Verbum Search through Tip of the Day #18

MJ. Smith

Tip 18: Factbook Biblical Person: Lemmas

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While the Referred To As section presents the references in English (or other target language), the Lemma section presents the references in the original language i.e. Hebrew/Aramaic for the Masoretic Old Testament; Greek for the Septuagint Old Testament and New Testament.

Note I would like to see this section expanded to treat the Vulgate and the Peshitta as it treats the Septuagint. That would give us an equal treatment of the four major streams of Bible texts.

From Verbum Help:

[quote]

Lemmas —  List of the original language words the entity is mentioned by, in Hebrew, Greek, or Aramaic as relevant.^[1]

Lemma

A "lemma" is the form of a word that is listed in the heading of a dictionary or lexicon entry. A single lemma may stand in for multiple forms of a word. For example, in English, the dictionary entry for the cluster of words run, runs, ran, or running is typically listed under the dictionary as run, so run is the lemma.^[2]

 

• The lemmas are sorted by language – Hebrew (1) and Greek (2) – and alphabetically within the language.
• The heading for each lemma contains: (3) an expand/contract arrowhead, a lemma icon, the lemma in the original language, a transliteration of the lemma, a microphone icon for the pronunciation, an English gloss, and (4) a sparkline.
• When needed a “more” (5) expands the list to show more lemmas.

The detail line can be expanded. The Bible references and text behave as they do in the “Referred To As” section. On the detail heading line:

• The arrowhead indicates expand/collapse.
• The lemma icon and the lemma in the Hebrew script display an information card on mouse over. Note that the counts on the information card are one less than the Search below and two less than the entry header sparkline.
• Clicking on the speaker icon provides the pronunciation. You may need to turn your sound on to prove this.
• The sparkline behaves as discussed in the previous post on “Referred To As”.

The Lemmas section diverges from the Referred To As section, is on right click (1) which opens the context menu.

• Select the Lemma entry (2) on the left.
• Select the Search on all Resources (3)
  
  We see a search argument (A) that is a new datatype … the sort of cryptic encoded datatype that frighten users away from the Search. But note one uses the context menu to build the datatype. One needs to recognize the datatype, not remember how to build it.
  <Lemma = lbs/he/אַבְרָם>
  the < > indicates a datatype
  Lemma indicates the datatype name
  = is the operator which defines the matching precision
  lbs indicates the morphology code conventions are for Logos morphology
  he indicates the language is Hebrew
  אַבְרָם is the lemma in Hebrew
  Our results include Bibles in any language that have a reverse interlinear (B), lexicons containing an entry for the lemma (C), and resources in Hebrew containing the lemma (D).
  Note: One does not need to set “match all word forms”; that is inherent in search for a lemma. In addition, as this search is dependent upon the Faithlife tagging of the lemmas, it is more accurate than the running of a computer algorithm as is done for “match all word forms”.
• The Look up function (4) opens the highest priority lexicon that contains the selected lemma. I have chosen to highlight Brown, Francis, Samuel Rolles Driver, and Charles Augustus Briggs. 1977. Enhanced Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon.
  
• The copy reference function has a search option (5) which places “<Lemma ~ lbs/he/אַבְרָם>” in the clipboard for the user to paste in searches as appropriate. We will discuss the operator ~ vs. = in a later post.

A second place where the Lemmas section diverges from the Referred To As section, is clicking on the lemma opens a Bible Word Study Guide. This will be discussed in detail for the more language-oriented user before we return to Factbook.

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^[1] Verbum Help (Bellingham, WA: Faithlife, 2018).

^[2] Logos Help (Bellingham, WA: Faithlife, 2018).