You may have seen today's blog post by Morris Proctor. He advises the following rule for a collection of all Greek lexicons:
type:lexicon AND title:(Greek,new)
I think it's helpful to set up such collections, but was sceptical when I looked at his rules. Also I wondered whether I had an existing collection rule to this end: yes there it was. Maybe I snatched it from the wiki or some forum discussion way back.
Putting the Morris-rule collection tab in one window and the library showing my old collection I compared them side by side.
Going by the titles will include false positives such as a lexicon to the Syriac New Testament or the Vulgate New Testament (which are not Greek, but Syriac and Latin lexicons).
And, much worse, Morris' rule will miss the popular and for users with smaller libraries probably relevant
- Enhanced Strong's Lexicon
- Kassuehlke's "Kleines Wörterbuch" (okay, it's Greek-German only)
- Lexham Analytical Lexicon to the Septuagint
Okay, using the Plus and Minus features of collections may get us where we want, which means I can manipulate Morris' collection so that it resembles line by line my old one. But then we could build our collection according to a different rule in the firstplace: type:lexicon subject:greek
Going by subject rather by title would be the point in having subjects at all. And I found that my old collection had some legacy minus entries for arabic, aramaic and syriac resources which I could remove since they no longer yield false positives.
So it seems, Logos metadata for lexicons today are more reliable for such a collection than going by titles. Since there was no former collection for Hebrew, I went on to put this theory to test:
left, the Morris-rule collection type:lexicon AND title:(Hebrew,old)
right, my library filtered for type:lex subject:hebrew
Going by the titles will again include false positives such as Swansons Aramaic lexicon to the Old Testament.
And, much worse, Morris' rule will again miss the popular and/or relevant resources
- Enhanced Strong's Lexicon
- Bosman et al's "Kleines Wörterbuch" (and, it's Hebrew/Aramaic-English, too!)
- Jastrow's Dictionary to the Targumin
The subject tagging obviously rules! But are these collections complete?
I went on and created collections for Arabic, Aramaic, Syriac and Latin, too.
Now I can check:
Metadata are incomplete for one Homeric Greek lexicon (not found via the subject or the title rule) and for one Latin one (Lewis' Elementary Dictionary which came with Perseus and is not to be confused with Lewis&Short). However, I'm glad this showed a decent quality of subject tagging in the lexicons.
Of course, my results are subject to the content of my library - yours may vary.
