Dataset Updates: Tuesday, March 3, 2020
The following datasets are scheduled to be updated today, March 3, 2020:
Datasets
- Bible Sense Lexicon: Some unattested senses were removed.
If this update is not published today (March 3, 2020) I'll update this post.
Rick Brannan
Data Wrangler, Faithlife
My books in print
Comments
-
Unattested in what corpus? Shouldn't FL be expanding the corpus not shrinking the lexicon? Yes, I think language support should include everything ever considered canonical by any groups. And doesn't deleting them force the user into "Logos think"?
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
0 -
In this case, "unattested" means not annotated in the Lexham Hebrew Bible or SBL Greek New Testament. I would also emphasize the word some in this scenario. Some unannotated senses remain, especially if they were seen as useful for the navigation of the hierarchy. Other unannotated senses were removed if they were deemed as too similar to other senses or generally not useful.
The goal behind this was usability. In the forums, it has sometimes been a frustration to users that they click on a sense in a dropdown only to find it is annotated with no occurrences. Dead end. So, this was part of an attempt to declutter the dropdown and make it easier for users to find what they are looking for.
I can at least offer that it was not the intention in making these changes to force users into "Logos think". For example, in the Bible Word Study guide the senses section comes below the glosses section. Certainly the BSL makes decisions about meanings, but hopefully by also looking in places like the glosses section users can recognize that these decisions are one set among many. HALOT, BDB, BDAG, and Louw-Nida all make their decisions. Perhaps they have better ways of communicating: this is only a possible meaning in this context. But, every lexicon at some level has to say: this word means this here and that there.
0 -
Perhaps they have better ways of communicating: this is only a possible meaning in this context. But, every lexicon at some level has to say: this word means this here and that there.
Unfortunately, this is the polar opposite of what I was taught studying South Asian languages. And I would argue strenuously that meanings outside the Bible corpus are essential to understanding the nuances within the Bible corpus. But I very much appreciate your explanation as it tells me a great deal about when and how I should use the tool.
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
0 -
Regarding MJ's reference to "meanings outside the Bible corpus": The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew does this in what the authors think was the "complete" corpus of "Classical Hebrew" and the Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek attempts to give an overview the that "complete" corpus (certainly more contemporary for us and also, I think, more satisfactorily than Liddell, Scott, Jones, McKenzie).
0 -
-
Accuracy and reliability may be more important than breadth of corpus. Judicious choices inspire more confidence than breadth which may include unhelpful or non-biblical meanings. I favor FL's choices.
0 -
MJ. Smith said:
And I would argue strenuously that meanings outside the Bible corpus are essential to understanding the nuances within the Bible corpus. But I very much appreciate your explanation as it tells me a great deal about when and how I should use the tool.
GaoLu said:Accuracy and reliability may be more important than breadth of corpus. Judicious choices inspire more confidence than breadth which may include unhelpful or non-biblical meanings. I favor FL's choices.
In which, we end up where I thought from the start. Bible Sense is a Logos Sense.
"If myth is ideology in narrative form, then scholarship is myth with footnotes." B. Lincolm 1999.
0 -
Just to be clear, there are a couple of separate issues here only one of which is related to the original post: the issue of the removal of unattested senses. So, I'll try to limit my comments to that. I'm not sure that I was clear about this, but the removal of unattested senses here has nothing to do with the issue of corpus.
In the process of developing the Bible Sense Lexicon, we first generated senses based on current lexica such as DBL Hebrew, BDB, HALOT, BDAG, Louw-Nida, etc. In essence, we over-generated senses, so that we would not have to stop as often during the annotation process to create new senses. Some senses were close enough to others to be merged. For others, we took the reading of one lexicon or set of translations over another. But essentially, these unattested senses are no longer included in the Bible Sense Lexicon in the same way that HALOT doesn't include every gloss from BDB, BDB doesn't include every gloss from Gesenius, and so on.
None of the senses that were removed were created because they were attested in some other corpus and then someone decided we weren't going to annotate that corpus. From the outset, the annotation of the Bible Sense Lexicon was done on the Lexham Hebrew Bible and SBL Greek New Testament.
As a Roman Catholic who worked on the annotation of this resource, I'm sympathetic to the issue of corpus, but even in spite of that sympathy, I can say that the removal of unattested senses here is unrelated to corpus. In reality, one can want both for the lexicon in its current state to be shrunk to be made more usable by having cruft removed and for the corpus underlying the lexicon to be expanded for it to be made more usable. But, the appropriate place for that second part of the equation might be on its own thread.
0 -
I'm not averse to what the BSL presumes to be. It's just not useful (as defined) as to what speakers/listeners/readers choices might be, when they encountered a word in the hebrew (not much anyway), or greek (quite a wide selection). It sounds like this thread expressed an earlier collecting process, cleaned up. But also, what BSL doesn't propose to answer (available sense choices as a hebrew or greek writer/reader).
"If myth is ideology in narrative form, then scholarship is myth with footnotes." B. Lincolm 1999.
0 -
If a user wants to make sense decisions of their own based on the Bible Sense Lexicon, it is possible to see a range of possible senses for lemmas (nouns, verbs, adjective, and some adverbs) in the Lexham Hebrew Bible or SBL Greek New Testament by looking at the senses section of the Bible Word Study guide, which resembles more closely a traditional lexical entry in more familiar lexical resources.
0 -
which resembles more closely a traditional lexical entry in more familiar lexical resources.
Thank you Jeremy. The following is not a complaint against Faithlife but rather an attempt to explain the use of the semantic web. The whole purpose of a semantic web is to bypass the limitations of a lexicons/dictionaries by showing the word in relationship to other words e.g.
- a kind of
- a part of
- a way of
- a synonym for
- an antonym for . . .
The more words that are shown in the domain and the more relationships noted, the better one can learn the nuances of the word. There is no reason to have the BSL in a web (limited to hierarchy in FL) form if it provides only the same information as a lexicon but in a different format. I strongly want Logos/Verbum to be a tool NOT to be a reservoir of pre-canned answers. And if you really want to see my prejudices, I consider studying based on pre-canned answers to be play-study to ensure that you not be challenged by new information.
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
0
