Bible Word Study does not work for direct input of certain words!?
Hi,
I've been working through a few word studies recently, and I have experienced a recurring problem. I've tried the forum for past topics, but haven't come up with anything.
If I open Guides > Bible Word Study (either the standard one or My Bible Word Study) and enter the word "kindness" or "goodness", the entry reverts to "kind" or "good" and proceeds with a study for those words. This is not what I wanted. However, if I go to Gal. 5:22 and right-click, select the word "kindness" or "goodness" and then choose either "Bible Word Study" or "My Bible Word Study" the pane opens to "kindness" or "goodness" and proceeds to give the desired results.
This seems odd. Am I doing something wrong? As a workaround, I can search for an instance of the desired word in a Bible and then follow the method that works above. But I thought that I'd ask about it here in any case.
Any thoughts?
John Duffy
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Is the word study you get for the two different? When I do a Word study on 'kind' I get the same result as I would if I did a word study on 'kindness'. I would assume that this is because the word study is based on Hebrew/Greek words -- not English.
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"Kind" is the lemma for "Kindness." Am I missing something?
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John Duffy said:
If I open Guides > Bible Word Study (either the standard one or My Bible Word Study) and enter the word "kindness" or "goodness", the entry reverts to "kind" or "good" and proceeds with a study for those words.
Concur Bible Word Study drop down list had "good" and "kind" choices, but lacks "goodness" and "kindness".
John Duffy said:As a workaround, I can search for an instance of the desired word in a Bible and then follow the method that works above.
Bible Word Study work around for "goodness" includes other "good" variations ("Good","goodly","goods"), which is different than using Morph Search Analysis to group results to show Greek lemma's translated as "goodness" or "kindness"
Keep Smiling [:)]
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alabama24 said:
"Kind" is the lemma for "Kindness." Am I missing something?
"Kind" can be both an adjective and a noun, whereas "kindness" is the cognate noun, so it isn't really the lemma for "kindness". You would expect to be offered different options for each. "Kind" is a very interesting word, because it has than one meaning as an adjective (displaying kindness) and another as a noun (a sort or type). I just fired off a Word Study in the NIV by searching for "kindness" in the text and doing a BWS on that. These were the results:
It seems a bit strange that a search on "kindness" the noun produces results for "all", "of what kind" and so on. It is a little bizarre. I can only think that in older usage "kindness" had a meaning to do with "what sort" which I haven't come across in my lifetime. There is something strange here in the way that BWS works, though.
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Thanks for the replies. I understand that the Greek/Hebrew results are the same. The BWS guide is great when digging into the original words used for the modern translations.
However, my objective for this search is sometimes a little more basic than that, since there are occasions when I just want to quickly look up how an English word (i.e. topic) is handled in dictionaries. There are times when I would like to use the BWS definition as a 'topic'
search without having to go to the passage guide (which, incidentally,
doesn't include 'kind' or 'kindness' among the words returned for Gal.
3:22 with my default English translation as the ESV, although it does have an entry for 'goodness' which returns
slightly different results than the BWS results for 'goodness'!).The 'Definition' section of the BWS results returns different results if different words are used. For my library it returns 6 dictionaries for 'good' and four for 'goodness' with two overlaping by covering both words under the same definition heading. For 'kind' I get a single sentence definition in one dictionary, while for 'kindness' I get two other definitions, once of which is quite detailed and long.
GregW said:There is something strange here in the way that BWS works, though.
I tend to agree. But I was wondering if there was some quick fix that others might have had on the issue, or an underlying reason that I should be aware of. No matter - I'll work with it as-is, bearing in mind the original workaround I mentioned.
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John Duffy said:GregW said:
There is something strange here in the way that BWS works, though.
I tend to agree. But I was wondering if there was some quick fix that others might have had on the issue, or an underlying reason that I should be aware of. No matter - I'll work with it as-is, bearing in mind the original workaround I mentioned.
Concur BWS could be improved.
Another work around idea is right click on word in a Bible, then click "Power Lookup" If Bible has reverse interlinear tagging, also could click on lemma OR Strong's # for lexicon choices.
Keep Smiling [:)]
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Basically what it comes down to is that the word kindness and goodness by definition need to be added to the English word list. It seems apparent that it just got missed….thats all.
