new Analytical Hebrew Lexicon cognate issue

Jeremiah
Jeremiah Member Posts: 399 ✭✭
edited November 2024 in English Forum

Hey guys, 

this was just released yesterday. Something is wrong with the cognates lists or there is a setting I don't know about.

For example, the entry for "Shalom" שָׁלוֹם has only *one* cognate listed, incredibly: Sh'lumieyl שְׁלֻמִיאֵל and the root of שָׁלוֹם "Shalom" is incorrectly listed as...well... שָׁלוֹם "Shalom" instead of שלם "SH-L-M" There should be many many many cognates for shalom other than this single proper noun listed. I can think at least 10 cognates for this word off the top of my head. (all entries which I checked are deficient in this manner, I simply chose an example which anyone would recognize is lacking).

Does anyone know if there is a "show all cognates" or some other setting like that I'm missing?

Thanks,

-Jeremiah

Dead languages are my mid-life crisis

Comments

  • Isaiah Hoogendyk (Faithlife)
    Isaiah Hoogendyk (Faithlife) Member, Logos Employee Posts: 65

    Good catch. 

    I worked on this resource and I'll be sure to get this issue sorted out immediately. Have you found other lemma entries that have missing cognates? Please post here if you find any so I can be sure to clear this issue up entirely.

    Thanks for your help, and sorry for the incompleteness.

  • Jeremiah
    Jeremiah Member Posts: 399 ✭✭

    Good catch. 

    I worked on this resource and I'll be sure to get this issue sorted out immediately. Have you found other lemma entries that have missing cognates? Please post here if you find any so I can be sure to clear this issue up entirely.

    Thanks for your help, and sorry for the incompleteness.

    Thanks for responding Isaiah,

    Lots of strangeness in the "cognate" and "root" arena on what seems like most words I click on.

    For example, דִּבְרָה lists it's root as דָּבָר I've never seen vowels listed before in a semitic root.

    דְּבוֹרָה 2 lists it's "root" as "דְּבוֹרָה 1" that ain't right

    דְּבִיר 1 is full of problems:

    1. דְּבִיר 1 lists it's root as דְּבִיר 1 and
    2. it's entire cognates list as דְּבִיר 2 

    Many words will list a couple of cognates then if you click on one of those cognates, it does not refer back to the other cognates on the list (or not all of them) cognate is not a 1 directional association.

    Also, I'm not sure listing proper names as a cognate is really the expected result.

    This 

    seems you're mixing up references when you pass your lists to the presentation layer somewhere.

    In Summary, the issues are as follows:

    1) cognate lists are incomplete

    2) cognates listed include proper nouns; I'm not sure if this really should be included. When I look for a cognate of Y-R-M- I'm not expecting to see YiRMeYahu listed as a cognate though I may be wrong on this

    3) when the root for a word is #1 homograph, we shouldn't expect to see the derived form listing a different homograph as it's root. See next pic:

    4. In Hebrew there are certain letters when they are in the final position of the word appear differently. 

    Here is a screen shot of a word which should have a final tsadeh but has instead a normal tsadeh; although looking at the vowels it seems the tsadeh is correct but the last consonant following the tsadeh got chopped off. I didn't notice the vowels when I took the screen shot.

    5-some of the inflected forms are mising actual consonants. See photo for the missing heh ה:

    seems #4 and #5 are actually the same issue (I didn't notice vowels on the 1st one when I did the screenshot).

    seems like pointer truncation of the string before you display it, should use smart pointers if this is C++ to avoid that.

    Anyway, that's what I got from going over it for about 7 minutes now. It's not hard to find this issues as I just randomly dug around while writing this response. Best of wishes, I'm not mad by the way. I know what it's like to get pushed hard for an unrealistic deadline ;)

    I bet you guys are using SCRUM or one of the other "treat your programmers like slaves" processes...

    I personally don't need this in a super hurry by the way so please nobody stay up all night damaging their bodies on coffee, sugar and stress on my expense. I'm deep in Ugaritic this week :)

    blessings,

    -Jeremiah

    Dead languages are my mid-life crisis

  • Jeremiah
    Jeremiah Member Posts: 399 ✭✭

    Isaiah,

    Hope I'm not stirring up much or causing stress for any of you good folks at Logos.

    I love the product and continually feel blessed to live in a time with such access to biblical resources.

    If there is anything I can do to help debug this further please let me know.

    You're Isaiah and I'm Jeremiah so maybe we should write some books named after ourselves? :P

    may the  "Sar Shalom" help you get this stuff figured out.

    -Jeremiah

    Dead languages are my mid-life crisis

  • Isaiah Hoogendyk (Faithlife)
    Isaiah Hoogendyk (Faithlife) Member, Logos Employee Posts: 65

    And thank you for your help thus far in finding the issues! I had started writing up a response to your last post (that detailed some problems), but it looks like I never submitted it (in the flurry of addressing some of the issues) and now it's lost. That said, my response was basically going to be: "We can get all those things addressed in a way that I think you'll find satisfactory."

    I may ask you a question or two about how I'll be handling the suffix issue you discuss in numbers 4 and 5 above. I'll keep you posted.

