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Hebrew Verbs that occur in one stem and not another


RobM

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Does anyone know how to search for all the verbs that occur in the Niphal but that also do not occur in the Qal?

 

The best thing I could come up with is the following:

 

In one tab, search for all verbs that are in the Niphal ([Verb Nifal]).

In a second tab, do a Hits search for all verbs that occur in the Qal from among

the verbs that occur in the Niphal ([Verb Qal] @[HITS Nifal Verbs]).

Open instant details for each tab, click on the

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Brilliant (as usual), David!

 

Most of this reply is not directly relevant to this query, especially since David has a direct solution, but may come in handy in other situations:

 

One way to save time in weeding out duplicates in long lists of Analysis tab results would be to copy and paste them to a window in TextWrangler (or its commercial sibling BBEdit), and then do the following:

 

1. Text menu > Sort Lines...

 

2. Search menu > Find... and do a grep search for

^([^\r]+?)\d+\r\1\d+\r (this regular expression looks for duplicate lines, ignoring the trailing hit count digits)

and replace with nothing. (If you learn grep, you can do all kinds of cool things like this, and customize the expression for different kinds of text)

 

In the scenario Rob describes, this leaves the 123 lemmas and a little bit of extra text from the Analysis tab.

 

--

 

What follows is food for thought and not a recommended research technique:

 

For fun, I also tried searching BDB (abridged) and BDB Complete on the English Content field using the phrase

Qal <NOT> Niph

and HALOT, on the same field, for

Qal <NOT> Nif

 

In theory, this should yield all entries where the Qal is discussed but not the Niphal/Nifal. But owing to the different content and the vagaries of dictionary-writing, the hit count is different (869 hits in abridged BDB; 961 hits in BDB Complete; 1326 hits in HALOT). One has to take into account, for example, that these words also occur in articles for non-verbal parts of speech, e.g. Heb. n.f. ‏מִבְדָּלָה [strong's H3995], which HALOT files under ‏מִבְדָּלוֹת. If this were even remotely accurate, one could at least do a systematic study through the dictionary of these types of verbs to see if they clustered around certain semantic domains... So much for reverse semantic-morphological-pattern-lookups with a half-twist!

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Rob,

 

Back in December, I wrote an entire blog post about this very search. Check it out:

 

http://www.accordancebible.com/3312562

 

You know, I seem to remember reading that blog post in December. I had completely forgotten about it. I guess somethings don't sink in very deeply until it's something you really want or need.

 

Thanks for your help and your blog posts, they are very helpful!

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