lex form hiding hits

[Kristin]

I am having some confusion concerning lexical forms. In the past I had thought in order to find all the hits I needed to focus on lexical forms and not the key, but sometimes I notice that the key has more results. I will use Jeshua as an example. I wanted to find all the OT hits of this name, so I went to Neh 10:9 and did a key search on the name. Doing so brings 30 hits.

 

I wanted to make sure I was not missing any, however, so I then searched for the lex form and now I have only 28 hits? I then saw that my lex had one of those little numbers and said (יֵשׁוּעַ־1). Ok, great. I need ALL the lexical hits though. I know that I can get rid of the equals and get the root, but I am not looking for the root, per se, but the lexical form. So then I found (יֵשׁוּעַ־0) and also (יֵשׁוּעַ־2). Now that is finally 30.

 

If I try to get rid of the number and just simply look for the true lexical form of (יֵשׁוּעַ), why is the lexical form not finding ALL the lexical forms? The number separating them seems really arbitrary given that they have the same key, same vowels, and same translation. Is there a way to bypass the numbers without resorting to the roots?

 

Thank you for any clarity anyone is able to provide.

 

Kristin

[Ken Simpson]

Hi Kristin, the way you have posed the question is a little problematic. "To find all the hits" is a loaded term. A hit is the result of your search. I think you mean to find all the occurrences of a homograph of a lexeme. The point of the 0, 1, 2 suffixes is that there can be different semantic tokens attached to homographic lexemes. So (while this is NOT the case for Jeshua) Jeshua_0 could have a deifferent semantic range to Jeshua_1. So to be able to distinguish them is important. Plus some searches may just be for aramaic, or just Hebrew etc etc. Remember too that this system is given to us by Westminster-Groves, so we just can't change it wholesale.

 

The simple way of expanding the search to include all the forms (ie any of the numbers following the overstrike) is to let Accordance do the search for one of them, then backspace over the NUMBER ONLY and replace it with a question mark. (ie a single letter wildcard - I am pretty sure you could use a * as well, but you only need a ?.)

 

 

This will find all the occurrences of the homographic lexeme.

 

Does that make any sense? I will see if I can find an example where the numbers make a semantic difference.

 

[Ken Simpson]

I should have thought of this straight away! An example of this would be the word chesed.

 

Most of us think of chesed as loving-kindness (or loyalty, or covenant faithfulness etc etc). But as you can see, the same three consonants can mean reproach or disgrace (with a different vowel pattern in this case). So, which "hits" are you looking for? Most searches will not want to find disgrace if you are looking for love (now there's a Freudian thing to say).

 

Anyway, hope that helps clarify. Ask some more if it's still unclear or you want to explore some more on this.

 

[Kristin]

Hi @Ken Simpson, Thank you! The ? worked. Yes, you are correct that I should have phrased my question differently. I think my core issue is that while I agree that a word might have two different meanings warranting -0 or -1 or whatever, I tend to distrust it since I think sometimes there is a word is truly just one word, but some committee has decided that it is two words. Whether Strongs, or Kohlenberger, or Westminster-Groves, I am looking for ALL the lexeme hits so that I can decide myself if they are really two different words or not. Perhaps I sound like a distrusting person, and perhaps I am, but I always like to check and make sure that I agree with the keys and lexeme.

 

The ? worked perfectly though, so I will remember that with these number issues.

 

If you do not mind, one question I have is that I know while the -number is used for Hebrew words (such as Jeshua vs Jeshua vs Jeshua), sometimes it is used to show an Aramaic word. If I use the ? will it find Aramaic words also? I would imagine not since it is a different language (sort of), but I am not sure.

Kristin

[Ken Simpson]

Yes it will find Aramaic words. Any word with a 0 will be Aramaic. 
 

you can exclude the Aramaic by specifying the numerals directly or (in this case) excluding the 0

 

for example (I won’t try to transliterate)

 

yeshua_?(123) will find the words with 1 or 2 or 3 in the addit, and this would miss a 4 or 5 etc etc

 

yeshua_?(-0) would show all the lexemes but not Aramaic. 
 

Kristin, it’s always good to be a little sceptical and yes, they have made some decisions for us in these cases. All depends on what you want to do. So we can do it, but it’s just slightly more complex 🙂