    Blessings!

    Isaiah.

    P.S. As it happens, I have a long-time friend named Jeremiah, and oddly, people often mistakenly call me "Jeremiah". But I have no problem with that mistake. It is my "companion" OT book after all!

  • Isaiah Hoogendyk (Faithlife)
    Isaiah Hoogendyk (Faithlife) Member, Logos Employee Posts: 65

    Jeremiah,

    Here's my point-by-point response:

    1. Cognate lists will be overhauled to reflect multiple roots per word, as well as multiple lemmas on a word that co-occur with a root or roots

    2. Check out the ROOT section of the Bible Word Study: this is a (nearly identical) parallel to the listing of roots and cognates under each lemma entry (or, as it will be when the Lexicon is updated).

    3. See #1 and #2 for reference, as those points encompass the issue here.

    4 & 5. I have consulted with a colleague about this and it will be remedied as you suggest; namely, it seems best to include the suffix that follows as part of the inflected form.

    Hope this sounds good.

    Isaiah.

  • Jeremiah
    Jeremiah Member Posts: 399 ✭✭

    Jeremiah,

    Here's my point-by-point response:

    1. Cognate lists will be overhauled to reflect multiple roots per word, as well as multiple lemmas on a word that co-occur with a root or roots

    2. Check out the ROOT section of the Bible Word Study: this is a (nearly identical) parallel to the listing of roots and cognates under each lemma entry (or, as it will be when the Lexicon is updated).

    3. See #1 and #2 for reference, as those points encompass the issue here.

    4 & 5. I have consulted with a colleague about this and it will be remedied as you suggest; namely, it seems best to include the suffix that follows as part of the inflected form.

    Hope this sounds good.

    Isaiah.

    sounds great Isaiah, thanks for getting back to me.

    Dead languages are my mid-life crisis

  • Francis
    Francis Member Posts: 3,980 ✭✭✭

    When I look up the product, it only lists Isaiah Hoogendyk as editor. His profile describes him so: 

    "Isaiah Hoogendyk received a BA in classical languages from Hope College and an MA in linguistics from Trinity Western University. He is a language editor for Logos Bible Software, contributing to such projects as the English-Greek Reverse Interlinear of the NRSV Apocryphal Texts, the Codex Bezae Cantabrigiensis, and the Old Testament Greek Pseudepigrapha with Morphology."

    With respects to Isaiah, I am a bit puzzled by the notion that a "lexicon" could be published without being traceable to a team of or a well-established Hebrew scholar(s). 

  • Isaiah Hoogendyk (Faithlife)
    Isaiah Hoogendyk (Faithlife) Member, Logos Employee Posts: 65

    The lexicon is indebted to the efforts of several Hebrew scholars and experts, and is therefore traceable to them in a couple tangible respects:

    1. The segmentation and lemmatization of the Hebrew words were all curated by our former Hebrew expert, Vincent Setterholm. Related to the LHB project is the Lexham Hebrew Interlinear, which contains curated glosses used in the LALHB.

    2. Our current Hebrew expert, Jeremy Thompson, was a consulting editor for the project. He is also co-editor of the Bible Sense Lexicon Hebrew data.

  • Bobby Terhune
    Bobby Terhune Member Posts: 700 ✭✭✭

    Isaiah,

    I'm curious as to why Dr. Michael S. Heiser wasn't part of the team. Pardon my lack of knowledge about your team, but I would have thought he would have had the best academic credentials at Faithlife for producing scholarly works on the Hebrew language.

  • Sean Boisen
    Sean Boisen Member, Logos Employee Posts: 1,452

    Isaiah,

    I'm curious as to why Dr. Michael S. Heiser wasn't part of the team. Pardon my lack of knowledge about your team, but I would have thought he would have had the best academic credentials at Faithlife for producing scholarly works on the Hebrew language.

    We all work on multiple projects, and Dr. Heiser has his own hands full with his recent book (The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible) and other activities.

  • Bobby Terhune
    Bobby Terhune Member Posts: 700 ✭✭✭

    Sean,

    Thanks for the reply, I meant no disrespect to any of the team. I think that a lot of us wonder who is behind the curtain so to speak. When considering a "dead tree" book, who the author is and what perspective is he/she coming from as well as their qualifications are vital considerations. These affect how much weight or trust I put into the books information.

    With Faithlife produced reference works, we tend to lose most of the information that we normally would look for in a normal book purchase. Basically how would one work compare to another similar work by someone else for scholarly and academic use.

    What are your thoughts on this subject?

  • David Paul
    David Paul Member Posts: 6,074 ✭✭✭

    Since reference books such as this one are often the link between ignorance and knowledge for great numbers of people, and there is often an assumption that the material within is triple-checked and vetted for accuracy, getting stuff like this right is (or should be) ISSUE ONE for FL. Better that this book not exist than that it passes along information which is tenuous and inaccurate. A "slow" roll out with frequent updates IS NOT ACCEPTABLE, PERIOD. A tenth of 1% errors is enough to make this kind of book worthless and unusable. It sounds like the error rate is well above that. It should be pulled immediately until fixed.

