Word prefixes not always working in Biblical Terms tool

Question

In the Biblical Terms tool, I have some words where the Word prefixes and suffixes work, but others where they don’t.

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The word “death” (moot) has most occurrences found because these prefixes are defined for ignoring the article at the beginning of the word:

So “al-moot” and “l-moot” are matched like this:

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We have the identical situation for the word “altar” (madbah), but those occurrences are not matching:

What is the difference?

Is there a way that we could treat the hyphen as an actual word separation, so we wouldn’t have to use the prefixes at all?

Answer 1

Not sure if this is expected, but it looks like the difference is that the madbah has an asterisk at the end. So the word is trying to use the asterisk and the prefix. I believe the wild card asterisk takes precedence. Add just the madbah (without asterisk) and see if that works.

Comments

That seemed to make sense, anon848905, especially in light of jeffh S’s video which talked about the 3 different systems for matching terms. In the video it seems like having a term with an asterisk means that it would use the first (wildcard) system, and so it would not use the prefixes.

But I’m speaking in the past tense… because this morning, after shifting back and forth between different projects and different key terms lists, I see this:

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So madbah* is still only there with the asterisk, but now for some reason all of those other forms with the al- and l- prefixes are being matched!

Anyone have another theory?

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The strange thing about the last screen shot is that it doesn’t include the prefixes. What I found is that if I remove the hyphen from the word medial punctuation in the Language settings then I get the results you show. (Note that this only showed after I closed and restarted Paratext.)
I believe that what is now happening is that since the hyphen is not considered part of a word it is ignored and the asterisk rules take over allowing the root to be highlighted.
I stick with my previous idea that if you want to use the prefixes for these words you would need to include the hyphen in word medial (and restart Paratext), and add madbah without an asterisk to the glosses.

Answer 2

Actually, we don’t really care whether we “use the prefixes” or not, we just want to make sure that the biblical term equivalents are matching, even if the “al-” or “l-” prefixes are there on the word. And yes, it appears that if the hyphen is NOT included in the word medial punctuation, then the “al” or “l” are treated as separate words, and the equivalents match, whether or not an asterisk is included. So I think we’re good now. Thanks!

Comments

Just for completeness of the topic, if you are using words that have prefixes and you don’t really need to use specific prefixes then you could enter the words with an asterisk at the beginning and end. This should find both prefixes and suffixes.