Search selection mystery

I am trying to understand inconsistent behavior when I try to search on a phrase in a Bible.

I select the phrase "until now" in Romans 8:22 in the NASB 1995. If I run a search in these three ways, I get a different result

If I select "until now" and select Search from the Selection menu, it creates a Search window with this search: lemma.g:νῦν. In other words, it only searches on the single Greek word meaning "now."
If I select Copy from the Selection menu, and then paste that into a Search window, it pastes "until now" (without quotation marks). This is exactly what I would expect.
If I do the same selection and open the Context menu, then choose Selection and Search This Book, it creates the search criteria I would expect: "until now" (with quotation marks).

Situation 2 and 3 work as I would expect. But situation 1 makes no sense to me. Logos is ignoring my selection and searching on only one Greek lemma from the phrase.

Does anyone know what is happening? It certainly seems like a bug to me.

*Logos 25.0.38 on Windows 10

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Comments

Graham Criddle

Does anyone know what is happening? It certainly seems like a bug to me.

I agree it looks like a bug

The selection menu is intended to run a morph search on the underlying lemma if just one word is selected - but it seems to be doing it (on just the first word) when two are selected.

Wolfgang Schneider

I select the phrase "until now" in Romans 8:22 in the NASB 1995. If I run a search in these three ways, I get a different result

Situation 2 and 3 work as I would expect. But situation 1 makes no sense to me. Logos is ignoring my selection and searching on only one Greek lemma from the phrase.

Does anyone know what is happening? It certainly seems like a bug to me.

What is the goal for your search: (a) Are you searching for the English words "until now" (search for "until now")? or (b) are you searching for the underlying Greek words for "until" and "now" (search for lemma.g:ἄχρι AND lemma.g:νῦν)?

In your situation 1 scenario, one must note that the underlying Greek for "until now" involves 2 words and not one, therefore a search argument needs the lemma for both words.

Andrew Batishko

Since the selection menu lacks the ability to allow you to specific exactly what you want to search for (like the context menu allows), it attempts to do its best to give you something useful.

First of all, it tries to give you the Greek lemma because you have the Prefer Lemmas option turned on in your Program Settings (at the bottom of the Text Display group). Turning that off will make it just use the selected surface text.

Secondly, when checking for lemmas, it ignores articles, conjunctions, particles, and participles. If there is a single lemma with some other part of speech selected, then it will search for the lemma. Otherwise it will search for the surface text phrase.

Graham Criddle

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1258222#Comment_1258222

Thanks Andrew

Really helpful insights, Graham

Harry Hahne

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1258222#Comment_1258222

Since the selection menu lacks the ability to allow you to specific exactly what you want to search for (like the context menu allows), it attempts to do its best to give you something useful.

I would argue that if a person selects a phrase in an English Bible and selects "search", the normal behavior would be to search on the surface English phrase. This is what happens if they select "copy." If they only select a single word, I can see that perhaps using the Greek lemma would be a reasonable behavior, if Prefer Lemmas is on (though I would still prefer using the surface text). But I cannot imagine someone with little or no knowledge of Greek expecting to search on a Greek phrase by selecting an English phrase. But the Selection menu Search command actually did that, I would be OK with it. So, in Romans 8:22, if I select "until now" and I have Prefer Lemma on, then the search should be on the Greek phrase ἄχρι τοῦ νῦν.

But I believe someone working at that level would want to use the Corresponding Selection to find the actual Greek phrase and then search on it. This would not be the casual user who just picks a phrase and selects search.

Secondly, when checking for lemmas, it ignores articles, conjunctions, particles, and participles. If there is a single lemma with some other part of speech selected, then it will search for the lemma. Otherwise it will search for the surface text phrase.

My experimentation suggests that phrase search also ignores prepositions. The problem is that the behavior is inconsistent and unpredictable.

I teach seminary students with how Logos can take them to another level of Bible study, even with little or no knowledge of Greek. I teach them how to look up a Greek word in a lexicon from an English Bible. But I also want them to do very simple, intuitive English language searches, such as for a phrase like "until now". The starting place for searching (lesson one for a class starting tonight) is to search for an English phrase by selecting it in an English Bible. If I have to give a lot of disclaimers, they are going to be confused and find Logos difficult to use.

I believe that that Selection menu should favor surface level copying and searching. The Copy command on the Selection menu copies the surface text. For consistency, the Search command in the same menu should also search the surface text. The program seems much more difficult to use if it shows unpredictable behavior, such as sometimes searching surface text and sometimes searching a single original language word (not even the whole original language phrase). The Selection menu should be easy to use for beginners. It is the place to start. The Context menu takes a user into the depths of the many available tags and is where power users live.

Andrew Batishko

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1258261#Comment_1258261

If you don't want the extra behavior of using the lemma in the event where one "interesting lemma" (where interesting is defined by the part of speech criteria specified), then you will want to turn off the prefer lemma setting. That's entirely why it was created, and it's used for the selection menu and the various clicking behaviors (double and triple clicking).

if I select "until now" and I have Prefer Lemma on, then the search should be on the Greek phrase ἄχρι τοῦ νῦν.

There are significant problems with trying to search a translated text for an original language phrase, making this kind of search undesirable. The key one is the fact that the phrase defines an order, and the order of the original language terms in the translated text will not necessarily match the desired order of the phrase. If you want original language phrase searches, you'll want to do that on an original language resource.

Harry Hahne

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1258264#Comment_1258264

If you don't want the extra behavior of using the lemma in the event where one "interesting lemma" (where interesting is defined by the part of speech criteria specified), then you will want to turn off the prefer lemma setting. That's entirely why it was created, and it's used for the selection menu and the various clicking behaviors (double and triple clicking).

I do want to be able to double click on a word in an English and open a lexicon. That is why I have Prefer Lemmas on.

But I also want to be able to select a phrase in an English Bible and quickly search for it, without going through the extra steps of using the Context menu.

There are significant problems with trying to search a translated text for an original language phrase, making this kind of search undesirable. The key one is the fact that the phrase defines an order, and the order of the original language terms in the translated text will not necessarily match the desired order of the phrase. If you want original language phrase searches, you'll want to do that on an original language resource.

I understand this. This is why I would expect the Search command always to use the English phrase in the Selection menu, just as the Copy command does from the Selection menu. I think most casual Logos users would expect this.