... so here's a basic question:
What's a "lemma"?
Thanks!
Ignorantly yours,
Carmen
... so here's a basic question: What's a "lemma"? Thanks! Ignorantly yours, Carmen
The best way I have heard to define "Lemma" is that it is the dictionary form or root word. For example, look up the word "run" in a standard english dictionary and look at how many forms (run, running, ran, etc) of the word we have, combined with all the different meanings of the word. Yet the word run is still the root or lemma.
Hi Carmen,
A lemma is simply the dictionary form of the word in the original language. If in English you wanted to look up "running" in the dictionary, you would lookup "run". That would be the English lemma for run, ran, running etc. I hope this helps. If you want a more detailed answer, let me know, or just wait and I am sure a few additional responses will be posted.
It's NOT a small furry creature that enjoys base jumping [:)]
Languages like Greek are inflected - the endings (and sometimes the beginnings) of each word change according to its usage in the sentence.
For example the greek word logos (meaning: word) is the subject of a sentence whereas logon (same meaning - word) is the object of the sentence. Rather than list all the possible variants of each word, most lexicons list the lemma - which in this case would be logos.
There are various arbitrary rules concerning which variant of the same word becomes the lemma. For nouns of the second declension, such as logos, the lemma is the nominative (subject) singular.
When looking Greek words up in a lexicon, one has to determine the lemma in order to find the word. Here Logos (the program) makes it utterly simple - it 'knows' what the lemma of each word is and takes you to the right place in the lexicon.
The wikipedia has more on this here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemma_%28linguistics%29
EDIT - looks like the others beat me to it!
Nice response, Andy.
In Hebrew the issue is more complicated because Hebrew has so many words that have the same consonants but different vowel pointing (think of English with r_d and the number of words that those two consonants can form when in that order, changed only by the vowels: rid, red, rod, Rod (name), ride, rode, and so on) . A Hebrew Lexicon which is ordered only by consonants and not vowels can be confusing to a person who hasn't run into this issue. Logos, however, has simplified the discovery of the correct lexical entry for us. See: http://www.logos.com/support/lbs/hebrewhomographs This means that the lemma Logos points us to is the correct one for the context in which the consonantal form appears.
I know that's more than you asked for, but it helps us appreciate how much is 'under the hood' as we use Logos.
