A concordance is an
alphabetical
Alphabetical order is a system whereby character strings are placed in order based on the position of the characters in the conventional ordering of an alphabet. It is one of the methods of collation. In mathematics, a lexicographical order is t ...
list of the principal
word
A word is a basic element of language that carries an semantics, objective or pragmatics, practical semantics, meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of w ...
s used in a book or body of work, listing every instance of each word with its immediate
context
Context may refer to:
* Context (language use), the relevant constraints of the communicative situation that influence language use, language variation, and discourse summary
Computing
* Context (computing), the virtual environment required to su ...
. Concordances have been compiled only for works of special importance, such as the
Vedas
upright=1.2, The Vedas are ancient Sanskrit texts of Hinduism. Above: A page from the '' Atharvaveda''.
The Vedas (, , ) are a large body of religious texts originating in ancient India. Composed in Vedic Sanskrit, the texts constitute the ...
,
Bible
The Bible (from Koine Greek , , 'the books') is a collection of religious texts or scriptures that are held to be sacred in Christianity, Judaism, Samaritanism, and many other religions. The Bible is an anthologya compilation of texts of a ...
,
Qur'an
The Quran (, ; Standard Arabic: , Quranic Arabic: , , 'the recitation'), also romanized Qur'an or Koran, is the central religious text of Islam, believed by Muslims to be a revelation from God. It is organized in 114 chapters (pl.: , sing. ...
or the works of
Shakespeare
William Shakespeare ( 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's nation ...
,
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of ...
or classical Latin and Greek authors, because of the time, difficulty, and expense involved in creating a concordance in the pre-
computer
A computer is a machine that can be programmed to Execution (computing), carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (computation) automatically. Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as C ...
era.
![Mordechai nathan hebrew latin concordance](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b3/Mordechai_nathan_hebrew_latin_concordance.jpg)
A concordance is more than an
index
Index (or its plural form indices) may refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media Fictional entities
* Index (''A Certain Magical Index''), a character in the light novel series ''A Certain Magical Index''
* The Index, an item on a Halo megastru ...
, with additional material such as commentary, definitions and topical
cross-indexing which makes producing one a labor-intensive process even when assisted by computers.
In the precomputing era,
search
Searching or search may refer to:
Computing technology
* Search algorithm, including keyword search
** :Search algorithms
* Search and optimization for problem solving in artificial intelligence
* Search engine technology, software for findi ...
technology was unavailable, and a concordance offered readers of long works such as the Bible something comparable to search results for every word that they would have been likely to search for. Today, the ability to combine the result of queries concerning multiple terms (such as searching for words near other words) has reduced interest in concordance publishing. In addition, mathematical techniques such as
latent semantic indexing
Latent semantic analysis (LSA) is a technique in natural language processing, in particular distributional semantics, of analyzing relationships between a set of documents and the terms they contain by producing a set of concepts related to the do ...
have been proposed as a means of automatically identifying linguistic information based on word context.
A bilingual concordance is a concordance based on
aligned parallel text.
A topical concordance is a list of subjects that a book covers (usually The Bible), with the immediate context of the coverage of those subjects. Unlike a traditional concordance, the indexed word does not have to appear in the verse. The best-known topical concordance is
Nave's Topical Bible
Nave's Topical Bible is a book written by Orville James Nave (1841–1917) and published by Thomas Nelson Publishers. Nave was a chaplain in the United States Army and referred to his work as "the result of fourteen years of delight and untiri ...
.
The first
Bible concordance
A Bible concordance is a concordance, or verbal index, to the Bible. A simple form lists Biblical words alphabetically, with indications to enable the inquirer to find the passages of the Bible where the words occur.
Concordances may be for the ...
was compiled for the
Vulgate
The Vulgate (; also called (Bible in common tongue), ) is a late-4th-century Latin translation of the Bible.
The Vulgate is largely the work of Jerome who, in 382, had been commissioned by Pope Damasus I to revise the Gospels u ...
