Strange lexicon behaviour

[wie]

I found the following curiosity:
When you move the mouse over the Greek OU (= "no/not"), in the analysis window below the entry for OU also the entry for ELEEW is shown.

Here is a screenshot:
http://666kb.com/i/bl5xa27bt090ibvjb.gif

I told the service but they are not able to reproduce it.
I experience this on two different computers with different BW8 versions.
It happens with all Greek versions and all verses containing OU.

Anybody else can reproduce this?

[SkipB]

I am seeing the same thing, except there is an entry for laos and egw after the entry for ouk.

[Michael Hanel]

I can't reproduce it. In my analysis window I am only using BDAG.


But if I change my default lexicon to Friberg, I can.

[MBushell]

I found the following curiosity:
When you move the mouse over the Greek OU (= "no/not"), in the analysis window below the entry for OU also the entry for ELEEW is shown.

Here is a screenshot:
http://666kb.com/i/bl5xa27bt090ibvjb.gif

I told the service but they are not able to reproduce it.
I experience this on two different computers with different BW8 versions.
It happens with all Greek versions and all verses containing OU.

Anybody else can reproduce this?

Wieland, this is probably a result of one of the Greek alias definitions (TOOLS|Interface Settings). When a lexical entry is displayed the program checks the alias list. This enables the program to find more entries because lexicons don't always follow the same spelling and sometimes they combine entries. This can result in some strange side effects, like an alias of an alias giving unexpected results. In this case one of the lexicons or Greek databases has an entry that associates ou with laos. I can't be more specific than that without investigating, which I am willing to do if it is necessary. In general the program tries to list entries that are of interest in context but it isn't foolproof. But it works better than it would without the feature.
Mike

[wie]

Yup, that was it.
Look into the file. It has these entries:

Ouv!evlee,w ouv evlee,w
Ouv!lao,j!evgw, ouv lao,j evgw,

After I deleted these, the error was gone.

But there are other strange entries like
o`!VAfrodi,sioj o` VAfrodi,sioj
o`!avdelfo,j o` avdelfo,j
which do not produce this error.

What are these good for?

[Michael Hanel]

Yup, that was it.
Look into the file. It has these entries:

Ouv!evlee,w ouv evlee,w
Ouv!lao,j!evgw, ouv lao,j evgw,

After I deleted these, the error was gone.

But there are other strange entries like
o`!VAfrodi,sioj o` VAfrodi,sioj
o`!avdelfo,j o` avdelfo,j
which do not produce this error.

What are these good for?

I assume there is a place in one of the Greek texts or lexica where crasis occurs making the two words (definite article + noun) into one word. The way BibleWorks marks this in lemmas when one word is really parsed into two words is WORD1+WORD2.

[Mark Eddy]

Actually I looked into this very thing a couple months ago and concluded (in the Hosea passage) that the two Greek alias entries are completely unnecessary, since each of the words of the compound noun is in the same verse in an uncompounded form. So I have removed these lines from the Greek alias file (I've also added dozens of new lines). I just haven't sent the updated file to Michael. I'll do it tonight. If he agrees with my conclusion, he can have it in the updater in a couple days.
Thanks for reinforcing my observation that these are faulty Greek alias entries.

The other entries which Wieland cited are there for Josephus. E.g. in Antiquities 1:1 the word τἀδελφοῦ occurs. This and other crasis forms in Josephus (and a few in the LXX) need the extra Greek alias lines. You can remove them, if you wish, but then when you come to crasis forms no lexicon entries will display in the analysis window. I have altered some of these lines in the Greek alias file which I use (dropping the article as a separate word). But I left most of them in the file which I am sending to Michael, since some beginning Greek users might be confused if their lexicon did not display entries for both parts of the crasis.

Mark Eddy

[wie]

Ok, thanks for clearing this up.
The only unanswered questions left are, why I saw this compound form (OU+ELEEW) at every OU and why did SkipB see OU+LAOS+EGW instead?

[Mark Eddy]

Wieland,
You ask the most difficult question: "why?"
Perhaps not even the programmers know "why?" But I know that only one Greek alias line works for any given lemma. So only one alias entry which contains the word ouv works on any one computer. It appears to have something to do with the order in which your computer loads (or reads) the Greek alias file.
For example, there are many entries in the Greek alias file which contain the definite article. Only one of them will display when you put the cursor over a definite article in the browse window. As I deleted the definite article from a number of lines in the Greek alias file, the alias which "works" kept changing. On my computer I got it down to displaying a lemma which is only in LS and LSJM, so that with most lexicons the user would not notice the anomaly. But I found that if I copied the same Greek alias file to my other computer, a different lemma showed up. As Paul Harvey used to say here in America on radio: "just what, not why."
Mark Eddy