How can I make an exhaustive concordance?

Question

I’m trying to make an exhaustive concordance to help in a text revision and don’t know where to turn. I had hoped that Concordance Builder could help me, but judging by the document “UsingConcordanceBuilder,” (18/06/2009 version which is still current on http://paratext.org/support/documentation) it appears that CB is not the tool to use, for it says in a footnote on page 32 “An exhaustive concordance includes every reference to every word in every book of the Bible. There are better ways of making these than using ConcordanceBuilder.”

Can someone please tell me how to make an exhaustive concordance? What is the “better way” that the help document refers to?

In actual fact, I don’t REALLY want a completely exhaustive concordance. What I want is a list of every word in the text (in this sense I want it to be exhaustive), but I only want the context for the first five (or so) occurrences of the word.

Thanks for any help y’all can give!
James+Ashley

Answer 1

Dear James+Ashley,

Do you want to create something for print/publication, or do you just want to work with it on your computer?

If it’s just for you to use on your computer, then I know something which might work. About 8 years ago I found Bibledit http://bibledit.org/ to be very helpful for its concordance feature. If I remember correctly, it can create an HTML file with all words in your Bible. Clicking on a word opens a window which contains a list of all of the passages containing that word. I think that list contained a few words of context too. I imported the wordlist into WeSay and used it as the basis for beginning a Bible dictionary. Clicking on a link in the right field in WeSay opened Bibledit with a concordance search for that word.

I haven’t used Bibledit in a while, so don’t know if that feature is still there.

LivingField

Comments

Thanks, LivingField, but I’m really looking for something that can create a printable document that I can share with people who don’t have computers. Weeding out the names, I’ve got around 2,400 words. Doing a quick computation based on the word counts (only 1740 occur more than 5 times), I’m reckoning that I’d end up with some 10,600 lines or about 160 pages – so I wouldn’t be making many copies. But I do need to make a few for the people who have agreed to help with this project.

Any further ideas would be appreciated.

Thanks again,

James+Ashley

Answer 2

The docs are right, CB is not the right tool for this.

If you really want to list every word in the text (i.e. every surface form) then this simply an exercise in creating the word list for the project and then extracting the context for the first five references. I’m not aware of a tool that will do that but it’s not that hard in principle provided you can write the code you need to do it.

If by ‘every word’ you mean every (disambiguated?) lemma then it gets a little harder. Again, there isn’t a tool designed to do this directly but if your project has worked with the interlinear to parse the wordlist into stems and morphs then you may have at least some of the raw material to hand.

Message me off list if you want talk in more detail. Blessings, anon907613 R.