Greek vocab - can Accordance tell me what I don't know ?

[Λύχνις Δαν]

Hi ya,

 

I am trying to do something with Acc that I cannot quite work out how to do, or at least cannot in a manner I like. In the process I've discovered a couple of issues or bugs.

 

What I am trying to do is this : I want to create a list of Greek words that I already know, so that I can exclude those from new vocab searches.

 

In principle this seems quite simple. Create a list in a user tool based on all the flash cards I have so far created and then do a * query in that tool for Greek content followed by some sort of *@-[hits VocabIKnow] in a GNT28 pane.

 

This fails miserably for a couple of reasons. The first is that a * query against a user tool for Greek content actually doesn't appear to select anything. It seems you can search for specific words in Greek but not *. This is perhaps "not a bug" as that's true of Greek Content searches in other tools like Wallace's grammar for example. But it appears to run the search, greying out the search term and not showing any warning dialog. Additionally it doesn't work because it appears that one cannot use a linking command between a tool and a text like this.

 

So theory two was to create a user bible containing all my Greek words. Just use a dummy book, chapter and verse and load up the vocab. This fails for the reason that the user bible does not in fact know what language its content is in. Even though one does an import of Greek from a Unicode source file Acc does not know that the content is Greek and so again the linking command fails. It would be necessary to have an import interview option to declare the language of the the bible so that such things could be done. I suspect this has implications for the functioning of other user bibles in any other languages.

 

Along the way here I created a Unicode import file containing Εὐλογητὸς cut and pasted from GNT28-T using Wordpad. This was all done on Windows 7. I created it as John 1:1 Εὐλογητὸς and tried to import it. It turned out that the import appeared to succeed but no content was in the imported user bible. The user bible could not be found in the library but trying to import again would not work. I don't know exactly what the issue here is because I was able to use LibreOffice to create a unicode file with multiple verses in Greek and import that ok. However, at one point I managed to get Acc to crash in this process. If I have more time later on I may try to get more details for a separate post on this.

 

Now the brute force approach would be to list the words to exclude (the ones I know) in the query itself, but that now runs to a large number of words and thus I am not sure how tractable such a query would be, not to mention that its basically rather hard to maintain it. I suppose it could be done with a specialised workspace in which to save the query.

 

Thoughts, comments, abuse ?

 

Thx

D

[Anthony Pyles]

Daniel,

 

What about creating a highlight style for words you already know? It would take some work on the front end, searching for lexical forms, but there's an easy way to highlight all hits. It seems like it might work since highlights can be searched for, but I've never tried searching for words in combination with or excluding highlight styles.

 

Cheers,

Tony

[Helen Brown]

This is an interesting problem, no current solution that I can see in Accordance. Ideally you would be able to mark on a list the lemmas that you know, and therefore see or list the new words in any passage. We'll consider this as a request for a new feature.

[Λύχνις Δαν]

Thanx Helen, much appreciated.

 

Tony, thanx. I tried your suggestion but it doesn't, in the end, quite work.

 

The search can be constructed with a pair of tabs, one doing [style style-name] and a second doing *@-[hits firsttab] but it still highlights the highlighted words. You can do an exclusion search using mutliple tabs using * search in one tab and then a highlight style search in another tab and then doing [hits star-tab] <NOT> [hits hightlight-tab] but this removes the entire verse in which the highlights occur, which means you'll miss some of the vocab you want if it occurs in the same verse as a word you already know. So, close but not quite I'm afraid.

 

The method of doing *@-(list of words) does work but the list is essentially unmanageable for any interesting case. *@-[hits tabwithknownvocabhighlights] does not work but it appears to. I'm not actually sure if such a search should work or not. OK syntax error in the search apparently though it failed silently which is not great. The correct way is *@-([hits tabwithknownvocabhighlighted]). This works but you are left with a way to construct the contents of tabwithknownvocabhightlighted. So we are more or less at a new list feature of some sort.

 

Thx
D