What about the graphical query?

This is true, there is no plan to reintroduce graphical queries at this stage. The morphologial search (like all the other searches) takes advantage of a more sophisticated textual search engine using operators like AND, OR, NOT, BEFORE 2 WORDS etc. You can type greek or hebrew by entering g: or h: and typing phonetically. Morphological information is entered with @, this can be attached to a lemma, or just by itself.

For an entirely arbitrary example:

"typing: (g:en BEFORE 3 words g:christos@NDS) OR (g:en before 3 words g:theos@NDS)" will result in:

(lemma:ἐν BEFORE 3 words lemma:Χριστός@NDS) OR (lemma:ἐν BEFORE 3 words lemma:θεός@NDS)

It's quite neat, but it is taking a while to get used to the syntax of the search queries; any of the beta crowd remember other operators you can use here?

SamuelCooperFranklinSmith said:

What does the "EDIT" mean?

It means he "edited" his post after initially posting it to add the following information.

Rick,

Thanks for the detailed information about the databases. That's very helpful! I have a question about the g: and h: thing.

Rick Brannan said:

Note that if you're in Windows, you can skip the whole g: or h: thing and just type Unicode if you want. All you need is a Unicode keyboard installed. I do this often; I have ALT+SHIFT set up as a hotkey to cycle available Unicode keyboards.

I normally use the logos keyboards to type, but have become fond of g: h: and lemma:. However, there is still a problem using h: or lemma: for words starting with aleph and ayin. Using ' and " doesn't work for anything more than 1 letter, and trying to start with the vowel sound gives inconsistent results. I was wondering if this was being worked on. It's not a big deal, but would be nice.

David B Phillips said:

I am most used to Opentext.org, but there is a new database in 4.0, Cascadia. Mike Aubrey (who is getting his PhD in all this stuff, or something like that. He's really smart and syntax savvy) is pretty excited about the Cascadia resource (http://evepheso.wordpress.com/2009/11/02/logos-4-is-finally-here/). I haven't used it much yet.

You're making me blush. I'm actually currently an MA student in linguistics right now (and have been for too long now...). I had considered aiming for beginning a PhD program fall 2010, but that's been put on hold for now -- though Greek syntax & syntax databases like these are very much the stuff that I'm specifically dealing with in my thesis.

@Samuel:

The strength of Lexham is more in it's Expansion and Annotations than it is in it's graphs with have very little structure. Generally, it's very, very Wallace-esque (which you may or may not think is a bad thing). The lack of structure in the graphs themselves can make it difficult to find a given syntactic construction.

Opentext.org has it's strengths & weakeness too. It's strength is probably it's simplicity. It uses only a few labels for everything. This is also a weakness if you want to find something more detailed - i.e. it makes no distinction between direct and indirect objects; they're all complements. And in terms of the structure of Greek, it often feels as if the labels aren't necessarily related to how Greek works in and of itself: e.g. the adjectival relations such as relator, specifier, qualifier, etc. have not semantic (meaningful) basis in the language itself, which makes it kind of arbitrary. Opentext is also rather inconsistent at times in it's annotations and some of it's inconsistencies are rather silly.

Cascadia is awesome. It's a much more precise database and it has a closer relationship to how Greek actually works as a language than the others. You can ask more specific questions of the Greek text than you could with Opentext, and yes, as Rick said, it's much more accessible in terms of terminology. What's also very cool is the fact that morphological data isn't only stored at the word level like it is in Opentext, which means that you can enter morphological preferences for entire phrases or even Grammatical relations (Subject, Object, etc.). That makes doing searches that require morphology significantly easier and faster to make than before. And like Rick, it has also become my first choice syntax database.

As for Hebrew, you'll want to look at the Andersen-Forbes Phrase Marker analysis. It's complex, but also very cool. And there's another syntax database for the OT in SESB collection, which I don't have...

I am very excited about the potential with all the development with the syntactical databases.

However, it is a concern that search capabilities on good old fashioned morphologically tagged databases have been curtailed.

I'm not sure that these resources are a sufficient substitute for the functionality that the graphical query provided for searching morphologically tagged texts.

The biggest problem, in my view, is that the new databases are limited to the text of the New Testament.

What about the need to do complex searches on other texts like the LXX, the Apostolic Fathers, Josephus, Philo, etc.?

In these cases, the new tools don't help as much and the missing functionality that was only available through the graphical query is especially missed.

I understand that the number of users that would have this concern might be small but it seems that Logos has historically been concerned for the needs of those who are working with more complex issues in the original languages (as evidenced by the emphasis on developing the syntactical resources).

My friendly challenge to the thinking behind depreciating the ability to easily do the most complex searches on any morphologically tagged text and advocating searching syntactical databases that are limited to the corpus of the NT is that this cedes important functionality to competitive products and reduces the potential of Logos 4 being the only Bible study tool necessary for advanced work in the original languages.

I totally understand putting a low priority on the functionality of the graphical query in relation to other functionality that the broader user base prefers. I do hope, however, that our kind developers at Logos might reconsider the ultimate fate of this helpful tool.

Please accept this suggestion knowing it comes from a very supportive user who is extremely grateful to this company for the value they have added to our ability to study the Bible.

I too want the Graphical Query in L4. I used it but I did not have my computers reporting statistics. So my use was not included in the statistics they consulted (not that one user would make all that big of a difference, but I doubt I was the only one).

I wonder, if it would be easier to take the Graphical search query tool in L3 and add an export function that would produce a text string that would let L4 give us the search results we want. Or port it to a stand-alone widget... just a thought.

Perhaps if when people with search questions come to the forum we could include graphical search queries that would work too and get L4 only people to realize they want what they don't have. Perhaps a grassroots effort for graphical queries [:)]

Mike Aubrey said:

With that said, it wouldn't to overwhelmingly difficult to create a database of other Greek texts as you might think. The new Cascadia database wasn't annotated verse by verse, but created with a computational grammar, which means that this grammar could be just as easily applied to other Greek texts. There would still be the need for some to work through the results of the grammar's work, but it would be far less effort than actually annotating things by hand. Now all of this does have the caveat that I honestly don't know what Logos' plans are for other texts; I simply know the power and requirements of computational grammars, because I've done a good chunk of work on syntax databases for my own purposes.

That is fascinating. I had no idea!

Mike Aubrey said:

As I understand it, syntax searching isn't necessarily meant to replace the graphical query. Specifically, Logos believes (this is from the beta forum) that power of the new morphology search is enough to replace the graphical query editor.

Yes. And I've gotten more used to using the morphological searches, and they are much better than the morphological searches in 3.0. I have become a fan of them [:)]. The biggest drawbacks here are setting agreement (as Dave mentioned) as well as being forced to write long strings of expressions using parentheses. The best part of the graphical query was that you could drag things around. It was much easier to develop the relationships between items because you didn't have to think through how to order the search. You just dragged arrows between items.