How do I look up an English word in Aramaic?

shark tacos
shark tacos Member Posts: 223 ✭✭
edited November 20 in English Forum

How do I look up an English word in Aramaic?

Seems strait forward enough, but I can't seem to figure it out. I tried the word study, but it does not give me any aramaic results. I tried searching in my Swanson's Aramaic lexicon but it does not let me search for English words. I even tried finding the word in Hebrew and then looking up the corresponding number systems in Aramaic, but none of them matched.

Can anyone help me? Surely this must be possible and I'm just missing it.

Comments

  • Dave Hooton
    Dave Hooton MVP Posts: 35,773

    How do I look up an English word in Aramaic?

    Perform a Basic Search of Swanson's Aramaic Lexicon. It allows a search for a gloss, so you would use a term like gloss:another to find the Aramaic word for "another".  Note that gloss with the colon is needed because it is a text field (as opposed to a data type). You can search all Swanson's lexicons this way.

    To see what Fields and data types are available to search just look at Help | About this resource.

    If you want to search an OT bible for an Aramaic word you must specify the language e.g. with the Aramaic for "tree"

    {x-arc}אִילָן{/}

    Dave
    ===

    Windows 11 & Android 13

  • shark tacos
    shark tacos Member Posts: 223 ✭✭

    Thanks Dave you rock! [Y]

    Two follow-up questions:

    1) Where can I learn more about  search terms like "gloss:" and others? I don't recall seeing that in the manual...

    2) Along a similar line: is there a way to find what the Aramaic equivalent of a Hebrew word would be?

    I tried opening Swanson's Hebrew lexicon side by side with the Hebrew one and linking them, cross-checking the GK numbers TWOT numbers, etc. Nothing matched.
    I'm suspecting that the Swanson's Aramaic lexicon is only containing a few words, (as in only the words that appear in the OT books written in Aramaic) and so I am thus not finding parallels. Could that be the problem? Is there a more exhaustive Aramaic lexicon I should use instead?

  • Dave Hooton
    Dave Hooton MVP Posts: 35,773

    1) Where can I learn more about  search terms like "gloss:" and others? I don't recall seeing that in the manual...

    Open your resource and then go to About this resource on the Help menu! The listed Search Capabilities vary from resource to resource.

    Press the Help button in Basic Search and under the Content heading of Searching select Advanced Searching. You will find topics on Field Searching and Data Type searching. The About tells you what fields and data types are available.

    2) Along a similar line: is there a way to find what the Aramaic equivalent of a Hebrew word would be?

    In Swanson's DBL Aramaic for GK10236 you will find a reference for DBLHebr 2402 . Click it to open the DBL Hebrew resource. Unfortunately, you can't do the reverse (what you are after). But the About for DBL Aramaic shows we can search for a Hebrew GK number and that the data type is HebrewGK or HGK. So we can search for HGK2402 with:

    HGK=2402

    This will return GK10236, as we had hoped it would! You will get no results if there is no Aramaic equivalent. You can search for a range with:

    HGK in "2445-2450"



    The GK numbers do not match as Hebrew ranges from 1 to 9999 and Aramaic starts at 10000.

     

    Dave
    ===

    Windows 11 & Android 13