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Room4more said:
Basically what it comes down to is that the word kindness and goodness by definition need to be added to the English word list. It seems apparent that it just got missed….thats all.
But it's not just a few words that have been missed - I've had this problem many times, and it seems that there are many words that are missed, if that is indeed the root cause.
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John Duffy said:Room4more said:
Basically what it comes down to is that the word kindness and goodness by definition need to be added to the English word list. It seems apparent that it just got missed….thats all.
But it's not just a few words that have been missed - I've had this problem many times, and it seems that there are many words that are missed, if that is indeed the root cause.
Well, then we just have to accept the fact the best our English language can do for χρηστότης and ἀγαθωσύνη is kindness and goodness, but then we need to also include πραΰτης for gentleness......and the many others that we are just lacking....
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John Duffy said:Room4more said:
Basically what it comes down to is that the word kindness and goodness by definition need to be added to the English word list. It seems apparent that it just got missed….thats all.
But it's not just a few words that have been missed - I've had this problem many times, and it seems that there are many words that are missed, if that is indeed the root cause.
In order for the BWS to work correctly, it needs to be able to treat different forms of the same word in the same way (love, loving, loves, loved), and so on. This is called stemming. But because there is no morphologically tagging for English texts, this is not done manually, and therefore it is computer generated. Most of the time it works fine, but sometimes there are problems, as you've identified.
On another thread Logos confirmed that stemming is algorithmic, not dictionary-based, so there are two problems that can be encountered:
1) related words are not stemmed the same (e.g., "ran" and "run" in English)
2) unrelated words are stemmed the same (e.g., "ejercito" and "ejército" in Spanish).I don't think there's a simple solution, though. Even if stemming was done manually it wouldn't solve the problem with 'kind' being two different words with two different meanings. Short of the enormous job of complete morphologically tagging of English texts, and the separating out of English homonyms, I think this is as good as we're likely to get.
(The stemmer used by Logos is called 'Snowball', which you can read about and test here: http://snowball.tartarus.org/demo.php)
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Mark Barnes said:
In order for the BWS to work correctly, ...
Hi Mark. That's a very comprehensive reply. Thanks.
Maybe the solution to what I was looking for is therefore to provide separate dictionary definition lookup of English words that is not affected by the underlying Greek/Hebrew issues, for occasions when only the English word definition is needed? I certainly suspect that novice users who want to just perform a topic lookup of the English word in their dictionaries find it difficult to access their Bible dictionaries, unless they know that they can 'sort of' do so through the 'topic' and 'definition' sections of the PG and BWS respectively. I know it's an old and well-worn 'topic', but I do think that it is something that is relevant to the non-power-user who works mainly with the original language tools. Anyway, it's Sunday morning, and I must rush...[:)]
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John Duffy said:
Maybe the solution to what I was looking for is therefore to provide separate dictionary definition lookup of English words that is not affected by the underlying Greek/Hebrew issues, for occasions when only the English word definition is needed?
Yes. At the moment you can use the Power Lookup tool for this. It works very well but it does not allow direct input (i.e. you have to run it from a right-click menu). You can also type lookup xxxx in the command box, although novices wouldn't know this, and of course it only returns the top entry and you then have to use the parallel resource menu to get the rest.
I see no reason why direct input couldn't be allowed in the Power Lookup Tool. It would be a useful addition.
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Mark Barnes said:
I see no reason why direct input couldn't be allowed in the Power Lookup Tool. It would be a useful addition.
That would be a really useful feature addition that at face value wouldn't seem to need too much extra coding.
Mark, would you like to raise a Uservoice suggestion for that, since you came up with the idea?
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John Duffy said:
If I open Guides > Bible Word Study (either the standard one or My Bible Word Study) and enter the word "kindness" or "goodness", the entry reverts to "kind" or "good" and proceeds with a study for those words. This is not what I wanted. However, if I go to Gal. 5:22 and right-click, select the word "kindness" or "goodness" and then choose either "Bible Word Study" or "My Bible Word Study" the pane opens to "kindness" or "goodness" and proceeds to give the desired results.
You're not the first to complain: Why does the Bible Word Study limit what words I can enter?
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