L/V 10+ Tip of the Day #122 Context Menu: word information group: lemma and root

MJ. Smith

Another tip of the day (TOTD) series for Logos/Verbum 10. They will be short and often drawn from forum posts. Feel free to ask questions and/or suggest forum posts you'd like to see included. Adding comments about the behavior on mobile and web apps would be appreciated by your fellow forumites. A search for "L/V 10+ Tip of the Day site:community.logos.com" on Google should bring the tips up as should this Reading List within the application.

This tip is inspired by the forum post: L/V 10+ Tip of the Day #121 Context Menu: word information group: manuscript - Logos Forums

From the help book:

[quote]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.

Logos Help (Bellingham, WA: Faithlife, 2022).

[quote]Root

The root is the core part of a word that gives it meaning.

If words are like houses, then roots are the foundation; they are what lemmas and inflected forms are built upon. For example, in English, words like biology, biography, and antibiotic are all built from the root bio. While each of these words have different meanings, they all, at their core, are concerned with life, which is what the root bio means.

Logos Help (Bellingham, WA: Faithlife, 2022).

Lemma, i.e. the word you look up in the dictionary, is what lexicons and dictionaries use for lookups. It is also how the word is normally referenced in commentaries, journal articles, and other literature. It follows, then, that lemmas provide the most information and are used for word studies, etc. When one selects the lemma tab on the left side of the Context menu, among the actions offered on the right are:

• Go to the Factbook entry for the lemma
• Search for the lemma - the morphology system will be selected automatically to match the system of the book you are in
• Look up the lemma in your lexicons - the top five in the priority list that have an entry for the lemma

Root is more restricted. Of the three options mentioned for lemma, the Search option is the only one appearing for roots.

The link from lemma to Factbook serves primarily as a link to the Lexham Research Lexicons and Factbook tags to lexicons, apparatuses, and related resources.

In the search I discovered and reported errors in the tagging of the lemma so I have changed the example word. Note the root should always have a count of results equal to or greater than the count for the lemma. The root should have all the results for the lemma plus the results from other lemmas that share the root.

For the lemma, the lookup feature is a quick way to get to appropriate lexicons. I tend to simply use hover unless I see that I need further information.