More Corpora and Cognates in Semitic Bible Word Studies

I have a few related suggestions, all designed to improve Logos as a tool for studying Northwest Semitic Languages. My primary suggestion has to do with features, but a few resources would need to be added for it to be fully operational.

Currently, the Textual Searches within the Hebrew Bible Word Study provides options for two corpora: The Hebrew Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls. It would be greatly improved if it also included Hebrew/Canaanite Inscriptions. Logos already has a product with these inscriptions, and they are even morphologically tagged. It would be much more convenient to search for words in the inscriptions if they were included in the Bible Word Study. It would also be a huge advantage if Logos had a morphologically tagged Mishnah (and other Tannaic literature) that also showed up in the Textual Searches of the Hebrew Bible Word Study.

As for the Textual Searches within the Aramaic Bible Word Study, it would be greatly improved if it included all Aramaic corpora, not just Biblical Aramaic and Targums. Aramaic inscriptions, Peshitta (OT and NT), and other Syriac Literature. Currently, it looks like Syriac is separate from Biblical Aramaic in the Bible Word Study, and having them combined would help a lot.

Another large improvement would be to have a Bible Word Study for Ugaritic, of course, including a textual search to a morphologically tagged Ugaritic Corpus (ideally in Ugaritic script).

Lastly, in all the Semitic Bible Word Studies, it would be wonderful to add a Cognates Section to enable one to easily open a Bible Word Study of a cognate in any of the other Northwest Semitic Languages.

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Comments

MJ. Smith

I want to vote multiple times for this … it could turn the word study guide into an actual word study! And put historical linguistics back into its proper place in Biblical studies.

Trent Wilde

@MJ. Smith Amen!

For anyone else reading this, if you would like to see these features implemented, please upvote and comment. Surely, the more people there are who express interest, the more inclined Logos will be to make it happen. That said, if you're a Logos employee reading this, I hope Logos will consider implementing these improvements even if not many people express interest — here's why:

These features would make Logos the best available tool for studying Northwest Semitic Languages, which would be a draw for specialists at a minimum.
These features would enable research that would likely improve our collective knowledge of Hebrew and Aramaic and the texts written in these languages, Biblical and non-biblical alike. It would thus have downstream benefits for everyone, not just those who use these features directly.