Change the lemma 3212 to 1980
AndyHubert opened this issue · 7 comments
I recently corresponded with Jason DeRouchie of Bethlehem College and Seminary on this question. He wrote as follows:
Yes, scholars do not affirm a ילךְ verbal root any more. Instead, they recognize that הלךְ acts like an original I-ו verb in certain conjugations of the Qal. I write in my Hebrew grammar on p. 198:
The very common common root הלךְ, “walk,” acts like an original I-ו verb in the Qal yiqtol, wayyiqtol, and imperative. For example, the Qal yiqtol 3ms and 3fs forms are יֵלֵךְ and תֵּלֵךְ, and the Qal wayyiqtol 3mp and 3fp are וַיֵּלְכוּ and וַתֵּלַכְנָה. (A similar situation occurs with הלךְ in all conjugations of the Hiphil––recall the form הוֹלִיךְ.)
Neither of the scholarly standard lexicons (HALOT and DCH) treat ילךְ as a root, so I would discourage its use in BibleArc. Feel free to follow-up with questions. I can develop any of my comments further if it will serve you.
I can make this change in the parsing project so that the lemmas will be updated in the xml that is produced from that. However, I first thought it would be good to bring it up for discussion.
I understand that 3212 is equivalent to 1980. If you follow it through to the lexicon, you will find it references the same entry in Brown, Driver, Briggs. However, one of the goals of the project is to maintain compatibility with Strong's dictionary, for the benefit of existing applications based on it. There are so many small websites that use it, and so many people unfamiliar with anything beyond Strong's, that maintaining this support was deemed desirable.
Help me understand how changing the lemma to strongs #1980 where it is currently 3212 would make it incompatible with existing applications? Have there not been dozen of other lemma corrections made?
There have been dozens of changes in lemmas. Here is the output the the script I recently ran to update the parsing database using the latest morphhb xml files. I didn't count them, but you can see that there are certainly dozens of lemma changes.
Back to the main discussion, however, I still am not understanding why changing the strongs number associated with a lemma to another valid strongs number would cause problems to the fidelity of the original strongs numbers or nullify the advantages of this dictionary. I am the developer of Biblearc.com and we certainly use strongs. Once I import the morphhb with parsings, a change like the one I propose here would simply cause the system to bring up the strongs info for הלך instead of ילך on the corrected words. Thus, I don't see how this would cause problems in the normal use cases. What am I not understanding?
If there is a legitimate argument for two distinct words here, then we certainly should not destroy the information of the distinction. However, I am not understanding that this is the case. As you said above, "3212 is equivalent to 1980."
It is true that a person might search for (3212|1980) together to get all the results, but that presupposes that they understand that this single word is divided into two different lemmas (in contrast to how things work with every other word). To bring the analogy to English, it is as if searching "come" includes results with "came," searching "bring" includes results with "brought," but searching "go" does not include results with "went." This inconsistency seems to me to be much more of a "bug" than a "feature." When someone clicks on the word הַהֹלֵךְ in Gen 2:14, and chooses to search this lemma, they expect all the results.
One sentence in your last comments which I do not understand is, "The point of the dictionary is that it is not limited to the lexical form of a word." But it is. There are not strongs entries for each conjugated form of each word, but only for each lemma.