nav[aria-label="Primary Navigation"] { padding: 0; & ul { list-style: none; width: 100%; display: flex; flex-direction: row; justify-content: start; align-items: start; gap: 30px; padding: 0; & li { margin: 0; } & ul li { list-style: none; } } }

Searching for grammatical "anomalies"

Ron

Anybody know of a way that I can search for grammatical "anomalies"? In other words, cases where (for example) the gender-neutral pneuma is treated as masculine (being referred to with "He" or "His") or where the plural Elohim is treated singularly (again, being referred to with "He" or "His"), etc. Is this type of search possible?

Find more posts tagged with

Comments

Fred Chapman

Anybody know of a way that I can search for grammatical "anomalies"? In other words, cases where (for example) the gender-neutral pneuma is treated as masculine (being referred to with "He" or "His") or where the plural Elohim is treated singularly (again, being referred to with "He" or "His"), etc. Is this type of search possible?

That sounds like something that could be done easily with a Syntax search. Can you an example verse or passage that could be used as a benchmark?

Ron

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/128847#Comment_128847

Well, in the case of Elohim, Genesis 1:5 is one example: "And God (Elohim) called the light day, and the darkness he called night." He implies singularity despite the plurality of Elohim.

In the case of pneuma, in the Upper Room discourse, there is alternation back and forth between a gender neutral noun (pneuma) and gender specific pronouns (ekeinos, autos) as well as gender specific nouns (parakletos). John 14:16-17 and John 14:26 are just a couple of examples in this passage.

Does that help?

In the case of the Holy Spirit example, I'm specifically trying to determine if there is any case in scripture where a gender-neutral noun is treated as a masculine aside from references to the Holy Spirit. Once I started thinking about that though, I thought it would be useful to be able to search for these "grammar discrepancies" more broadly than just that narrow case.

Dave Hooton

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/128883#Comment_128883

In the case of the Holy Spirit example, I'm specifically trying to determine if there is any case in scripture where a gender-neutral noun is treated as a masculine aside from references to the Holy Spirit. Once I started thinking about that though, I thought it would be useful to be able to search for these "grammar discrepancies" more broadly than just that narrow case.

In the narrow case you can use a Bible/Basic search like <lemma = lbs/el/πνεῦμα> WITHIN 2-4 word (he, him, his, it)

which will find "Holy Spirit" within 2 to 4 words of he, him, his or it in a Reverse Interlinear. In Basic Search use the drop-down Field "Bible Text" rather than "All Text" (provided you have 4.0c). The search finds John 14:17 in the NLT RI, but nothing for 14:26.

In the broader case you use <lbs-morph+el ~ N??N?> instead of <lemma = lbs/el/πνεῦμα> but I doubt the c. 10,000 results is worthwhile unless you narrow the range to a book like John (c. 1, 100) --> the numbers come from a collection of RI's.

I don't know if you wanted to look at it that way but you can use the technique in a Greek bible to look at proximity between between a gender neutral noun (pneuma) and gender specific pronouns
(ekeinos, autos) as well as gender specific nouns (parakletos). You would use the Basic Search because it will find occurrences that span verses (Bible Search looks within a single verse).

Fred Chapman

Anybody know of a way that I can search for grammatical "anomalies"? In other words, cases where (for example) the gender-neutral pneuma is treated as masculine (being referred to with "He" or "His") or where the plural Elohim is treated singularly (again, being referred to with "He" or "His"), etc. Is this type of search possible?

I had to work last night so I did not get a chance to look at this until this morning. I am not sure if this is what you are looking for, but I think it gets you closer. Try running the search shown below. I get 1,064 hits from it. I see what you mean about the manuscript text being written in the plural form, yet it is viewed as singular. The AFAT has morph tags indicating it is singular but "diety" seems to catch only those references to "the true God". I did not go through all of the results (just quickly scanned them.)

Fred Chapman

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/129157#Comment_129157

Ron,

I played with Elohim in Gen 1.1 a little more and I think I found a better way to find what you are looking for. If you have the Lexham Hebrew-English Interlinear

Open that resource to Gen 1.1 (or any other passage that contains your word)
Right click on the word
Make sure "selection is clicked on the RHS
Then click search this resource

I used the analysis format in the search window to insure it only returned those instances of the word that matched the text in 1.1

It returned 679 results in 634 verses. I am no Hebrew expert (in fact I am probably not even a good student) but this appears to give you the information you are looking for. I assumed the syntax search from the clause analysis would be the best way to find this, but this may be better. I just like playing with Syntax graphs.[:D]

Fred Chapman

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/129273#Comment_129273

I played with the other part of your question regarding neuter gender nouns that are treated as gender specific. In addition to what Dave suggested above I just did a simple morph search of NNSN (noun, nominative, singular, neuter) which is the morphology of Spirit found in John 14:26, and it returned 674 hits in the ESV. As with the previous search if you use the Analysis feature in the search window you get the result plus the text just prior to and just after the noun you have searched for. There are many instances of this morphology applied to words like girl, he, son, etc. If you expand that search to all nouns in the neuter gender (and no other parameters) it returns over 4800 hits in the ESV.

One of the benefits on the analysis format I like is that the results can be exported to an Excel spreadsheet. In Excel you can apply a data filter to the results column and then select or deselect the list of words found in that column. This is a good way to select just those words that appear to masculine.

You can sort the actual search results alphabetically by clicking the results column tab. This helps if you are looking for a specific word(s)

Hope this helps

MJ. Smith

Anybody know of a way that I can search for grammatical "anomalies"?

I kept waiting for someone to state the obvious. The definition of grammatical rules is required before one can consider anomalies. Which brings up a more interesting question - how does one distinguish between:

grammatical anomalies
incomplete grammar
textual corruptions

Fred Chapman

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/129453#Comment_129453

Anybody know of a way that I can search for grammatical "anomalies"?

I kept waiting for someone to state the obvious. The definition of grammatical rules is required before one can consider anomalies. Which brings up a more interesting question - how does one distinguish between:

grammatical anomalies

incomplete grammar

textual corruptions

I was not completely clear when I read the orginal post (and I may still not understand exactly what Ron is looking for); but based on his clarification (in the second post) I think I have a better understanding of what he meant by that title in the post. I agree, the title of the post and the orginal could a imply a number of options. I hope that the responses give him the help he is looking for; or at least allow him to go in the right direction.

I enjoy these types of posts, because it gives me the opportunity to learn more about the tootls in L4. They sometimes result in me asking questions regarding scripture I might not otherwise think about or ask.

Ron

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/129455#Comment_129455

Hi Dave, Fred, and MJ,

Sorry, I've been out of town without much chance to get online. Thanks for all the replies and suggestions. I haven't been able to take a look yet, but it seems they should do just what I'm looking for...and yes, you did correctly understand what I was trying to do.

Regarding MJ's statement, that doesn't really matter to me at this point because I'm not looking for anything incredibly specific, just looking at broad generalities at this point. I had a question about how grammar is often used when dealing with God (in one case) and the Holy Spirit specifically (in another) and wanted to konw if there was a way to find what I was looking for with Logos. It looks like there is.

Thanks again, I'll give this a try first chance I get to open up Logos.

In Christ,

Ron