Can't use "καν" in search string

[Thomas]

Ok, this is odd. Try and search by "καν αποθανῃ ζησεται" and you get 0 results, but you should get 1 (John 11:25). Ok, so I tried "κ* αποθανῃ ζησεται" and still got 0. So then I tried "καν" <AND> "αποθανῃ ζησεται" and I do get a result. What is going on here?

 

Ἰωάννην 11

[David Lang]

Thomas,

 

When you can't get a search for text you're actually looking at to work, the best approach is simply to select the text and click the Search button on the Resource palette. Doing that for καν αποθανῃ ζησεται opens a new search window with the following search argument: καί ἐάν_1 ἀποθνῄσκω ζάω.

 

Notice how using the Search button on the palette gets Accordance to format the search correctly, and notice that when it does, it does not search for καν, but καί ἐάν_1. καν is an example of "crasis," where two words καί and ἐάν are combined. That's why Accordance doesn't recognize καν as an acceptable lexical form.

 

This is also why your wildcard search didn't work. The wildcard search "κ* αποθανῃ ζησεται" is searching for a three-word phrase where the first word begins with kappa. But the phrase you want to find is actually a four-word phrase!

 

There are some interesting ways that you can search for crasis, and those are detailed on page 13 of the Grammatical Supplement PDF inside your Manuals and Documents folder.

 

Hope this helps.

[Joe Weaks]

That's why Accordance doesn't recognize καν as an acceptable lexical form.

This glosses over the problem. He never searched for a lexical form καν. All of his searches were for inflected forms. I agree with Thomas that it is odd, and I'd say it's quite a flaw at work here. One can guess how the underpinnings of the tagged text create the problem, it being a crasis, but searching for an exact inflected form inside of quotes should be expected to do just that.

To illustrate the problem further, we would expect a search for

"*ν αποθανῃ ζησεται"

to find the occurrence at Jn 11:25 regardless that the "*ν" portion of the potential result is part of a crasis, in the same way that

"*ν τῇ τρίτῃ" does find occurrences such as "ἐν τῇ τρίτῃ"

 

Note that the paragraph on page 13 of the grammatical supplement you cite (which I'm not sure why we shouldn't just paste here, though I'd not feel I have the authority to do so) is also about searching for lexical forms. Even moreso, the last line implies you can always just do a crasis search by putting it in quotes to search for the inflected form, which we're now seeing is not fully the case.

 

In an attempt to be helpful to us users who might fall trap to a searching error, let me state in another way that the problem highlighted here is that I'm given erroneous results when I shouldn't expect them, when I may not know that I'm searching for a crasis. Let's say I'm doing research on phonological phenomena, and my theory is that word final nasals can not precede word initial unvoiced bilabial stops + front vowels. One of my searches would include:

"*ν ψω*"

which will also find no hits, despite it's occurrence in

1Cor. 13:3 κἂν ψωμίσω...

 

Or another example, let's say I want to find all places where a word ends with omega and the next word begins with omega.

Natrually, I would search for "*ω ω*"

However, the verses found will erroneously leave out two occurrences of κἀγὼ ὡς in Rom. 3:7 and Gal. 4:12.

 

Giving erroneous results when a user has reason to think the results are reliable is problematic. So, we have a serious buyer (searcher) beware scenario here. The lesson learned is that if you're doing searches anything similar to what we've seen here, your best bet for morphological searches is to go with the non-tagged versions of texts. I guess I'd better reload that GNT module.

[David Lang]

Joe,

 

I appreciate your clarification of the problem, and I agree that it is a problem. I'm going to assume that I'm misreading your tone and that you're not really busting my chops.

 

It wasn't my intention to gloss over the problem. Rather, I was hurriedly trying to help someone late at night, and I assumed, but didn't check to make sure, that option-clicking the Search button would properly format the inflected search. Sorry, it doesn't.

 

Neither do I have any objection to you pasting excerpts from the Grammatical Supplement here. Not sure what "authority" you feel you need to do that. For my part, I was just trying to be brief.

 

The simple reality is that any time you're dealing with a database where interpretive decisions have been made, there may be cases where simply typing what you see will not necessarily get you the results you expect. My point was that when you click the Search button, Accordance takes into account such things as morphological separation, crasis, etc. The fact that, in this case, option-clicking the Search button does not result in a properly formatted inflected search is indeed a problem. The fact that apparently inflected searches cannot take crasis into account is certainly counter-intuitive, and the fact that wildcard searches are therefore impossible is also problematic. We can certainly look into it.

[Joe Weaks]

David, I like your chops. I simply wanted make it clear to users the existence and implication of this idiosyncrasy (which was news to me).

 

And I meant no tone with the 'authority comment, and I apologize if it sounded such. I just didn't know if the Gram Supp qualified as proprietary material that you guys charge for and so didn't want to be trumping that by pasting something you're trying to sell. That's all.

 

I do think this limitation of wildcard inflected searches ignoring crasis is no small matter for a user to be unaware of. Are there any Accordance users who knew that "*ω ω*" would not give them complete results? I see now that research I've done in the past is erroneous because of this limitation.

[Joe Weaks]

The wildcard search "κ* αποθανῃ ζησεται" is searching for a three-word phrase where the first word begins with kappa. But the phrase you want to find is actually a four-word phrase!

This comment is helpful, and points towards what it looks like causes the issue. They way it looks like a tagged module accounts for a crasis is that the second form is a non-displaying word following the initial word.

 

To illustrate the point further

see how in this search that the hits count is indeed 4! Also, notice how when hovering over the word that no details of the second form are present. These words are NOT handled the same way compound words are handled in the Hebrew text. The actual occurrence of the second part of the crasis is an invisible, non-displaying word in the text.

And also, notice how searching for "κἀκεῖ εὐαγγελιζόμενοι" will not find the phrase because there is in fact a word between those two words, even if you can't see it, but putting a wildcard word search in the middle "κἀκεῖ * εὐαγγελιζόμενοι" will find the occurrence. And, notice how the Analysis window shows that the invisible/non-displaying form of ἐκεῖ was indeed found. Instead of a *, one can also find these invisible, non-displaying crasitized words with the search term "χρασις". The search term would be: "κἀκεῖ χρασις εὐαγγελιζόμενοι"