Searching between the fields in online lexica?

Here you can discuss all things Ancient Greek. Use this board to ask questions about grammar, discuss learning strategies, get help with a difficult passage of Greek, and more.
Post Reply
User avatar
ἑκηβόλος
Textkit Zealot
Posts: 969
Joined: Wed Aug 07, 2013 10:19 am
Contact:

Searching between the fields in online lexica?

Post by ἑκηβόλος »

Is there a way to search for parts of the entries which are neither lemmata nor meanings in an online version of LSJ? I want like to be able to search for something as non-specific as "ii" and to get heaps of nonsensical results. Then perhaps to be able to search within the returned results.

Both Perseus and TLG seem to be too efficient and clean in their categorisation of elements into data fields. I realise that the quality and consistency of data in lexica ranges quite a bit for different pieces of information given in different entries - with lemmata and meanings being the most reliable, but I do also want to search for a few things that do not belong in those two fields too.
τί δὲ ἀγαθὸν τῇ πομφόλυγι συνεστώσῃ ἢ κακὸν διαλυθείσῃ;

User avatar
Barry Hofstetter
Textkit Zealot
Posts: 1739
Joined: Thu Aug 15, 2013 12:22 pm

Re: Searching between the fields in online lexica?

Post by Barry Hofstetter »

Would wildcards work, something like *ii* or perhaps enclosing your search string in quotation marks, "ii"?
N.E. Barry Hofstetter

Cuncta mortalia incerta...

User avatar
jeidsath
Textkit Zealot
Posts: 5332
Joined: Mon Dec 30, 2013 2:42 pm
Location: Γαλεήπολις, Οὐισκόνσιν

Re: Searching between the fields in online lexica?

Post by jeidsath »

Download the full text of the LSJ here and search in your favorite text editor.
“One might get one’s Greek from the very lips of Homer and Plato." "In which case they would certainly plough you for the Little-go. The German scholars have improved Greek so much.”

Joel Eidsath -- jeidsath@gmail.com

polemistes
Textkit Neophyte
Posts: 91
Joined: Thu Oct 15, 2015 3:31 pm

Re: Searching between the fields in online lexica?

Post by polemistes »

I get a lot of results when searching for "ii" at TLG's full corpus textual search. Of course most of the results are inflected and not dictionary forms, and you need to have access to the full corpus search to get it. I don't know if that would be useful for you? I get things like "διιπετέος", "διιστᾶι", "Εὐποιίας" and "Διί".

User avatar
ἑκηβόλος
Textkit Zealot
Posts: 969
Joined: Wed Aug 07, 2013 10:19 am
Contact:

Re: Searching between the fields in online lexica?

Post by ἑκηβόλος »

Barry Hofstetter wrote:Would wildcards work, something like *ii* or perhaps enclosing your search string in quotation marks, "ii"?
An interesting experiment.

In TLG, with out without the wildcard markers, a search still only return ὡροσκόπησις, which apparently is because of corrupt?? / incorrect inclusion of the "II" in the meaning field.

In Perseus, one specifies where in the word a string should occur, rather than using wildcats. If just a double ii is specified, then, only ἀναδέω is returned, presumably also because of misalligned data in this section,
  • II. ἀναδῆσαι τὴν πατριὴν ἐς ἑκκαιδέκατον θεόν trace one's family to a god in the sixteenth generation, Hdt.2.143.
In Perseus, with the wildcard option, a search returns Latin genitives in scientific names, etc., ie words with "ii" included in one word of the definition.

Both attempts at wildcards confirms my belief that searching is limited to fields.

Perhaps a clearer example is that in the entry for LSJ, "Corinth" is included in the dictionary entry for ἄναξ, but it will not turn up is the English of the definitions is searched for "Corinth", because "IG4.236 (Corinth)" is a type of data other than the definitional data.
τί δὲ ἀγαθὸν τῇ πομφόλυγι συνεστώσῃ ἢ κακὸν διαλυθείσῃ;

User avatar
ἑκηβόλος
Textkit Zealot
Posts: 969
Joined: Wed Aug 07, 2013 10:19 am
Contact:

Re: Searching between the fields in online lexica?

Post by ἑκηβόλος »

polemistes wrote:I get a lot of results when searching for "ii" at TLG's full corpus textual search. Of course most of the results are inflected and not dictionary forms, and you need to have access to the full corpus search to get it. I don't know if that would be useful for you? I get things like "διιπετέος", "διιστᾶι", "Εὐποιίας" and "Διί".
That search capability of the lemmata is something that I will have to try in the future. Trying it in the public version only reveals data errors in ἑξᾰμηνιαῖος and φρυκτωρός.

Out of curiosity, in the full version is it also possble to search for, say ϝάναξ or Κόρϝα from within their respective entries?

For me, for now, Perseus is capable of a similar search of the lemmata, but in this case, the diairesis on the second iota of the LSJ entries is part if a long-standing indexing problem for characters with the diairesis, between search results and dictionary entries for the Perseus LSJ searching, but not for those entries going to the Middle.
τί δὲ ἀγαθὸν τῇ πομφόλυγι συνεστώσῃ ἢ κακὸν διαλυθείσῃ;

polemistes
Textkit Neophyte
Posts: 91
Joined: Thu Oct 15, 2015 3:31 pm

Re: Searching between the fields in online lexica?

Post by polemistes »

I can't search for ϝ anywhere in TLG.

User avatar
jeidsath
Textkit Zealot
Posts: 5332
Joined: Mon Dec 30, 2013 2:42 pm
Location: Γαλεήπολις, Οὐισκόνσιν

Re: Searching between the fields in online lexica?

Post by jeidsath »

For the entries with ϝ, see this post: http://www.textkit.com/greek-latin-foru ... 36#p189772
“One might get one’s Greek from the very lips of Homer and Plato." "In which case they would certainly plough you for the Little-go. The German scholars have improved Greek so much.”

Joel Eidsath -- jeidsath@gmail.com

User avatar
opoudjis
Textkit Member
Posts: 116
Joined: Tue Oct 03, 2017 2:54 am

Re: Searching between the fields in online lexica?

Post by opoudjis »

polemistes wrote:I can't search for ϝ anywhere in TLG.
I no longer work there, but (a) I could have sworn we mapped ϝ back to Beta code for search (which the texts are underlyingly in); (b) if in doubt, try Beta Code. Digamma in Beta code is V.

User avatar
opoudjis
Textkit Member
Posts: 116
Joined: Tue Oct 03, 2017 2:54 am

Re: Searching between the fields in online lexica?

Post by opoudjis »

ἑκηβόλος wrote:Both Perseus and TLG seem to be too efficient and clean in their categorisation of elements into data fields.
Indeed: a lot of the ii's used to denote different meaning fields, for example, were TEI markup in the version of the LSJ that the TLG got from Perseus; and the TLG version reflects years of debugging the markup further, so it would have gotten even more "clean". (Not perfect still, as Hekebolos reports!)

Joel is right: your best bet is to do a text search through a downloaded version of the marked up LSJ. The Morpheus distro from Perseus should include *somewhere* their original TEI version; it will not have the TLG corrections and improvements, but it will still have more searchable text than an archive.org OCR.

Post Reply