Verbum Tip 2b: Personal Names special considerations

MJ. Smith · November 2020

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Personal Names special considerations: distinguished by diacritical marks

Verbum Help:

Mark Sensitivity

Terms can be modified to count diacritic marks as significant or not significant for matching. Defaults vary by language. For example, English generally doesn’t have diacritic marks, so by default typing resume will match resume, resumé, and résumé. To override this default, specify a marks matching term modifier into the query.

All languages will support:

• [match marks] — Makes all non-spacing marks significant . . .

• [match nomarks] — Ignores all non-spacing marks, regardless of language defaults

• [match exact] or [match all] — Matches exactly what you type

Languages with capital letters and lowercase letters will support:

• [match case] — Matches sensitive to capital/lowercase letters

Some languages have special mark-matching rules.^{^[1]}

Related to diacritical marks is punctuation. There is an urban legend that the Verbum search ignores punctuation. This is not true. From Bradley Grainger (Faithlife) in the Faithlife Logos Search group:

Intra-word punctuation has always been indexed. "I'd" and "id", or "it's" and "its" have always been indexed separately. (The rules for determining intra-word punctuation vs inter-word punctuation are complex, though. 😀)^{^[2]}

The example is not a personal name. It is simply the example I found given my limited Spanish vocabulary. For this example, I use as my Bible Reina Valera Revisada (1960). 1998. Miami: Sociedades Bı́blicas Unidas.

On the left, the search term is simply the text argument “más”. This yields results of both más and mas.
On the right, the search term has been constrained by the mark sensitivity of [match marks]. This yields results only of más; mas is excluded from the results.

Personal Names special considerations: use of multiple names

In Genesis 1:5, God changed Abram’s name to Abraham. So far, our searches have intentionally only found references to Abram.

From Verbum Help:

Multiple Terms

When a query consists of multiple terms, each term is given a different color in the search results. When typing multiple terms, one may want to match them all (default), any of them, or only some of them.^{^[3]}

Match any of the words

To specify multiple alternatives for a term in the query where any one of the words faith or hope or love appear, there are two choices:

• faith, hope, love — The comma (,) operator denotes a list of alternate query terms to match. (Include a space after each comma or not.)

• faith OR hope OR love — The OR operator denotes alternation between what appears on its left and what appears on its right.

There is a subtle difference between these two choices.

OR is an operator that establishes a relationship between what appears on its left and what appears on its right. A search for faith OR hope OR love is interpreted as something like (faith OR (hope OR love)). The three words are treated as three separate search terms, which can be demonstrated by the fact that each word gets a different color in search results.

The comma will join together different alternatives into a single search term, so searching for faith,hope,love will result in hits of one color.

For this reason faith,hope BEFORE love means that either “faith” or “hope" can appear before “love”, but faith OR hope BEFORE love means to match either “faith” or “hope ... love,” that is, faith OR (hope BEFORE love).^{^[4]}

On the left, the search argument is given in list form “Abram, Abraham). This finds 345 results in 313 verses highlighted in a single color.
On the right, the search argument is given in the logical operator form “Abram OR Abraham”. Again, this finds 345 results in 313 verses highlighted in two colors – orange for Abram, blue for Abraham.

Personal Names special considerations: match in multiple languages

By using a single Bible, the results are limited to English. To illustrate other languages, I am searching “type:Bible lang:(French, German, Italian, Portuguese)”

At the left side show, the search term “Abram” finds results in 10 out of the 25 Bibles. Portuguese is excluded.
Adding Abrão to the search, adds the Portuguese Bibles; Note: adding “abramo” adds the Italian Bible.
The remaining problem? Because I lack the stemming routines for the additional languages, only the grammatical form I enter will be selected.

One can, however, limit a search argument to a single language. What languages can be searched? Bradley Grainger (Faithlife) wrote

"All text in a Logos resource is tagged with its language, so all resources are coded for (foreign) languages.”^{^[5]}

For ISO-639 language codes, see Wikipedia.