Curious if BW can do this

[Joshua Luna]

A friend with another application was showing of his new toy a while back and kept asking me, "Can BibleWorks do this?" He knew I had recommended BibleWorks to the other pastor at the Church and I think he was trying to show off ;)

One feature that caught my eye (BW could do everything else and more... usually faster and with less screen paging imo) was the ability to produce glosses and morphology for an entire verse.

e.g. You could pull up a window that would give the words in a column with a gloss and morphology next to each word.

I thought this was interesting for a number of reasons. The first was the glosses because they were short and would be good for vocabulary. The other reasons was it could be useful to print. In many ways I would love to have a feature the exports verses from the Hebrew or Greek that lines them up in a way that is easy to work with for translating.

I am on BW5, so I am not sure what BW6 or 7 has in this regards; but it would be nice to be able to quickly export a version (like WTM) in a way that was in a column without doing the formatting yourself and the option to include the morphology longhand.

I know there have been a lot of changes since 5, and none of these are killer features (in many ways you get the same info, minus the glosses, by running the mouse right over the words). Just curious if BW is capable of something like this. (As for the glosses, is the vocabulary app in BW6 pulling definitions from a gloss list or how is that specifically done? TWOT's abbreviated definitions only is pretty short... guess I am just curious).

Maybe I should just upgrade BW7 and have all these questions answered :D

[jfidel]

Hi Joshua,

I cannot speak for 7.0. Version 6 has a command on the right mouse menu when over a Greek/Hebrew word to send verse to lexicon browser. This puts each word from the verse into a window along with a lexicon.

As to the vocab tool, in 6.0, I have enjoyed the tool, except creating vocab lists is not easy. It would be nice to select a passage of scripture and have the vocab list generated.

John Fidel

[Joshua Luna]

Thanks John! In BW5 you can send a verse to your default lexicon.

Your vocab suggestion sound good. On the vocab generation, where do the definations come from? Do you have to enter them or is there a "stock" gloss you can use (and modify)?

[Ben Spackman]

You can do this with any verse(s) and lexicon(s) of your choice in 6&7 using the report generator.

[Joe Fleener]

In the 6.0 & 7.0 flashcard module you can filter the vocab lists by a number of parameters. For example:

1. Verse Range
2. Frequency
3. Part of Speach

So I could create a set of flashcards containing only the verbs which occur in Ruth chapter 1 and occur fewer than 20 times in the Old Testament.

Once I have my flashcard set, I can then print them as a review sheet.

I have attached a simple example of the words from Gen 1:1.

The flashcard module contains simple glosses.

Now, what the flashcard module does not contain is morphological information.

Ben is correct you can get this via the Report Generator - you can do this in 5.0 was well.

However, the way the report is formatted is not the best. Rather than getting English words for the morphology you can the codes. Secondly the morphology and the vocab are not together in the report. Third the vocab are not simple glosses, but lexical entries.

I see both of these tools as very helpful, but serving two different purposes.

I think one or both could be modified to give you all you are looking for.

I would send your idea to the BW staff!

[Joshua Luna]

Another curiousity...

I noticed in a link for another piece of software that you can perform a search and then get a detailed analysis of the lexeme. e.g. If I did a search on the Hebrew bara' it would look something like this:



bara' 54x
Qal 38x
Perfect 19x
3rd Person 11x
Masc 11x
Singular 11x
Participle 13x
Masculine 13x
Singular 12x
Plural 1x
Piel 5x
Vav consecutive 2x
etc...


I am using BW5, and the Detailed Stats pulls up a nice graphical window showing the dispersion of the searched form(s) in a graph, but I found the above layout VERY useful.

BDB, Halot, etc... include this information, but BW also generates it--it is in list form in one of the result windows. I found a "tree" presentation very neat and appealing as a "visual" presentation and it seems BW could do this as it already generates the information, it would just be a matter of creating a window that parses the returned information. Sometimes the organization of data is as important as the data itself. (BW does a very good job of this, but I did find this one feature appealing as it gives a very detailed survey that can be browsed quickly or be used for more indepth and systematic review).

Have I overlooked this feature or is this something in v.6 or v.7?