Verbum Tip 4l: Bible Browser: Senses part 1

MJ. Smith
MJ. Smith MVP Posts: 53,861
edited November 2024 in English Forum

Docx files for personal book: Verbum 9 part 1How to use the Verbum Lectionary and Missal

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Note: this is divided into two parts not because of length but because the Bible Sense Lexicon and the Search sections require learning a fair amount of new material.

Facet: Senses

Dataset

DB:Word-Senses

Documentation

Thompson, Jeremy. 2015. Bible Sense Lexicon: Dataset Documentation. Bellingham, WA: Faithlife.

Blogs on the use:

•  “Specialize Your Searches with the Bible Sense Lexicon” (Jeremy Thompson)

•  “Find the Right Meaning with the Bible Sense Lexicon” (Jeremy Thompson)

•  “Logos 5: Locate Biblical Occurrences of a Sense” (Morris Proctor)

•  “How to Do Smarter Word Studies” (David Witthoff)

•  “Logos 5: Sense in Word by Word” (Morris Proctor)[1]

 

Series on example uses: Sense of the Day: Using the Bible Sense Lexicon

Basic definitions:

This glossary is a bit broader than that provided in Thompson, Jeremy. 2015. Bible Sense Lexicon: Dataset Documentation. Bellingham, WA: Faithlife. It comes from the glossary of the official WordNet website. This list is chosen based on my finding them to be useful and/or their use in the Verbum Biblical Sense Lexicon.

  • Coordinate
    • Coordinate terms are nouns or verbs that have the same hypernym .
  • Derivationally related forms
    • Terms in different syntactic categories that have the same root form and are semantically related.
  • Entailment
    • A verb entails if cannot be done unless is, or has been, done.
  • Holonym
    • The name of the whole of which the meronym names a part. is a holonym of if is a part of .
  • Hypernym aka superordinate
    • The generic term used to designate a whole class of specific instances. is a hypernym of if is a (kind of) Y.
  • Hyponym aka subordinate
    • The specific term used to designate a member of a class. is a hyponym of if is a (kind of) Y.
  • Instance
    • A proper noun that refers to a particular, unique referent (as distinguished from nouns that refer to classes). This is a specific form of hyponym.
  • Meronym
    • The name of a constituent part of, the substance of, or a member of something. is a meronym of if is a part of Y.
  • Pertainym
    • A relational adjective. Adjectives that are pertainyms are usually defined by such phrases as "of or pertaining to" and do not have antonyms. A pertainym can point to a noun or another pertainym.
  • Synset / synonym
    • A synonym set; a set of words that are interchangeable in some context without changing the truth value of the preposition in which they are embedded.
  • Troponym
    • A verb expressing a specific manner elaboration of another verb. is a troponym of if to X is to Y in some manner.[2]

Bible Browser

From Verbum Help on Bible sense lexicon:

[quote]A sense is a basic unit of meaning. A given lemma (dictionary form of a word) will have one or more senses, one for each basic meaning of the word. A given sense may span across several lemmas.

For example, the sense "to shudder" is a sense of the Greek lemmas tremō, phrissō, and seiō. The Bible Sense Lexicon reveals all three of these Greek lemmas, alerting users to the different connotations of the words that can be translated as "to shudder."

Senses in the Bible Sense Lexicon are related to one another in various ways. For example, the type of relationship expresses the fact that an asp is a type of snake which is in turn a type of reptile, a type of small moving thing, a type of swarming thing, a type of animal, a type of living thing. Other relationships are also expressed (see below).[3]


When you select a sense such as “tent,” you are asking for all words (synonyms) that have the meaning “tent” in context.

  • Entering tent in the find box (1) opens several possible facets
  • Select tent under the facet Senses (2)

It is usually worth the time to read through the results to understand why the sense was assigned. Occasionally you will find a real clash between the sense and the translation. This is because the senses were assigned in the original language text not in each translation. This indicates that considering the underlying text variants, the bias of the translators, etc. might be useful.

Interactive / Tool

Senses has no interactive but the Bible Sense Lexicon tool more than fulfills the function.

Note I have questioned the placement of “court (royal)”  in the forums. DATA BUG: In what sense is a courtyard or palace a tent?

From Verbum Help:

[quote]

•   The sense label, part of speech, and a definition

•   A  graph showing the frequency of the sense’s usage throughout the Bible, organized by book. The number of occurrences is displayed to the left of the graph.

•   The Lemmas section lists the original language words associated with the displayed sense, ordered from most frequent to least. Clicking a lemma opens a Bible Word Study for that lemma.

•   Hovering over a verse reference will display the full verse in a tooltip.

•   The Relationships section categorizes how the current sense relates to other senses. The + icon appears when there are other senses connected to the one displayed. Non-biblical senses are italicized.

•   Type of denotes the top-down hierarchical relationship for the current sense, e.g. “person” is a type of “living thing”

•   Derived/Derived from lists senses that are derived from similar senses, such as one sense causing another. For example, “to destroy (damage)” is derived from “to be destroyed”

•   Similar to lists adjective senses that are semantically similar. For instance, “dark” is similar to “gloomy”

•   Pertains to connects semantically similar senses regardless of part of speech. For example, “sacrifice” pertains to “sacrificial”

•   Antonyms list senses that have the opposite meaning of the current sense. For instance, “heavy (weight)”  is an antonym of “light”

  • The See Also section contains links to related Factbook entries, Topic Guides, and Louw-Nida numbers. Clicking the Louw-Nida link will open to that number (or range).[4]

 

The Visualization pane illustrates the Type of hierarchy from the Relationships section in the left pane.

•   Click a “filled in” circle to expand or collapse the list of more specific senses.

•   The word in bold is the current sense; this will be expanded by default.

•   Click Actual Size next to the Navigation box to zoom in (drag to pan the image around), or Fit to scale the visualization to the panel size.[5]

See the Search section below for the effect of the hierarchy on the <sense nnnn> search.



[1] Jeremy Thompson, Bible Sense Lexicon: Dataset Documentation (Bellingham, WA: Faithlife, 2015).

[2] Select entries from wngloss(7WN) | WordNet (princeton.edu) accessed 11/27/2020 1:13 AM

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

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

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

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