first letters of words in Hebrew construct search

[daniel.stoekl]

Hi! I am trying to find possible identifications for a Qumran fragment with letters that represent the beginnings of lines, so the beginnings of words. I know how to use construct search in Hebrew with the inflect box in order to find words with n to m words in between them that correspond to the wildcard search I set. But I do not find information how to add the criterion that these letters should be at the beginning of words. If I add a space before them, the tool still looks for the letters at the beginning of a morpheme, so at many different positions also inside a word. Many thanks for help. Daniel

[Timothy Jenney]

Hmmm..., I wonder if we should make a "space" ( ) a searchable character?

[Ken Simpson]

It would be nice to be able to specify the literal search as part of a construct too.

[Joel Brown]

Daniel, if you search for the letter followed by a star (*), won't this specify that the letter must be the beginning of the word?  i.e. *מ

[Timothy Jenney]

I searched for lamedh followed by an asterisk. It worked, mostly, though it consistently ignored a vav in front of the lamedh. It also found many places where the lamedh was in the second position, preceded by a radical other than vav. 

[Helen Brown]

Daniel's issue is that he wants to ignore the morphological separators between the prefix and the word, since he just wants to find the letter conbination. Only the literal search does that, but not in a Construct. Right now he would have to look either for the first letter as a prefix followed by a word starting with the second letter, OR a word with no prefix starting with the two letters. It can be done.

[daniel.stoekl]

thx for all the replies. division seems to follow morpheme rather than word boundaries. i need to search for 4 words of which I only know the first letter that are separated from each other by four to sixteen words. these four to sixteen words represent the rest of each line. can i do that with the indicated function? bgD

[Helen Brown]

Ideally you would be able to do it by adding Place 1 to each column, but this does not work because you need to expand the Scope in the Search tab in order to search across the line/verse boundaries. Then the Place is tied to the Scope so that it looks for each word at the head of the Chapter. The FIELD command in the Search tab also depends on the Scope. Unless we program the choice of the Scope for these two commands, there is no easy way to find this. I also tried with the CONTENTS command, but that requires the Verse scope as well.

 

I will discuss this with the developers.