L/V 10+ Tip of the Day #138 Context Menu: word information group: Strong's & Louw-Nida

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 #123 Context Menu: word information group: morphology - Logos Forums

Strong's numbers are a clever solution to a problem that computer solve more flexibly. Within Logos/Verbum the behave in the same manner as Louw-Nida and are best thought of as a way to access lemma information without using the lemma data. They cover the KJV i.e. Textus Receptus rather than a critical edition of the texts. If you have a long history of using them, they are useful to have in Logos/Verbum; if you do not habitually use them, ignore them.

GK (Goodrick-Kohlenberger) numbers, a variant of Louw-Nida number, do not appear in the Context Menu but are indexed for some resources, e.g. Swanson, James. Dictionary of Biblical Languages with Semantic Domains: Greek (New Testament). Oak Harbor: Logos Research Systems, Inc., 1997. I do not understand why the use of semantic domains appears to have "not caught on" in Hebrew/Aramaic studies.

Semantic domains is a way of viewing words that explains why if you are reading an accounting article you will give a different meaning to "net" than if you were reading a tennis article. Or why "bat" in a sports article means something different than it does in a flying mammal article. Louw-Nida number classify words by the semantic domain(s) they belong to. This is very useful for searching for a group of related words - related by being used in the same semantic domain.

1. Select word and right-click to open Context Menu
2. Select Louw-Nida number on the tab side (left)
3. Select a search on the action side (right)

The results for this example are not particularly interesting as they all use the translation "prophet".

Using wilderness in verse 4 provides more useful information as it has multiple translations in English:

So what does the magic number of prophet LN 53.79 mean?  To answer that question:

1. Select "prophet" and right click to open Context Menu
2. Select Louw-Nida entry on the tab side (left)
3. Select Look up Louw-Nida on the action side (right)

This shows the following classification:

Religious activities > Roles and functions > one who proclaims inspired utterances on behalf of God—‘prophet, inspired preacher.’  from Johannes P. Louw and Eugene Albert Nida, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament: Based on Semantic Domains (New York: United Bible Societies, 1996), 542.

If you play with the LN search, you will discover that you can use a range of values as well as a specific value.