Bible by
Hugh of St Cher (d.1262), who employed 500 friars to assist him. In 1448, Rabbi Mordecai Nathan completed a concordance to the Hebrew Bible. It took him ten years. A concordance to the Greek New Testament was published in 1599 by
Henry Stephens, and the Septuagint was done a couple of years later by Conrad Kircher in 1602. The first concordance to the English Bible was published in 1550 by Mr Marbeck. According to Cruden, it did not employ the verse numbers devised by
Robert Stephens
Sir Robert Graham Stephens (14 July 193112 November 1995) was a leading English actor in the early years of Britain's Royal National Theatre. He was one of the most respected actors of his generation and was at one time regarded as the natu ...
in 1545, but "the pretty large concordance" of Mr Cotton did. Then followed
Cruden's Concordance
''A Complete Concordance to the Holy Scriptures'', generally known as ''Cruden's Concordance'', is a concordance of the King James Bible (KJV) that was singlehandedly created by Alexander Cruden (1699–1770). The ''Concordance'' was first publ ...
and
Strong's Concordance.
Use in linguistics
Concordances are frequently used in
linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...
, when studying a text. For example:
* comparing different usages of the same word
* analysing keywords
* analysing
word frequencies
A word list (or ''lexicon'') is a list of a language's lexicon (generally sorted by frequency of occurrence either by levels or as a ranked list) within some given text corpus, serving the purpose of vocabulary acquisition. A lexicon sorted by ...
* finding and analysing phrases and
idioms
An idiom is a phrase or expression that typically presents a figurative, non-literal meaning attached to the phrase; but some phrases become figurative idioms while retaining the literal meaning of the phrase. Categorized as formulaic language, ...
* finding
translation
Translation is the communication of the Meaning (linguistic), meaning of a #Source and target languages, source-language text by means of an Dynamic and formal equivalence, equivalent #Source and target languages, target-language text. The ...
s of subsentential elements, e.g.
terminology
Terminology is a group of specialized words and respective meanings in a particular field, and also the study of such terms and their use; the latter meaning is also known as terminology science. A ''term'' is a word, compound word, or multi-wor ...
, in
bitexts and translation memories
* creating indexes and word lists (also useful for publishing)
Concordancing techniques are widely used in national
text corpora
In linguistics, a corpus (plural ''corpora'') or text corpus is a language resource consisting of a large and structured set of texts (nowadays usually electronically stored and processed). In corpus linguistics, they are used to do statistical ...
such as
American National Corpus The American National Corpus (ANC) is a text corpus of American English containing 22 million words of written and spoken data produced since 1990. Currently, the ANC includes a range of genres, including emerging genres such as email, tweets, and ...
,
British National Corpus
The British National Corpus (BNC) is a 100-million-word text corpus of samples of written and spoken English from a wide range of sources. The corpus covers British English of the late 20th century from a wide variety of genres, with the intention ...
, and
Corpus of Contemporary American English
The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) is a one-billion-word corpus of contemporary American English. It was created by Mark Davies, retired professor of corpus linguistics at Brigham Young University (BYU).
Content
The Corpus of C ...
available on-line. Stand-alone applications that employ concordancing techniques are known as
concordancer A concordancer is a computer program that automatically constructs a concordance. The output of a concordancer may serve as input to a translation memory system for computer-assisted translation, or as an early step in machine translation.
Conco ...
s or more advanced
corpus managers. Some of them have integrated
part-of-speech taggers and enable the user to create their own
POS-annotated corpora to conduct various types of searches adopted in corpus linguistics.
Inversion
The reconstruction of the text of some of the
Dead Sea Scrolls
The Dead Sea Scrolls (also the Qumran Caves Scrolls) are ancient Jewish and Hebrew religious manuscripts discovered between 1946 and 1956 at the Qumran Caves in what was then Mandatory Palestine, near Ein Feshkha in the West Bank, on the nor ...
involved a concordance.
