A Computer-Generated Concordance to the Syriac New Testament, According to the British and Foreign Bible Society's Edition, Based on the SEDRA Database, 6 vols.

AuthorSokoloff, Michael

George Kiraz, well known for his recent efforts in adapting the Syriac language to the computer,(1) has now produced a computer-generated Key Word in Context (KWIC) concordance of the Syriac New Testament in six volumes, meant to be used by both Western scholars and the Syriac Christian communities which employ this language in their liturgy.(2) The first volume contains the introduction and the KWIC to the letters ?? the second volume, letters ?? the third volume, letters ?? and the fourth volume, letters ??. The fifth and sixth volumes contain a series of helpful indices: proper nouns, high frequency entries, English-Syriac index, index of Greek words. nominal lexical order, and alphabetical key.

Until recently, scholars working on Syriac texts have had to rely on their own collections of data to supplement that available in the lexica, even for biblical texts. Only in the past few decades have manually prepared concordances of portions of the Old Testament by various scholars appeared.(3) Though a manual concordance to the New Testament was actually prepared by A. Bonus, it was never published.(4)

Work of this type is now obsolete. The computer revolution in the humanities has made it feasible for some time now to prepare in a relatively short time concordances from machine readable texts which may be of interest to even a small number of scholars. While such works have been common for texts in European languages for years now, not many works of this type have yet appeared for Semitic texts.(5) The reason for this is that the production of a KWIC for a West Semitic vocalized or unvocalized text involves much more than just the preparation of an alphabetized list of words, but requires a morphological analysis of the words [i.e., strings of letters] in the text in order to produce a usefully arranged work, viz., an alphabetically arranged list in which the verbal roots are given according to their stems and all other words are listed according to their lexical entry.(6)

The author has given the reader very little information on the manner in which he prepared the concordance. In his short remarks (see p. xiii) he tells us that the Syriac Electronic Data Retrieval Archive (SEDRA) is a linguistic database designed specifically for the Syriac language, and that it contains linguistic information on roots and words transparent to any text. No additional information is given as to how the concordance was prepared, e.g., what special software...

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