Search Word (Flex) KJV seems bugged

[Enoch]

With my  12.2.8 Accordance there is what seems a bug to me, namely that if I search a verb by right click Search Word (Flex), the Elizabethan forms are omitted in the results. For example, with ASV or KJV if I put the cursor on trust and chose from the right click pop up menu Search Word (Flex), conjugated forms for trust appear in the results (e.g. trusted), but trusteth is omitted, as in Psalm 115:8.  Do these omissions cause faulty search statistics to be generated? Have these Elizabethan omissions been corrected in the latest Accordance version?

 

[Mark Allison]

A Flex search will often miss Elizabethan forms. That's why (for most cases) I prefer to use a word search with the wildcard character (trust*). 

[EricC]

Seems to me it'd be possible to program in those early modern English ("Elizabethan") forms, too. It's a finite number of endings. But maybe it's harder than it looks.

[Joel Brown]

Flex search is designed to easily find related words.  If the goal is accurate, specialized, statistics, then more exact searches should be done, so you know exactly what results you are getting.

[Enoch]

Flex search is designed to easily find related words.  If the goal is accurate, specialized, statistics, then more exact searches should be done, so you know exactly what results you are getting.

 

Well the flex search fails to find easily certain related words in an Elizabethan translation. Is it a bug in the system?

 

How would I find all the occurrences of a lexeme (like trust) in an Elizabethan text? 

[Solly]

For ASV or KJV try searching for "trust*". The asterisk means include trust with any ending of any length. Using the KJV, a flex search produced a result of 167 verses found and 170 total words. The search for trust* produced a result of 188 verses found and 191 total words.

 

Words found in the trust* search not found in the flex search were trustedst, trusteth, and trusty.

 

Shalom,

Joseph

[Mark Allison]

The FLEX search is useful, but it has limitations. It wasn't necessarily designed for precision, but as a "quick and dirty" way to find a broad spectrum of hits.
The WORDS search allows for greater precision, but it's a little more difficult to use, since an understanding of wildcard characters is required.

 

If you learn two simple wildcard characters, you'll probably never use the FLEX search again:

The asterisk ( * ) stands for zero-unlimited number of characters. So a search for trust* (as Joseph has described above) will find both "trust" and "trusteth" and any word that begins with the letters "trust".

 

The question mark ( ? ) stands for exactly one character. So z?? would find all three-letter words in a Text that begin with the letter "z" (Zer, Zia, Zin, Ziv, Ziz in the CSB).

 

So what do you do if you want to find a question mark (or any punctuation)? Put a period ( . ) in front of it. So .? will find all the questions in the text.

Edited January 25, 2020 by Mark Allison

[Solly]

Thanks for the additional information, Mark. I had forgotten the role the period played in this (I would have guessed backslash.) The Accordance approach is so much simpler that scripting a regular expression. In my senior years I forget so much of the command line protocol.

 

Happy for GUI,

Joseph

[Enoch]

Thanks a lot.  Of course "trusty" would mess up your stats if you wanted just verb forms.  Am I wrong in thinking that Accordance discriminates vs Elizabethan English?  Was it intentional to leave out the Elizabethan conjugated forms, or an original overlook?  Am I correct in thinking that Accordance does not want to go to the effort to make searches of Elizabethan texts equivalent to modern text searches?  I mean if there is a method to search lexeme (I don't know if that includes adjectives derived from verbs) for modern English texts, would you not wish to have the same system for Elizabethan texts, so that your stat system would be equivalent?

[Enoch]

The FLEX search is useful, but it has limitations. It wasn't necessarily designed for precision, but as a "quick and dirty" way to find a broad spectrum of hits.

The WORDS search allows for greater precision, but it's a little more difficult to use, since an understanding of wildcard characters is required.

 

If you learn two simple wildcard characters, you'll probably never use the FLEX search again:

 

The asterisk ( * ) stands for zero-unlimited number of characters. So a search for trust* (as Joseph has described above) will find both "trust" and "trusteth" and any word that begins with the letters "trust".

 

The question mark ( ? ) stands for exactly one character. So z?? would find all three-letter words in a Text that begin with the letter "z" (Zer, Zia, Zin, Ziv, Ziz in the CSB).

 

So what do you do if you want to find a question mark (or any punctuation)? Put a period ( . ) in front of it. So .? will find all the questions in the text.

Thanks for the info on questions.  I am thinking that often the interpretation of a sentence as a question or not, depends mostly on the context; so it may be largely an editorial decision.  But it would be an interesting project to save all the questions of the Bible & classify them (who asked it, to whom asked, rhetorical or not, etc.)  "Yea, hath God said . . . ?" There could be heated questions, as Moses to YHWH.

[Enoch]

A Flex search will often miss Elizabethan forms. That's why (for most cases) I prefer to use a word search with the wildcard character (trust*).

Thanks so much for the great suggestion.  Of course that would not succeed with so-called strong verbs. Sing* would give you singeth, but not sang or sung. Trust, troost, ist getrusten.