About:
This is the latest 2023 iteration of a Latin grammar search tool for Swedenborg's works. It's designed to help people search the Latin text, with the ability to find all the instances of a word form's specific grammatical usage.
How to:
Try searching for the word ecclesia in the first search box. Choose Nouns and Adjectives, click Save, and then Search. You will see the search results. You'll see the book and section numbers in the left column, and the text of a selected result in lower right pane.
Search Types: There are two main types of searches -- a text search that doesn't use any grammar criteria, and one that does.
Text-only searches: The basic text search will show you all the occurrences of your search term in the works that you're searching.
- If you use an * as a wildcard, like this, eccles*, you will find all words that begin with eccles.
- If you enclose a text string in double-quotes, like this, "ex sola fide", you will find all words that match that whole string.
Grammar searches: If you would like to use grammar criteria in your search process, in the dropdown beside the search text box, make some choices, and save them. Your current choices will then show below the search box. When you run the search, only results that meet your criteria will be shown.
Multiple Search Terms: You can add more search terms by clicking on the plus button. If you are using several terms, enter one word in each text box. You get to choose a different set of grammar criteria for each search box.
Analyzer: If you want to see the possible sets of grammatical characteristics for your search word, use the "Analyze this word" button. It will pop up a page that shows you a table with those details.
Streets Broad and Narrow: Next on the page are two radio buttons. They allow you to run a broad "family search" or a narrower "just this word with this grammar" search. The family search is useful when you want to see occurrences of the word you entered, along with others that are formed from the same base. The narrow search gives you a way to see whether an exact word form for a chosen set of grammar criteria exists in the texts. (This differs slightly from a text-only search, which doesn't "do grammar".) NB: This version only supports one type for all the search terms.
Which works to search: Next, you can choose which works you want to search. NB: This version doesn't yet let you choose several individual works, but that feature is in the pipeline.
Search results.... You can show/hide text excerpts in the left column of results. By default, they're sorted by relevance, but you can change the sort criteria. There's a paging control at the bottom of the column that lets you navigate to see more results.
Reading Pane: In the bottom right pane, you can see your results in their context, and read through, result by result. You can go to the main reading view, bookmark results, make notes, check other translations, and find words in the page. And, there's highlighting!
Highlighting Key - Ambiguity:
No ambiguity - When a word form can only be from one Latin base/root, and one set of grammatical characteristics, it gets our normal yellow highlighting.
Internal ambiguity - pink highlights are for word forms that have the same spelling | same base word, but could potentially have different grammatical characteristics.
External ambiguity - blue highlights apply when word forms are spelled the same, but could be formed from different bases.
Double ambiguity - purple highlights show you the words that could be either same-spelling | same-root | different-grammar, or same-spelling | different-root.
Credits:
NeoSearch started life in the late 1980's as a hypercard stack created by Jonathan Rose. In the 90's, it was re-engineered as a Mac application, "NeoSearch", as Jonathan worked with Chuck Ebert and his STAIRS team at Bryn Athyn College. There were several releases of the Mac software, and then a first web version in 2016. Many other people have helped along the way, including John Chadwick, Mattias Fornander, Bjornar Larsen, Steve Simons, Joshua Schnarr, Michael Pigg, Lisa Hyatt Cooper, Stuart Shotwell, Josephine Appelgren, Ben Cole, the New Christian Bible Study team, and more.
