Greek Syntax: Lexham SGNT Expansions and Annotations

| Thu, December 29, 2005 | Misc.

Last week, I posted on the Lexham SGNT “running text”. I mentioned at that time that there are three primary pieces of the Lexham Syntactic Greek New Testament:

  • The Lexham Syntactic Greek New Testament
  • The Lexham Syntactic Greek New Testament: Sentence Analysis
  • The Lexham Syntactic Greek New Testament: Expansions and Annotations

Today it is time to look at the Expansions and Annotations resource. This resource is still in a state of flux, so the implementation may change somewhat between now and the time that the Lexham SGNT is released.

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Greek Syntax: Lexham SGNT Running Text

| Wed, December 21, 2005 | Misc.

Awhile back, I posted about the Lexham Syntactic Greek New Testament (Lexham SGNT). At that time, I mentioned I’d blog about the makeup of that project.

It’s been nearly two weeks since that post. But now it is time to make good and describe the pieces of the Lexham SGNT in a little more detail.

The Lexham SGNT consists of three primary resources. These are:
  • The Lexham Syntactic Greek New Testament
  • The Lexham Syntactic Greek New Testament: Sentence Analysis
  • The Lexham Syntactic Greek New Testament: Expansions and Annotations
This post details the first item in the above list, the Lexham Syntactic Greek New Testament (aka the “running text” of the Lexham SGNT).

Syntax: Thinking About Clause Boundaries

| Wed, December 14, 2005 | Misc.

When approaching a text, one of the initial steps of exegesis is to do some general background study, thus becoming familiar with the larger context of a passage. If I’m looking at a passage in First John, I should have a decent idea of the author, recipient and setting of the letter. Logos has several resources (commentaries, handbooks, dictionaries, encyclopedias, etc.) that should provide assistance with this general process.

After this initial step, according to many guides to NT exegesis (e.g. Fee’s NT Exegesis) the next step is to work through the the grammar and syntax of the passage. Some guides mention that one should read (and re-read, and re-read) the passage. One must be familiar with the current context and the larger context for exegesis to be effective.

When you’re familiar with the text through the reading (and re-reading) of it, you’ve arrived at the point where detailed picking apart of the text is required. This is the point where one really begins to consider issues of grammar and syntax of the original language.

There are existing resources to consult to learn these things; some are even available in Logos Bible Software. These should be consulted and applied. But detailed reading of a book that provides hints, clues and process for exegesis does not magically transform the reader into a competent and confident exegete of Scripture. This only happens through practice and repetition.

And this is why morphologically and syntactically annotated editions of the primary texts of the Hebrew Bible and the Greek New Testament are necessary. They provide an example for you to check your work against, to use in the sharpening of your own skills. This is very helpful when you don’t have a hard-grading seminary prof check your work for accuracy.

This article walks through some ways to think about clause boundaries using Logos Bible Software; comparing these to the information provided by the Lexham Syntactic Greek New Testament.

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Greek Syntax: Introducing the Lexham Syntactic Greek New Testament

| Fri, December 9, 2005 | Misc.

I’ve posted in the past regarding a project we’ve been working on with the good folks at OpenText.org; to make their syntactic analysis of the entire Greek New Testament available in Logos Bible Software. It is a massive project, and it will provide oodles of chunky syntactic goodness to Logos Bible Software users to inform and sharpen their studies of the New Testament.

But that isn’t all that we’ve got cookin’ on the Greek Syntax front. We’ve been working on our own syntactic analysis of the Greek New Testament. We’re calling it the Lexham Syntactic Greek New Testament; this post (including a video link, see below!) introduces the work and begins to discuss it in some more detail.

I should say that this project involves a lot of work, and that it will be released in stages as the work progresses. We waited until we had the first major chunk — the General (or Catholic) Epistles, Hebrews through Jude — to consider a release. The first release (as happenstance would have it, perfectly timed with Logos Bible Software 3.0! What serendipity!) will therefore include these books. We hope to release an update in the spring that will include data for the book of Revelation. After that, the Pauline Epistles will trickle out over the following year or so; other books after that. At least, that’s the plan for now.

