COUNT and the number of roots in BDB

[Martin Smith]

The COUNT command does not appear to be supported as a command within the BDB module. I'd like to find out the number of roots in the BDB lexicon. How would I do this? Related to this, is there a way to query for the total number of distinct words related to all the BDB roots? Also, can the same query be done against BDAG for Greek words? Thanks for any pointers.

 

[Timothy Jenney]

I'm guessing somewhere just under 10,735.

 

I used the following search: ‏* ‎<WITHIN 1 Words>‏ ‎[FIELD BEGIN]‏ (reversed, of course, since it was in Hebrew). Since I selected the Hebrew Entry field, the hit count indicates the number of Hebrew entries. They aren't all roots though. Many are just individual entries—and I noticed the radical at the beginning of each section was also counted. Still, it gets us a bit nearer to your query.

 

[Mark Allison]

If you want to constrain your search to three-letter roots, you might want to refine the search a little: [FIELD BEGIN] <Within 2 Words> ???

 

I used the "Within" command because some of the words are bracketed, and you want to account for that. The question mark represents exactly one letter, so three question marks finds words with only three letters.

Edited April 21, 2016 by Mark Allison

[Ken Simpson]

Tim and Mark have good workarounds, but yes you are right, as far as I understand, the + prefix for a search is not supported in tools because the text itself does not have a tag for the hebrew. If you try and get an instant details for any of the BDB entries, you will find they have a translit, but no parsing, root or lexical information in ID.

 

At least that’s how I understand it all.

[Mark Allison]

Ken is correct. Root searches are only available in original language tagged texts.

[Martin Smith]

Thank you all. I'll work with the suggestions and post back if I find any useful refinement.