Biblical Greek Dictionary and Parsing Practice App (iOS)

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Jacob Rhoden
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Biblical Greek Dictionary and Parsing Practice App (iOS)

Post by Jacob Rhoden »

I have been slowly working on my own free Biblical Greek Dictionary App that I can use to speedily look up words that I either don't know, or words that I vaguely know but are obscured due to the morphological form they appear in. 😀

I've been using the app to work through physical books and texts that don't have a "tap to lookup" function. This week I am working on recording audio for at least the most common words—I am starting with Dr Randalls Reconstructed pronunciation. Although I am sure I don't have the pronunciation down perfectly, but I feel like I am getting there the more I practice. The app also has a "parsing quiz" function that still needs some work, but it is mostly working great.

The design of the app has been very much based on "What app would I have wanted when I was a student". I know there are quite a few teachers on here, so I would very much appreciate and value any constructive feedback that I could take on board to improve it.

https://biblicaltext.com/biblical-greek ... -practice/

David Fish
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Re: Biblical Greek Dictionary and Parsing Practice App (iOS)

Post by David Fish »

Jacob Rhoden wrote: August 11th, 2021, 10:00 pm
The design of the app has been very much based on "What app would I have wanted when I was a student". I know there are quite a few teachers on here, so I would very much appreciate and value any constructive feedback that I could take on board to improve it.
Jacob, this looks like a great app, something that my students may be interested in having while they are students (like, starting on Monday!). I will be adding this to my recommended bibliography. I haven't looked at the iOS app, just the web portion. I will certainly be showing this to students next week.
David Fish
Ozark Christian College
Joplin, MO
dfish@occ.edu
Stephen Carlson
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Re: Biblical Greek Dictionary and Parsing Practice App (iOS)

Post by Stephen Carlson »

Look pretty neat. I noticed that it tries to fill out the paradigmatic forms with this disclaimer:
Table entries in black are directly from parsed biblical text. Table entries in pink are computer AI generated guesses, and may not be accurate. Please use pink entries as as a guide only. If you spot an error, please flag this entry for review.
I'd like to know more about this AI, but it doesn't seem to be aware of the law of limitation, so instead of τῷ δαιμονίῳ we get τῳ δαιμόνιῳ, with the accent on the wrong syllable. Because datives and genitives singulars in this declension have long endings, either one, when attested, can supply the accentuation for the other.
Stephen C. Carlson, Ph.D.
Melbourne, Australia
Jacob Rhoden
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Re: Biblical Greek Dictionary and Parsing Practice App (iOS)

Post by Jacob Rhoden »

Hi Stephen,

Thanks for your feedback. I have set it up so it shows all endings that exist in the NT in black, and then for endings that are not in the NT, it attempts to infer what they should be. I am torn about this, the options are to leave those fields blank, or try to put in something that might be helpful for a beginner. I remember when I was a student and I was trying to practice putting endings on, I posted here in b-greek asking if there was any book or website that had a list like this (there wasn't, but I believe now there are a few).

Accents are one of my key weak points, I have Carsons book but I haven't had time to work through it yet. Once I get to that point, I expect I could code it to handle accents better. Perhaps the compromise in the short term, is to fill out the boxes, but strip all accents, (Jeremy Duff textbook style). At least that way there is something to reference.

I would appreciate your thoughts on this. If I just strip accents for unknown forms, perhaps the word and article should both be "faded" out and stripped of accent for now.

Regarding the target audience, yes the goal for the time being is simple tools for beginners. The dictionary is obviously not much use for detailed/advanced study. The same applies for the Biblical text used as well. I just want to create some resources that are fully completely free for anyone, including in developing countries, where people might not be able to afford to pay for NA28 (for example). So for the purpose of beginner study and reading practice, I am comfortable with just having the Byzantine Text and Nestle 1904, and I should put WH in there as well. (I did look at the SBLGNT but they have some "no digolot" rules.)
Stephen Carlson
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Re: Biblical Greek Dictionary and Parsing Practice App (iOS)

Post by Stephen Carlson »

I was just wondering if you had something sophisticated. The wiktionary pages for the Greek words tend to have declensions filled out. If you can scrape those, that might be an easy(ish) approach.
Stephen C. Carlson, Ph.D.
Melbourne, Australia
Jacob Rhoden
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Re: Biblical Greek Dictionary and Parsing Practice App (iOS)

Post by Jacob Rhoden »

The the legalities of scraping make me a little allergic to that option. Although word endings are technically facts that cant be copyrighted, wikipedia is technically under a CC license. Long term think I want to end up with a dictionary and data set that is 100% fully public domain so that it can be published and shared and used for research purposes without any restriction whatsoever. So I am trying to avoid getting tangled up with any grey areas.

I think it should be possible to auto-generate all of the endings and accents that are missing, Im just not quite at the point where I can do that with confidence. (Thus the compromise with the alternate colour for generated endings)
Daniel Semler
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Re: Biblical Greek Dictionary and Parsing Practice App (iOS)

Post by Daniel Semler »

Jacob Rhoden wrote: August 14th, 2021, 7:48 pm I think it should be possible to auto-generate all of the endings and accents that are missing, Im just not quite at the point where I can do that with confidence. (Thus the compromise with the alternate colour for generated endings)
Being a coder myself I hear you on the legalities of scraping.

For what is may be worth my own inclination would be to avoid presenting the material you are unsure of in an app intended for beginners. It will to some extent go in to peoples heads - and they'll forget the colour coding in their memory - and getting it out later is work that they needn't have to do, nor may fully complete. It would be better I think to indicate that unaccented words are present for the time being where the correct form is not yet producible in the code.

Thx
D
Jacob Rhoden
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Re: Biblical Greek Dictionary and Parsing Practice App (iOS)

Post by Jacob Rhoden »

It would be better I think to indicate that unaccented words are present for the time being where the correct form is not yet producible in the code.
Yes, iOS app deliberately doesnt add accents to words that don't appear in the NT, So it basically shows words with accents when the word appears in the Byzantine text. (I also added accents to common words that students need)

I just haven't applied that approach to the website yet. I am interested in Stephens thoughts about this type of approach. My feeling is accentless words are better than no words. But I am not sure everyone would feel the same way.

Image
upload
Jacob Rhoden
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Re: Biblical Greek Dictionary and Parsing Practice App (iOS)

Post by Jacob Rhoden »

I've changed the website to act like the iOS app for now. I would love to get the accents filled out ASAP, but yes it does need to be done right. I have started work on Dan Carsons Book on Accents, it is great, but its a bit tedious to work through. If anyone has other recommendations on accent resources I'd love to hear about them.
Ken M. Penner
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Re: Biblical Greek Dictionary and Parsing Practice App (iOS)

Post by Ken M. Penner »

Jacob Rhoden wrote: August 14th, 2021, 9:10 pmIf anyone has other recommendations on accent resources I'd love to hear about them.
Jacob Rhoden wrote: August 11th, 2021, 10:00 pmI would very much appreciate and value any constructive feedback that I could take on board to improve it.
I just want to make sure you know about James Tauber's work, specifically
https://github.com/jtauber/greek-inflexion and https://github.com/jtauber/greek-accentuation
Ken M. Penner
Professor and Chair of Religious Studies, St. Francis Xavier University
Co-Editor, Digital Biblical Studies
General Editor, Lexham English Septuagint
Co-Editor, Online Critical Pseudepigrapha pseudepigrapha.org
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