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Metheg Search


josephhabib1

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Hey all,

 

I am having trouble finding all instances of a Metheg occurring underneath a shureq.

 

It seems that Accordance only finds methegs under consonants which also have vowels under them along with the Metheg. Would anyone know how to do this?

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I am not able to find an example of this occurring in the HMT-W4. Here is a search where you can find a metheg and a shuruk in the same word :

post-32023-0-36253500-1544627765_thumb.jpg

 

You get 53 hits and none show this phenomenon.

 

But if I combine them into one search :

 

post-32023-0-07876000-1544628102_thumb.jpg

 

I get told there are no such hits. I'm not 100% sure that form of the search is correct given the docs but it's consistent with the results of the previous search.

 

Thx

D

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Daniel, 

 

Thanks so much for trying this out. I know that there are about 259 occurrences of this phenomenon but I wanted to make sure I got every one. For an example, see Gen. 1:18, 30. 

I think the problem is that shuruk is a vowel, and you can't really search a character underneath a vowel. A general search for metheg yields examples where the metheg and another vowel are underneath a consonant.

 

I did find a way of getting the examples included in the hits, I just have no way of isolating them, so I have to sift through them the ole' fashioned way...which is taking foreverrrrrrrrrr.

 

But again, I really appreciate your reply!

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Ok, so I saw Gen 1:18 in a different search. The problem is that the search@search thing only finds them in the same word not on the same letter. I don't know of a way to do that I'm afraid. And yes my second search finds those whereas the first does not. I don't know why it does actually because it really should. The second search though finds tends of thousands of hits which is hardly helpful as you note. I tried a couple of other tweaks but I didn't get it much better.

 

I wonder if my first search above failing to find these cases is a bug.

 

Thx

D

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Yeah it's an interesting problem. I ended up having to just dump all the hits for my main search in word, find all the shureqs with methegs, and copy/paste them to a different word doc. I think accordance can't do it because it's the equivalent of trying to search for a vowel underneath a vowel! Maybe one of them will chime in give us the word from on high!

Edited by josephhabib1
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Hi Joseph,

 

  I had another shot at this and came up with this:

 

post-32023-0-17219900-1544673262_thumb.jpg

 

  It is not the same as the second search I posted. This I created because I became suspicious that the character I was entering as a metheg was not in fact a metheg. So I cut and pasted the example from Gen 1:18 and split it up applying the relevant . and @ and quotes in the right places. This actually does find what I expected my second query to find. It yields 272 hits in the HMT.

 

  There are several things going on. You cannot search for cantillation on a letter, only on a word. This is why the @ is used. Accents marks are ignored if entered with a search string, even in quotes with =, that is, an exact inflected search. The @ construction allows you to find a word, however specified, and then to find the specified accent anywhere on that word. This caused difficulty in getting them narrowed down to be together. However, in this case if one treats the case of ו being a whole word in itself, which it isn't always of course but bear with me, you can create a search for all those cases at least. And that is what this search is. Alas, of course you cannot just merrily add * on either side and get to the result you want because now the word is more than one character long and you get back to what you had.

 

  I even tried using the metheg character from the character input dialog - Window -> Characters menu. That also enters a character that looks like a metheg but is set way too far to the right. So I do not know what the character in the text actually is. I can only get this search to work by cut and paste as I described.

 

  Man ! this is killin' me ! Ok, there are two methegs ! One is set more to the right the other. The question is then, which one are you looking for. The one that works in my searches is produced by the Accordance character pallette, there called option-`a. The other one called option-`e - this is Unicode 5BD. Alas, it is also this latter one that the Ezra SIL keyboard produced. That's why I was having problems. However, looking at the Unicode code page I only see 5BD and it looks like it should be centered under the letter not offset to the right. Methinks there is something afoot in Yehudit.

 

  So I don't know what the option-`a character is. I also don't know why they both exist. Actually searching for each individually sheds some light. They are used according to positioning requirements. The one I think you want here is the one that was not easy to produce. I guess when converting Unicode input to the character encoding used in Accordance texts (Yehudit not Unicode) a decision had to be made which one to pick. And they picked the more numerous one but alas that had an unfortunate side-affect in this case.

 

  Overall this solves one mystery but we are ultimately limited by the cantillation search being limited to "somewhere in the word".

 

  It would be great if Accordance folks could chime in with confirmation or corrections.

 

Thx

D

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