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Block or Sentence Flow Diagrams

| Tue, December 6, 2005 | Training

Another feature in the upcoming LDLS 3.0 release has to do with sentence diagramming.
Yes, we’re aware that there are more ways to diagram a sentence than you can shake a stick at (pun intended). One of these methods is the “Block” or “Sentence Flow” diagram.

The linked video presentation walks through using the new feature. It is all contained within the present sentence diagrammer. The steps are simple:

  1. Create a New Sentence Diagram document (or open an existing one)
  2. Insert a passage
  3. When inserting a passage, select the “As Wrapping Columns” option
  4. Enter the passage and version information
  5. Click Insert Passage

That’s it. Now you can click and drag text around as you see fit. I should note that I didn’t think too much about this particular block diagram. Looking at it in retrospect, there are things that need to be done differently. But since it is an LDLS document, I can just open the diagram and edit it later to clean that stuff up.

Video: 950×750, Flash, approx. 2 megs.

One cool feature here is that you can insert more than one column of text. So, as I did in the video, you could insert one column of Greek text and another column of English text, and match them up.
Or — hold on to your hats — you could enter different accounts of an event in the synoptic gospels and block-diagram them in parallel. You can use the stick diagramming symbols (like, say, brackets, lines or arrows) to draw attention to parallel groups or features. On top of that, all of the Visual Markup features are available in the sentence diagrammer.

All done? Go to File | Export. Look, you can save it as a PDF to show your friends, or to put on your web page or blog!

Syntax Papers from 2005 ETS Conference

| Wed, November 30, 2005 | Misc.

As mentioned earlier on this blog, Eli and I presented papers at the meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS) describing how Logos is moving beyond the word level into syntax of the original languages.

Eli’s paper (approx. 350 KB PDF) discusses our approach to issues of syntax in general, using examples from the Andersen-Forbes database to illustrate major points of implementation.

Rick’s paper (approx. 1.4 MB PDF) provides information on both Greek syntax datasets that are being worked on and short examples (and screen captures) of how this information can be used.

Greek Syntax: Searching OpenText.org Material

| Mon, November 28, 2005 | Products, Training

I’ve briefly discussed searching OpenText.org material at the word level; this post discusses searching at the clause level, with word group level stuff in the mix.

There’s even a groovy video of the search I describe so you can see exactly what’s going on (see bottom of this article). One take, no cuts. This is done with the current beta version of Logos Bible Software (3.0 Beta 1) and an extra syntax searching component currently in development.

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Novel Use of Sentence Diagrammer

| Mon, November 21, 2005 | Misc.

So, the other day, I had printed out a sentence diagram of Mark 1.16-20 and was evaluating it while making coffee (triple americano, no milk or sugar messing it up) at the Logos espresso machine.

Heidie from accounting walks by. “What’s that?” she says. I reply, “Sentence diagrams.” “Oh” Heidie says, “it looks sort of like playoff brackets.”

I hadn’t ever thought of that. But you could use the sentence diagrammer to make playoff brackets for whatever. I hear the NFL season ends in a month or so; now you’ll be ready to chart your team’s path to the Super Bowl!

(If you have the Sentence Diagramming Addin you can download the file for editing! Just unzip it to “\My Documents\Libronix DLS\SentenceDiagrams”.)

Greek Syntax: Clauses in OpenText.org Material

| Mon, November 14, 2005 | Misc.

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted about Greek syntax. In the interim, Eli has been regaling us with graph theory and all sorts of other chunky syntactical goodness.
Well, the drought is over.

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Greek Syntax: Using OpenText.org Word Groups

| Tue, November 1, 2005 | Products, Training

Last week, I posted an article about “Word Groups” in the OpenText.org Syntactic Annotation. I promised some follow-up; and now it’s time for that.

There are obvious uses for this level of annotation in the realm of searching, but what about in just reading the text? Or in working through a passage exegetically?

The good news is that the visualization (graph) supports most operations you’re used to performing from a standard morphologically tagged Greek NT in Logos Bible Software. This article is about some of those options.

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