| 
  • If you are citizen of an European Union member nation, you may not use this service unless you are at least 16 years old.

  • You already know Dokkio is an AI-powered assistant to organize & manage your digital files & messages. Very soon, Dokkio will support Outlook as well as One Drive. Check it out today!

View
 

Young's Analytical Lexicon

Page history last edited by John F. Felix 12 years, 6 months ago

Click here for a sneak peak of Young's Analytical Lexicon Logos 4 snaphot! 

 

Since the return of Personal Books in Logos Bible Software 4, the lexicon has taken a new direction and format, incorporating all the functionality of one of the best Bible software packages available. Back in '07 I undertook an exhaustive Internet search for an electronic version of Young's Analytical Concordance (YAC), but found none. There were even urban legends that a printed version existed that also added the Strong's numbering system to the ancient language words, though I'm convinced this is, as I said, legendary. After purchasing the print version of YAC, I was intriqued by his literal renderings of Greek and Hebrew/Aramaic words as found in the so-called Authorized Version or King James Version of the Bible. Now in 2010, someone has since put up freely on the Web page scans of the concordance. Of course, page scans are pictures and not searchable text, so the scans are of limited use, but the actual files are of such low resolution that an OCR program has great difficulty determinining even the English text.

 

I decided to undertake the arduous task of creating what I now call Young's Analytical Lexicon (YAL) from scratch. There are many software packages for the Bible student that allow concordancing, notably Logos Bible SoftwarePC Study Bible, etc., of not only the AV but also of many other popular English and other modern language translations. What is not available is a lexicon that finally brings together the AV (and frequently the Revised Version) English headword, the Greek or Hebrew/Aramaic word, the Strong's number, and the literal rendering of Robert Young. Anyone familiar with both the concordance and Young's Literal Translation (YLT), his own literal English translation of the Bible in the public domain, will have noticed that he does not really make much systematic use of the literal renderings of the ancient languages, as recorded in his analytical concordance, in his own translation. So, I consider the lexicon the first stage in eventually producing a new version of YLT, making full use of his literal word renderings, but without his idiosyncratic view of Hebrew verb tenses and other grammatical peculiarities.

 

Due to the quality of the printed typeface of the YAC, often it is difficult to determine the correct Hebrew pointings that Young considered for his concordance. There are definite differences between his and many other lexicons concerning what the lexical form of a given word should be, so I have used various means to electronically enlarge the typeface using a sophisticated camera that allows near-microscopic photographs, well beyond the range of only the most expensive industrial strength scanners, for select problem entries. Originally I wanted to reproduce the forms of the Hebrew and Greek lexemes as printed in the version of the concordance I own. However, I decided against this policy and have gone back and changed the lexemes to reflect the lexical forms as they are printed in modern lexicons. Frequently, the entry is just too ambiguous to determine what the precise entry is, so all final determinations are my own, arrived at by the best tools I have at my disposal.

 

Here is an example. The modern lexicons maintain that the lexical form of beshaggam (Gen 6:3) is:

 

 

Young's Analytical Concordance shows:

 

 

The latter scan looks to me like the entry should be, according to Young:

 

 

Very hard to tell. If the last case is Young's intention, then he is showing a different parsing from the definition he is offering in his concordance; one that is more in line with his own translation: "in their erring," rather than the form of the KJV ("for that he also"). His analytical concordance has the definition, under the heading ALSO, for that: "in that also" for the word in question. But is it 1) an actual printing error, 2) Young's error, 3) Young's actual intention, or 4) just a random smudge? What I decided to do in this case, and in others, is to offer the modern lexical form, and make a note of Young's variations, etc.

 

Young's concordance is unique in that it is arranged alphabetically according to the English word, rather than the ancient language word, or according to the Strong's number. In addition, Young provides all person and place names in the Bible. Electronically, it is possible to sort the entire new YAL lexicon by any of these columns, not just Young's original scheme. With over 1000 entries conpleted so far (and still on the A's), I am now acutely aware of just how massive such a project is, and I have learned to appreciate the amount of work involved for a scholar living in an age so far removed from modern technological advances.

 

The Logos 4 version now incorporates the pronunciation, as well as the biblical concordance information and detailed part-of-speech and verb tense information (as footnotes), so in a sense, it is the concordance, but it has the physical appearance of a lexicon. I hope that the geniuses at the Logos company will allow the sharing of these books sometime soon.

Comments (0)

You don't have permission to comment on this page.