Find specific sequence of Hebrew vowels within a word

[Thomas]

How would I search for a specific sequence of vowels in a word in Hebrew? e.g. qamaṣ followed by pataḥ as in הַָלַךְ, or say qamaṣ followed by shewa as in שָׁכְבְּךָ?

 

I know to search for a specific vowel I can enter: .ָ

But then what would I put after that?

Edited November 11, 2008 by Thomas

[David Lang]

Thomas,

 

To do what you're asking, you'll need to do an exact search using wildcards, and I'm assuming you'll want to search inflected forms. Try this for starters:

 

"=?D?A*"

 

The question marks are character wildcards representing any consonant, and after each I've entered a vowel (qamas then patah). The asterisk wildcard at the end will pick up any combination of letters beyond that.

 

Hope this helps.

[Thomas]

Right on target, yes. Thank you.

[Thomas]

I need to modify this search a bit.

 

I want to find: a letter has a dagesh and shewa, and is preceded by a vowel. Using parentheses and <OR> operators didn't seem to get me what I need.

 

My pseudocode:

"=(?vowel1 <OR> ?vowel2 <OR> ?vowel3)?+dagesh+shewa

 

Thanks

 

 

Thomas,

 

To do what you're asking, you'll need to do an exact search using wildcards, and I'm assuming you'll want to search inflected forms. Try this for starters:

 

"=?D?A*"

 

The question marks are character wildcards representing any consonant, and after each I've entered a vowel (qamas then patah). The asterisk wildcard at the end will pick up any combination of letters beyond that.

 

Hope this helps.

[David Lang]

Thomas, the way to do this is not to use the OR command, but to use a question mark followed by parentheses. When you have parentheses immediately after the character wildcard, you can specify the characters that wildcard can match by placing those characters in parentheses.

 

For example, in English, the search ?(aeiou)* would find all words which begin with a vowel, since the question mark representing the first character has been constrained to be a vowel by only including vowels in the parentheses.

 

Now, to do the search you're wanting to do, you would use two questions marks. The first would represent the vowel, while the second would represent the consonant with the dagesh and shewa. The first question mark would be followed by parentheses enclosing whatever vowels you want to find. The following will find sere (E), seghol ®, and hatef segol (T). You could include all vowels if you like:

 

"=?)ERT(?;V*"

 

Note that the parentheses look reversed in English. It is the ERT which is enclosed in the reversed parentheses. The only other thing to note is that I included an asterisk wildcard at the end to allow for other characters after this particular combination of characters. You might also want to add an asterisk at the beginning depending on what you're looking for.

 

Hope this helps.

[Thomas]

Ok. This might just be a small bug, but when I search for:

‏"=*?(ַ)?ְּ*" which is "=*?)A(?;V*"

Search within Verse of Torah, I get 212 results. In the concordance in the Details window, I see a listing of אבד for Gen 37:34. The issue is, the word highlighted does not fit the search criteria. We know this, because the main search window does not return this verse since it does not meet the search criteria.

 

Also, to get the search to work, I had to add a * to the beginning as well. Accordance is so powerful; this is really very useful. Thanks for your help as I narrow my search down.

[Helen Brown]

The concordance will not be useful in this case, since it concords the lemmas of your hit words throughout eother your range or the entire text. It doe not list only the hits but each occurrence of each lemma.

[Thomas]

Ok, so I'm getting a handle on using this. I'm able to narrow my search down to nouns, but I want to exclude certain words, e.g. לילה.

Can I do a search like this that excludes one or more words? e.g. לילה and maybe רחב.

 

"=*?)D(?V*"@[noun ]

 

Thanks,

[Helen Brown]

You can add another @ followed by a hyphen and the word you want to exclude, or several words in parentheses separated from each other by commas).

[fred ovadia]

How do you search for a sequence of vowels say a Patah followed by a Sheva, and taking into account the associated consonants with or without a Dagesh?