    ASUS  ProArt x570s Creator, AMD R9 5950x, HyperX 64gb 3600 RAM, ASUS Strix RTX 2080 ti

    "The Unbelievable Work...believe it or not."  Little children...Biblical prophecy is not Christianity's friend.

  • Sean Boisen
    Sean Boisen Member, Logos Employee Posts: 1,452

    Sean,

    Thanks for the reply, I meant no disrespect to any of the team. I think that a lot of us wonder who is behind the curtain so to speak. When considering a "dead tree" book, who the author is and what perspective is he/she coming from as well as their qualifications are vital considerations. These affect how much weight or trust I put into the books information.

    With Faithlife produced reference works, we tend to lose most of the information that we normally would look for in a normal book purchase. Basically how would one work compare to another similar work by someone else for scholarly and academic use.

    What are your thoughts on this subject?

    We do our best to include information about the sources of our work, typically in an Introduction section for a resource, or in the documentation for a dataset. In the case of the Lexham Analytical Lexicon of the Hebrew Bible, the credentials are essentially those of the various resources that have contributed to this work:

    and others.

  • DMB
    DMB Member Posts: 14,401 ✭✭✭✭

    Since reference books such as this one are often the link between ignorance and knowledge for great numbers of people, and there is often an assumption that the material within is triple-checked and vetted for accuracy, getting stuff like this right is (or should be) ISSUE ONE for FL. Better that this book not exist than that it passes along information which is tenuous and inaccurate. A "slow" roll out with frequent updates IS NOT ACCEPTABLE, PERIOD. A tenth of 1% errors is enough to make this kind of book worthless and unusable. It sounds like the error rate is well above that. It should be pulled immediately until fixed.

    I think the horse left the barn, years back. When I first got Libby and the hebrew interlinear, I assumed a shaky base (as a philosophy), and that one had clear author-identification. But after the Logos-branded interlinears, etc, the horse is wandering around somewhere, even with known ranch hands. I simply assume possible issues and go from there.

    "If myth is ideology in narrative form, then scholarship is myth with footnotes." B. Lincolm 1999.

  • Bobby Terhune
    Bobby Terhune Member Posts: 700 ✭✭✭

    Sean,

    Once again thanks for listening. Perhaps what would help in the case of this particular resource is a better understanding of how Faithlife is utilizing previous resources to create new ones.

    My understanding until now is that The Analytical Hebrew Lexicon was a made from scratch new work. 

    By the way I was impressed with Isaiah's cheerful handling of the few issues that have been pointed out so far, There was no long wait to hear back, no ducking of anything, just we will fix it and we'll get right on it. Most impressive!

  • David Paul
    David Paul Member Posts: 6,074 ✭✭✭

    Denise said:

    When I first got Libby and the hebrew interlinear, I assumed a shaky base (as a philosophy), and that one had clear author-identification. But after the Logos-branded interlinears, etc, the horse is wandering around somewhere, even with known ranch hands.

    The LHI lists a number of things as "Hebrew idioms". I asked Nehemia Gordon (well-known Karaite Jewish author) about a particular "idiom" and he seemed perplexed by it. It turns out that the proposed idiom is something based on an NRSV emendation rather than the actual Hebrew text. Go figger.

    ASUS  ProArt x570s Creator, AMD R9 5950x, HyperX 64gb 3600 RAM, ASUS Strix RTX 2080 ti

    "The Unbelievable Work...believe it or not."  Little children...Biblical prophecy is not Christianity's friend.

  • Simon’s Brother
    Simon’s Brother Member Posts: 6,823 ✭✭✭

    One colt of 'Old Regret' is known to have gotten away and run with the wild bush horses. When it comes to FL many a Colt has gotten away and run wild. In fact it seems to be the culturally accepted way to do things at FL.

    Denise said:

    Since reference books such as this one are often the link between ignorance and knowledge for great numbers of people, and there is often an assumption that the material within is triple-checked and vetted for accuracy, getting stuff like this right is (or should be) ISSUE ONE for FL. Better that this book not exist than that it passes along information which is tenuous and inaccurate. A "slow" roll out with frequent updates IS NOT ACCEPTABLE, PERIOD. A tenth of 1% errors is enough to make this kind of book worthless and unusable. It sounds like the error rate is well above that. It should be pulled immediately until fixed.

    I think the horse left the barn, years back. When I first got Libby and the hebrew interlinear, I assumed a shaky base (as a philosophy), and that one had clear author-identification. But after the Logos-branded interlinears, etc, the horse is wandering around somewhere, even with known ranch hands. I simply assume possible issues and go from there.

  • DMB
    DMB Member Posts: 14,401 ✭✭✭✭

    To avoid misunderstanding, from the start, I assumed the LHAL would be a database exercise, supplemented as cost/timing constraints would allow. Rick has always quickly improved the analytical lexicons. Isaac seems well on his way, in the same tradition. But the Lexham products are pretty much Lexham products. They don't accompany their authors very much.

    "If myth is ideology in narrative form, then scholarship is myth with footnotes." B. Lincolm 1999.