Searching for specific forms

[Helen Brown]

Two users contacted me this week, wanting to search for Hebrew forms of Jerusalem that do not have yod in the inflected form. (I have to wonder if they are students in the same class? ) They were using a search entry like the first one shown:

but the results were not what they expected, so I recommended the second search string.

 

The first term is the lexical form for Jerusalem, and adding the equal sign (or checking the Use exact form box) specifies this lemma and excludes the Aramaic lemma with the _0 suffix.

 

The quotes around the second term indicate the inflected form (without a yod), but unchecking the Use exact form box allows for all the variants of pointing.

 

The difference between the two strings is that the first looks for verses that contain the lexical form and the inflected form in the same verse. It counts twice some verses that have two occurrences of Jerusalem, and in those cases, in theory, neither occurrence actually meets the desired criteria.

 

The correct second string looks for verses that contain the lexical form and the inflected form in the same word. It requires that each hit word have this lemma and this inflected form.

 

I know this seems complicated, let me illustrate with another example:

 

You want to look for verbs with the lemma מלך (to reign). If you use: מלך [VERB] you will find all the verses with any verb and any word with this lemma, such as king. Using @ to join the two terms ensures that the verbs you find actually have this lemma.

 

I hope this is helpful.