Concordance (publishing)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- For other uses, see concordance.
A concordance is an alphabetical list of the principal words used in a book or body of work, with their immediate contexts. Because of the time and difficulty and expense involved in creating a concordance in the pre-computer era, only works of special importance, such as the Bible, Qur'an or the works of Shakespeare, had concordances prepared for them.
Even with the use of computers, producing a concordance (whether on paper or in a computer) may require much manual work, because they often include additional material, including commentary on, or definitions of, the indexed words, and topical cross-indexing that is not yet possible with computer-generated and computerized concordances.
However, when the text of a work is on a computer, a search function can carry out the basic task of a concordance, and is in some respects even more versatile than one on paper.
A bilingual concordance is a concordance based on aligned parallel text.
A topical concordance is a list of subjects that a book (usually The Bible) covers, 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. For example, an entry for 'homosexuality' in a Biblical topical concordance will list all the verses in the Bible that deal with the subject of homosexuality, even if the word 'homosexual' doesn't actually appear in that verse. The most well known topical concordance is Nave's Topical Bible.
[edit] Use in linguistics
Concordances are frequently used as a tool in linguistics that can be used for the study of a text, such as:
- comparing different usages of the same word
- analysing keywords
- analysing word frequencies
- finding and analysing phrases and idioms
- creating indexes and word lists (also useful for publishing)
[edit] Inverting a concordance
A famous use of a concordance involved the reconstruction of the text of some of the Dead Sea Scrolls from 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 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. [1], [2]
This was soon followed by the release of the original text of the scrolls.
