectly adequate for simple searches, but for more complicated searches it is quite difficult to use. Time and again I find that if I run searches in Accordance (using the Westminster 4.2 encoding scheme) and then come to Logos and try to replicate the search using a resource with the same encoding scheme I either cannot figure out how to do it, or I get an response that is incomplete (i.e. does not find everything that it should find).

I am aware that part of the problem of the complexity of morphological searching in Logos stems from having different encoding schemes employed in different resources, and that this is not the fault of Logos. I deal with this in one to two ways: (1) by generally sticking with one encoding scheme consistently so that I know how things are encoded in those resources; and (2) by running a search against all of the multiple resources that I have. Sometimes, however, one search specification/encoding scheme combination produces results that I cannot replicate in another encoding scheme regardless of how I try to specify the search. That is very frustrating.

I am willing to admit that my own relatively recent arrival in the land of Logos is part of my difficulty. However, I have been working with various Bible software packages on various platforms since I first encountered Gramcord back when it was in the developmental stage in the early-to-mid 1980s. In addition to having a doctorate in Old Testament and 20 years experience in teaching Hebrew and Old Testament courses, I have been working with computers since the late 1970s. So I am not a technological novice, nor am I afraid to read manuals or deal with technical matters (and, for that matter, a variety of programming languages).

I think that much of the difficulty may be the result of the lack of clear instructional help. The help system provides very minimal guidance for constructing morphological (and even less for syntax) searches. I have looked at all the on-line video tutorials that I can find on your site, and they only cover the very minimal basics. I bought the two-volume set of training manuals put together by Morris Proctor, but they were very disappointing. Again, they cover the very basics, but there are no examples or help for doing advanced searches. The material at wiki.logos.com is helpful as far as it goes. It just does not go very far beyond the basics either. I really think someone needs to write a good tutorial on morphology searches that includes basic and advanced examples, and that documents in one place all of the keywords and terms (like "lemma:" for example) that can be used, and provide examples for their use. I would write one myself, but I can't find the documentation anywhere that would give me the information to be able to do this.

As someone who is trying to use Logos to teach seminary and graduate students (on the basis of the original languages), I need to be able to help them understand how to search the text in as many ways as possible. I have committed to doing a series of workshops for students in the fall, and I am starting to worry about my ability (or lack thereof in this case) to teach them how to handle these kinds of advanced searches. I would be glad if you could point me to any documentation that would help address this need.

I am sorry for the long entry, but I wanted to explain as much as possible so that you would not have to waste your time trying to figure out exactly what level of information I am looking for.

Thanks for the assistance,

dla

Ryan Schatz

I have a slightly different but related question. I would like to right-click on a word and in addition to selecting the Manuscript and Lemma forms, have a way to select the root word. For example, I want to right click on Torah (ie. law) in Psalms 1:2 and select Root->Yarah->Search this resource. That would be cool.

Can a Logos employee indicate if this is something that can be added as a feature enhancement, or its not even possible?

The problem is that I don't know Hebrew, so I don't know enough to search on hebrew words. I want the tool to return to me the root word (or a list of possible root words). Alternatively, I could open the TWOT, navigate to the root word, right-click and select the Strong's number and search all open resources, then select the NASB to get a list.

I'm trying to understand what the reason is that Logos4 can't make this simpler and more intuitive. Is it fundamentally about how the words are tagged? How does Accordance get it to work?

Thanks,

Ryan

Ben

The problem is that yarah is not a root but a verbal form, YRH is the root. Due to the complexity and ambiguity of Hebrew, it's very difficult to tag by root, which is why no one has really done it (except Accordance, I believe.)

Vincent Setterholm

This is coming. The analysis is done, but I'm fairly sure you won't see it until the next major version release (there's still some work that needs doing to deliver the data in the app/resources).

Ryan Schatz

This is coming. The analysis is done, but I'm fairly sure you won't see it until the next major version release (there's still some work that needs doing to deliver the data in the app/resources).

This is great news! Thanks for the update.

James W Bennett

This is coming. The analysis is done, but I'm fairly sure you won't see it until the next major version release (there's still some work that needs doing to deliver the data in the app/resources).

Please say that this will also apply to Syriac (and Aramaic) !!!

If that were to happen; if we could do root searches (i.e. works were tagged by root); and if Syriac display were fixed I would actually start using L4 again and I would dearly love to be able to go back to using L4. For the type of work I do I have had to re-install L3 and do the majority of my work there and work the best I can in L4 for the resources that are not available in L3.