Access to some of the scrolls was governed by a "secrecy rule" that allowed only the original International Team or their designates to view the original materials. After the death of
Roland de Vaux
Roland Guérin de Vaux (17 December 1903 – 10 September 1971) was a French Dominican priest who led the Catholic team that initially worked on the Dead Sea Scrolls. He was the director of the Ecole Biblique, a French Catholic Theological S ...
in 1971, his successors repeatedly refused to even allow the publication of photographs to other scholars. This restriction was circumvented by
Martin Abegg in 1991, who used a computer to "invert" a concordance of the missing documents made in the 1950s which had come into the hands of scholars outside of the International Team, to obtain an approximate reconstruction of the original text of 17 of the documents.
This was soon followed by the release of the original text of the scrolls.
See also
*
A Vedic Word Concordance
''A Vedic Word Concordance'' ( Sanskrit: ') is a multi-volume concordance of the corpus of Vedic Sanskrit texts. It has been under preparation from 1930 and was published in 1935–1965 under the guidance of Viśvabandhu Śāstrī (1897–1973) ...
*
Bible concordance
A Bible concordance is a concordance, or verbal index, to the Bible. A simple form lists Biblical words alphabetically, with indications to enable the inquirer to find the passages of the Bible where the words occur.
Concordances may be for the ...
*
Cross-reference
The term cross-reference (abbreviation: xref) can refer to either:
* An instance within a document which refers to related information elsewhere in the same document. In both printed and online dictionaries cross-references are important because ...
*
Key Word in Context
*
Index
Index (or its plural form indices) may refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media Fictional entities
* Index (''A Certain Magical Index''), a character in the light novel series ''A Certain Magical Index''
* The Index, an item on a Halo megastru ...
*
Text mining
Text mining, also referred to as ''text data mining'', similar to text analytics, is the process of deriving high-quality information from text. It involves "the discovery by computer of new, previously unknown information, by automatically extract ...
References
External links
Shakespeare concordance- A concordance of Shakespeare's complete works (from Open Source Shakespeare)
Online Concordance to the Complete Works of Hryhorii Skovoroda- A concordance to
Hryhorii Skovoroda's complete works (University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada)
Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts- The Alex Catalogue is a collection of public domain electronic texts from American and English literature as well as Western philosophy. Each of the 14,000 items in the Catalogue are available as full-text but they are also complete with a concordance. Consequently, you are able to count the number of times a particular word is used in a text or list the most common (10, 25, 50, etc.) words.
Hyper-Concordance, Mitsu Matsuoka, Nagoya University- The Hyper-Concordance is written in C++, a program that scans and displays lines based on a command entered by the user. Includes Victorian, British & Irish, and American literatures.
- Page includes link to Concord, an on-the-fly KWIC concordance generator. Works with at least some non-Latin scripts (modern Greek, for instance). Multiple choices for sorting results; multi-platform; Open Source.
ConcorDance- A concordance interface to the WorldWideWeb, it uses Google's or Yahoo's search engine to find concordances and can be used directly from the browser.
Chinese Text Project Concordance Tool- Concordance lookup and discussion of the continued importance of printed concordances in
Sinology
Sinology, or Chinese studies, is an academic discipline that focuses on the study of China primarily through Chinese philosophy, language, literature, culture and history and often refers to Western scholarship. Its origin "may be traced to th ...
-
Chinese Text Project
The Chinese Text Project (CTP; ) is a digital library project that assembles collections of early Chinese texts. The name of the project in Chinese literally means "The Chinese Philosophical Book Digitization Project", showing its focus on books ...
KH Coder- A free software for KWIC concordance and collocation stats generation. Various statistical analysis functions are also available such as
co-occurrence network
Co-occurrence network, sometimes referred to as a semantic network, is a method to analyze text that includes a graphic visualization of potential relationships between people, organizations, concepts, biological organisms like bacteria or othe ...
, multidimensional scaling, hierarchical cluster analysis, and correspondence analysis of words.
The electronic concordance of the Armenian literature- Armenian literature of concordances has a rich history, but one of its breakthrough stages was marked by the creation of a large Armenian electronic concordance available on the website. The electronic concordances are advantageously distinguished from both typographical, printed concordances and foreign-language electronic concordances. Those differences refer to the choice of authors, the structure, and the presentation of the headword.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Concordance (Publishing)
Information science