Searching exact Hebrew phrases?

[Woty Regan]

How do I search for an exact phrase or word in a grammatically tagged Hebrew text? For instance "ותכתב אסתר" or "בראשית ברא".

[Helen Brown]

If you have already found one occurence of the phrase, the easiest way is to select it and use the contextual menu (right-click or control-click) to search for inflected forms, or press option and click Search on the resourse palette.

 

Accordance then puts the phrase in quotation markes (to indicate that you are searching for inflected not lemmas) and breaks up the words with separate prefixes and suffixes. Once you see how Accordance does it, you will be able to learn how to enter such a phrase directly. Especially in Hebrew it is best to let Accordance do it for you.

[Woty Regan]

The main thing I want to do with exact phrase searching is to figure out which verse other sources are referring to when they quote partial verses with no citation. I don't think there's any way to have Accordance do that for me. :-)

[Helen Brown]

I don't think you want an exact phrase search for that! I would select the phrase in the source and amplify to the BHS-W4. If you amplify from a tabbed text, you will search for the phrase in lemmas, from a tool (or untagged text) it will search for the inflected forms. If the phrase is not found, try pressing shift as you amplify to add a FUZZY command whoch lets the search drop or add the specified number of words.

 

Of course, if your source is not in Accordance, you will need to enter the phrase yourself, inside quotes to specify inflected, and with extra spaces between each word and its suffixes and prefixes.

 

It would help to have a specific example, and I am happy to screenshare and demonstrate the searches to you. Just send me a persona message with your iChat name and account type.