Word count and Word definition in the BHS-corpus

[Dominik Paszkiet]

Dear all,

 

I tried to calculate the absolute number of words in Old Testament books (BHS corpus with Westminster Hebrew Morphology) with the formula: * <AND> [RANGE Book Name]

 

Are the words in the electronic BHS on Accordance Bible Software defined as character strings that are delimited by space characters or is each lexem counted as a new word?

 

Would enclitic personal pronouns ( e.g. אָבִ֔י), prepositions (e.g. בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית) and certain conjugations (e.g. וַיֹּ֥אמֶר) in the BHS-corpus be counted as separate words or is the whole construction (e.g. preposition + noun) conuted as one word?

 

I would be very, very grateful for an answer. Thank you very much!

 

Best regards,

Dominik Paszkiet

[Helen Brown]

There are several factors to consider in Hebrew word counts.

 

First of all, each prefix is counted as a separate word. Suffixes are NOT counted as they have no lemma which is the default search. If you want to include them, search for the inflected forms with "*" [RANGE gen 2:1].

 

Secondly, set your Bracketed words option (under the +) to ignore the words in brackets (keri) unless there aren't any as in your text, I think, the BHS-T with Apparatus. The HMT-W4 has them so those words will be counted twice if you do not ignore them.

 

Thirdly if you look at the Analytics: Word table in any language, I think it also counts punctuation in Total Words, so your method is more accurate.