Feature Concept — Hapax Legonmena

David Christensen
David Christensen Member Posts: 30 ✭✭
edited December 2024 in English Forum

I'm not entirely sure the best place for this idea, but I think this could be a useful feature for Logos.

In the "right-click" context menu, when selecting a word in the original language, it would be really sweet if the context menu would have a number next to the "lemma" or similar that indicates the number of NT usages of said term. If the usage is "1", there could be a label like 'hapax' or something of the sort indicating that the term in question only has a single usage in the NT.

I've seen other threads in the forum with compilations of hapaxes in the Bible, and it would be fantastic if these were compiled into a dataset that was then used to tell someone the frequency of a term's usage in the "right-click" menu.

I'm happy to create something for this on a "uservoice" if that exists. Thanks for making great software!

With joy,

-David

Comments

  • Matthew
    Matthew Member Posts: 941 ✭✭

    There are two conceivable ways in which this would have to be done. One route would be to base the frequency count on whichever Greek New Testament the user has prioritized, in which case a separate dataset would have to be made for each supported Greek New Testament. The second route would be to base the count on the Greek text underlying the English translation the user is working from. This would be much more complex, as most translations do not slavishly follow any of the standard printed Greek New Testaments. They may choose to go with a different manuscript reading here or there, and that would impact frequency counts. Faithlife would have to have the exact Greek text used for each supported English translation. I would suspect that if this route were to be taken, the dataset would only be available for those English translations that already have reverse interlinears available.

  • George Somsel
    George Somsel Member Posts: 10,150 ✭✭✭

    This doesn't give what you are seeking since it only covers words which appear 5 or more times, but it might nevertheless be of interest (it's in Logos).

    Van Vorst, Building Your New Testament Vocabulary, 3rd ed.,1990.

    george
    gfsomsel

    יְמֵי־שְׁנוֹתֵינוּ בָהֶם שִׁבְעִים שָׁנָה וְאִם בִּגְבוּרֹת שְׁמוֹנִים שָׁנָה וְרָהְבָּם עָמָל וָאָוֶן

  • Kiyah
    Kiyah Member Posts: 2,842 ✭✭✭✭

    I agree with David's idea and would like to bring back to the surface.  I didn't see a uservoice post for this so I created one: https://logos.uservoice.com/forums/42823-logos-bible-software-7/suggestions/18575215-hapax-legomena-dataset

    Here's my summary of the idea that I included in the uservoice post:

    It would be really helpful to have Hapax Legomena datasets/tagging for the OT and NT (and possibly the LXX as well). With this, if you're exegeting a passage you can quickly identify the unique words in the passage. You can also compare the amount of Hapax Legomena a certain book/author uses compared to others in the bible. My professor wants us to look at this in our exegesis so it would be helpful to have a way to quickly do this in the software. And since it will be a dataset you can explore and find hapax legomena with the Bible Browser feature.

  • Matthew
    Matthew Member Posts: 941 ✭✭

    If something like this were ever implemented, I would think it would be better to include word counts for all words rather than only identifying hapax legomena. It seems somewhat arbitrary to only be interested in knowing that a word only occurs once but not wanting to know if the word only occurs two or three times, for example. A quick frequency count - regardless of what the frequency is - would provide users with more information than a mere yes or no regarding whether a word only occurs once.

  • Kiyah said:

    It would be really helpful to have Hapax Legomena datasets/tagging for the OT and NT (and possibly the LXX as well).

    This Feature Concept — Hapax Legonmena suggestion was created on 29 Sep 2015, which was followed on 14 Dec 2015 => New Feature: Reader's Edition Interlinear (Feature) 

    Reader's Edition can show Hapax Legomena lemma's by hiding lemma's that occur more than 2 times. Job 38 has some Hapax Legomena:

    Keep Smiling [:)]

  • Kiyah
    Kiyah Member Posts: 2,842 ✭✭✭✭

    I didn't know you could do this based on frequency. I just marked my 2 Peter passage manually yesterday [:)].  However, the method you showed above still seems rather manual if you want to do more in-depth analysis across whole books or across multiple books (like for example comparing the undisputed letters of Paul with the letters that scholars disagree about regarding Pauline authorship). It would be really slick to have it as a data set, then you can set up visual filters to highlight them even if you're not using an interlinear. They can be included in the bible browser and they would be available for full Logos search functionality.

  • Kiyah said:

    I didn't know you could do this based on frequency. I just marked my 2 Peter ...

    Thankful Reader's Edition can be combined with visual filter highlighting and Discourse Greek feature subset:

    Kiyah said:

    It would be really slick to have it as a data set, then you can set up visual filters to highlight them even if you're not using an interlinear.

    Thread => Hebrew Hapax Legomena Visual Filter - Search Snytax Help

    Keep Smiling [:)]