Comparing Lexical and Morphological Similarities and Differences Between Two Texts

[lprado317]

Hi,

 

I have a question that may have a simple answer, but it's not so simple to me. I'm trying to compare two passages in the Song of Songs (4:1-7 and 6:4-10), specifically, trying to find the same lexical roots, but also differences in form (e.g., 3rd person verb vs. 1st person verb of same root). Is this possible? And if so, can it only be done between two passages, or can I add more? Thanks!

 

Lenny P.

[Joel Brown]

Lenny, thanks for your question.

 

Directly, text comparison works between different texts of the same passage, rather than different passages in the same text. However, you can do some sort of limited text comparison using the HITS command. For example, you can set up one tab with the search * [RANGE Song 4:1-7], then another tab [RANGE Song 6:4-10] *@-[HITS Tab1]. (where Tab1 is the name of your first tab). This will show you all lemmas used in Song 6:4-10 that aren't used in Song 4:1-7. You can do a similar thing, comparing the inflected forms (using HITS=i) or the tags (using HITS=t) to find your differences.

 

I don't believe there is any way to do this involving roots, and as you will tell, the searches also are not respecting the word order of each verse, but it may help you get closer to what you are looking for.

[lprado317]

Joel,

 

Thanks for your help! Let me make sure I understand you correctly: I will set up two (or three) separate tabs; the name of my first tab will be BHS-W4 and the name of the second tab will be BHS-W4 2; I will type *[RANGE Song 4:1-7] in the first tab, and then [RANGE Song 6:4-10]*@-[HITS BHS-W4] in the second tab - yes? If I decide to compare inflected forms, I'm not sure where/how in the equation you've suggested to incorporate "HITS=i" or "HITS=t" - can you help?

[Ken Simpson]

Hi Joel and Lenny

when I tried this, the * {RANGE Song 4:1-7] errored and told me I needed to use the <AND> command.

 

When I did it worked fine.

 

I have set this up to find the similar lemmas in the second plane, and you can do it with as many passages as you can fit! (tabs is the best way to do it)

 

 

If you change the second tab to have [HITS=I Heb1] (I renamed my tab) then you will compared inflected etc

Edited October 14, 2014 by Ken Simpson

[lprado317]

Ken - thank you so much! However, how are you able to see the texts side by side as they appear in your screen shot?

[JonathanHuber]

They are separate zones. Drag your second HMT to the right side of your workspace until the gray outline appears indicating that it will form a new zone when you release the tab. Hopefully that makes sense.

[Ken Simpson]

have a look at this

 

 

TabSidebySide.mp4.zip

Edited October 15, 2014 by Ken Simpson

[lprado317]

Thank you very much, Jonathan and Ken. I have tried comparing the texts, and I think it's done what I'm looking for. My question is, how come most of the text from tab 1 is in red? Also, when I tried incorporating "HITS=i" or "HITS=t" to tab 2, Accordance crashed - several times already. Any reason why this keeps happening? Also, what is "HITS=i" or "HITS=t" supposed to accomplish?

[JonathanHuber]

Words in red are the words found by your search. You've searched for all of the words in the left tab, so they're all red. In the right tab, you've restricted the search to just the words also found in the 1st tab, so only a fraction of the words are highlighted.

Edited October 15, 2014 by JonathanHuber

[Ken Simpson]

Can I ask, what version of Acc are you using? PC or Mac?

 

HITS=I means that the words compared are inflected forms, and HITS=T

 

from the help,

 

 

1. Additional modifiers can be used inside the brackets to choose a different list for the search in the target tab. These modifiers are entered with an equal sign directly after the word HITS.
2. The modifiers are Keys, Inflected, and Tags. Only the first character of each modifier needs to be entered.
3. [HITS=k tabname] uses the list of Key numbers from the source tab (Key numbers option, Key numbered text).
4. [HITS=i tabname] uses the list of words (inflected forms) from the source tab (Words option, grammatically tagged text).
5. [HITS=t tabname] uses the list of entire tags from the source tab (Tags option, grammatically tagged text).

[lprado317]

Thanks again, Jonathan.

 

Thanks again Ken - also, I'm using Accordance version 10 for Mac.

[Ken Simpson]

Thanks - but which version of 10? Can you check your “About Accordance” menu? The latest release version is 10.4.3.2 please make sure you have this by doing a “Check for app update” from your file menu

 

It doesn’t crash for me - here is what HITS=I does for me - here are the examples...

 

 

I have just compare Song 1 with Song 2 for brevity’s sake.

Edited October 15, 2014 by Ken Simpson

[lprado317]

I just updated to the latest version and now it worked. Thank you very much for your help!

[Ken Simpson]

No problems!

[Ken Simpson]

have set up a generic cross checking session.

 

The idea is that you enter the search ranges in the workspace called “Input ranges” and then you will see the cross compared results in the workspace called “Compare"

 

Here are the screenshots and the saved session for you to look at. Feel free to ask any questions. Yes you can add more texts to it...

 

 

compare.accord.zip

[lprado317]

Ken,

 

I just saw your last response to this thread. Could you explain what's happening in the screen shots that have [contents] and [hits] - I'm not sure what's going on there. Thanks!

[Ken Simpson]

Of course, sorry this got lost in alpha and beta testing we are doing.

 

[CONTENTS] takes the list of verses from the target tab and uses that as a dynamic [RANGE] in effect.

 

[HITS] takes the list of words and uses that in the new tab as the list of words searched for.

 

So this is just cross-comparing the tow pericopes that you insert in the first two tabs.

 

Does that make sense at all?

Edited October 27, 2014 by Ken Simpson