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Middle words in each of the Psalms


hemijordan

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I am working on a project in which I need to locate the middle word in each psalm. To do this by hand I would need to count the total number of (Hebrew) words in a psalm and divide by two. For example, in Psalm 1 there are 69 Hebrew words. The word(s) in the middle are the 34th and 35th words of the psalm (יִתֵּן בְּעִתּוֹ).

 

Is there a way to use Accordance to locate the middle words so I do not have to do this by hand? I am a new user (finally fully migrated!) and would appreciate some help.

 

Thanks,

Jim

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This is kinda tough and there may be a better than what I figured out. My suggestion will help you narrow down the search pretty quickly. For you Psa 1 example I found the middle words with my method in about 60 seconds. Here's what I did:

 

Do the following search in BHS: ‏ ‎‏ ‎[RANGE Psa 1] <AND> *

This search gives you the total number of words in the Psa 1, which in this case is 88 words (the tagging counts vav's and prefixed prepositions as separate words... thus more than your 69 words).

 

Now you need to find the verse with the middle word, so I did the following process of elimination via the same kind of search above:

 

[RANGE Psa 1:1-4] <AND> *

this gave me 67 words so I narrowed the search further:

 

[RANGE Psa 1:1-3] <AND> *

this gave me 56 words so I narrowed it further:

 

[RANGE Psa 1:1-2] <AND> *

this gave me 34 words. Since I knew that the middle word(s) would be numbers 44-45, I went back to this search:

 

[RANGE Psa 1:1-3] <AND> *

and counted from the beginning of this verse (the first word being number 35 in the chapter) till I reach numbers 44-45.

 

 

Obviously not an instananious single search with the right answer, but again, I did all this in about a minute.

 

Now, as for including the vav's and prefixed prepositions as separate words (different from what you appear to be wanting or thinking you want), not sure how to avoid this.

 

Accordance team, is this possible to change the search to consider forms with a prefixed vav or preposition as a single 'word' in the search? Or must it be always divided up to be able to actually search for just vav or just a given preposition, etc? Could the syntax tagging be used in this regard since a prepositional phrase would be considered an adjunct(?)?

 

At any rate, Jim, I hope my suggestion at least saves you the time of manually counting every word in each psalm even though it doesn't instantaneously give you the answer you're looking for.

 

-Robert

Edited by RobM
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Hi Jim,

 

To piggy-back on Robert's instructions, you can also accomplish this another way:

 

1. Open a BHS-W4 text

2. Define a range for the Psalms

3. Search for: ?* in the search window

4. Under the Analysis icon, select "Table"

5. Select cmd-T and select "Show chapter detail"

 

You should now have the word count for each chapter, and have something that looks similar to this:

 

post-20406-0-11079800-1337723673_thumb.png

 

 

Just as Rob mentioned, there are 88 words. Next, follow these steps to find the 44th and 45th words:

 

6. Open a new search text of the BHS-W4 text

7. Change the range to "Psalms"

8. Change the "Verse" pop-up to search by "Chapter"

9. Search for: ?* <WITHIN 44-45 Words> [FIELD Begin]

 

In this search you're telling Accordance to search for the 44th and 45th word from the beginning of the chapter.

 

You should have something that looks similar to this:

 

post-20406-0-17846500-1337723720_thumb.png

 

10. Calculate from the Table analysis and change the numbers in the WITHIN command for each chapter…

 

Hope that helps.

 

Darryl

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Very nice! I like it!

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Thank you for your help with this! One question I still have is if it is possible in Accordance to search on Hebrew words which would include the waw's, suffixes and prefixes. When the ancillaries are counted as separate words, the results are different.

 

Thanks again!

Jim

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No, sorry, the prefixes and suffixes are always counted separately, except for some on the untagged texts where the work of separating them hasn't been done.

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