Greek Form Generator

[Robb B]

I don't know if anyone here has heard of Kalos Software before, but basically what it does is generate Greek word forms or analyze forms and tell you what forms they could be. It's a pretty powerful tool and helpful when reading something with some rather obscure forms. I think it would be a great new feature for Accordance to either license this technology and bring it into the user interface or develop something along the same lines for Accordance. I realize that you can generate paradigms for many words using tagged texts, but you are, of course, limited to what actually occurs in the text. With this technology, you can generate forms for words regardless of the texts in which they appear (or don't appear, as the case may be). Thoughts? Plausibility discussion?

[jpkang]

Alas, I couldn't run either the PowerPC app or the Java version (it crashes under Leopard).

 

I can testify that I've benefited greatly over the years from the Perseus morphological tools and digital lexicons, which are based on a fairly broad corpus of classical Greek and Latin texts. So that's always a valuable resource when one is faced with an obscure or difficult form.

 

I think one major difficulty with generating paradigms programmatically is that they would run the risk of being misleading or simply incorrect, especially when there are actual differences in attested forms due, say, to dialectal variation and/or historic linguistic change.

 

Finally, I have used Accordance several times to predict the probable inflections of unattested ancient Hebrew verbal forms, and it is not easy nor certain!

[Robb B]

J.P.,

 

You have to modify the main .plif file to java version 1.6 to get it to run. I sent them an email letting them know about the bug and how to resolve it, but I haven't heard back.

 

As you said, no electronic tool will probably ever be perfect, but this one is very good. And, what's even more interesting about it, is how it takes into account dialectical variation and historical linguistic change. It will show you the Attic forms, for example, or separate out strong aorist forms. It's really a pretty nice tool (if you modify the .plif and get it to run!). Even with its (and any tool's like it) limitations, it would be a nice addition to Accordance that no other Bible software as such currently includes, at least, in my view.

[Rick Bennett]

You have to modify the main .plif file to java version 1.6 to get it to run.

 

I am curious to see this in action. Can you post instructions on how to do this, or email me?

 

Rick

[Robb B]

I am curious to see this in action. Can you post instructions on how to do this, or email me?

 

Rick

 

Sure. Go to the Kalos app file, control-click and choose "Show Package Contents." In Contents, open Info.plist with Property List Editor. Expand Java, double click the 1.5 in JVMVersion and type in 1.6. Save it. The app should now work. Let me know if you have any problems.

[Rick Bennett]

Sure. Go to the Kalos app file, control-click and choose "Show Package Contents." In Contents, open Info.plist with Property List Editor. Expand Java, double click the 1.5 in JVMVersion and type in 1.6. Save it. The app should now work. Let me know if you have any problems.

 

Thanks, that worked perfect. I couldn't find Property List Editor, so I just used BBEdit.

[Robb B]

I think you have to have the Developer Tools installed to use the Property List editor. Any basic text editor would do, though. Glad it's working!