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Searching for Adjectives


CWW

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Hi,

I'm pretty new to Accordance so please excuse beginner questions.

I'm trying to find all the adjectives used by God to describe the condition of the human heart.

For example, in Gen 6:5 the heart is described as "evil" and in Exo 4:21, the heart is described as "hard".

What I'm trying to find out is how many such descriptions are there, and what is the count of each descriptor? Ultimately I'm trying to find out which is the most used description by God of the condition of the human heart.

Because of the many possibilities, I don't know where to begin to construct a search string.

What I'm doing now, is to search for "heart" (there are 726 hits in NAS95S) as going through the list of verses manually. Is there a more elegant way?

I should also say I'm an English user, not original languages.

Thanks very much in advance.

Wei

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I think I would try a Construct search which you can look up in the Help under Advanced Features: Graphical Searches

 

Put heart (and similar words) in the first column and * in the second

Put a WITHIN 2 above them

Put an INTER above them which limits the intervening words to what you specify, such as is, was, are, became...

heart.jpg

Click OK to perform the search in the linked Search window

 

Your results can then be analyzed by clicking Details/Analysis which lists all the words found after Heart in these conditions, and before if you click the Search Both Directions button on the Construct window.

 

A lazier, easier, way is to use a topical tool such as Nave's or the Topical textbook and just look up heart there, they already did the work for you.

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A lazier, easier, way is to use a topical tool such as Nave's or the Topical textbook and just look up heart there, they already did the work for you.

 

:D

 

Thanks Helen! I was so focused on using Search, I didn't even consider other tools! That was slightly embarrassing. However, the words Nave's uses are not necessarily the scriptural word. eg it uses "Diabolical" for verses like John 13:2 "the devil having already put into the heart ..." which is an interpretation for classifying of the text (not a bad one but not the one I'm looking for). And again, it doesn't tell me which is the most used description as not every verse reference is listed.

 

Actually, performing the construct you suggested returned some unexpected results like "heart of the earth", "says in his heart" because of the wildcard (*) but which are outside my desired criteria. Is it even possible to eliminate these kinds of results? Maybe limiting the wildcard word in the construct to adjectives or participles? I'm not even sure that would work.

 

Now, is there a way I can find the most used description from the search results? Would this be in the Details box? That's something else I need to learn how to best interpret and use.

 

Maybe my search criteria is too broad or too vague to define precisely. This is just the first real challenge I was hoping to solve with Accordance and I'm really curious to see if it could help.

 

Again, appreciate your patience and help.

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Yes, use the Details: Analysis to get the list of words.

 

You can limit the terms in the construct, certainly, but the only way to find adjectives or participles is to use a text that is tagged with that information. For that you must turn to the grammatically tagged original language texts, since no-one has bothered to do that on English translations.

 

These texts can be used even by someone with no knowledge of the languages, but I suggest you play with the demo texts first, to see if this is really what you want to do.

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