21st Century Classical Greek -- caveat on computerized language

I want to make sure that you understand how to examine hoste clauses for nuance.

You can’t do it with an app. You have to touch all the examples yourself.

There’s a paper online purportedly examining a concept in Biblical Hebrew which in fact is false, has been adopted from Arabic, and can be safely ditched. There’s a computer analysis in the paper, but it’s based on old grammer, not 21^st century concepts. I contacted the author and pointed this out to him. He didn’t know anything about modality in Biblical Hebrew.

In the old days we used to call this GIGO. The programmer can only program based on what she knows, and if her knowledge is out of date, she hasn’t produced a useful analysis.

That’s just the first problem.

The second problem is that computers do not understand context. People have been trying to create computers that know language. It has been 40 years since my first contact with these efforts and it’s still not happening.

This is part of the problem with Google Translate. Putting in a given word and getting an answer does not make a good translation. That’s that word-for-word substitution stuff I already condemned. In fact a neighbor of mine who teaches French and Spanish had to give a student like a D at best and it took the kid twice as long to finish the assignment, using Google Translate, compared to learning the material and doing the homework from memory.

Computers invariably get idioms wrong. That’s an issue of context.

And if the computer is programmed wrong, that adds to the problem. I’ve seen entries on Google Translate that look as if somebody is deliberately entering false data.

The only thing a computer can do for you is a) let you download text you can search (full text, not a PDF) b) let you search the Greek of the text for hoste (copy one example and paste it into the search function) c) let you mark the found items for study.

You should not, repeat not, excerpt the found items and put them into a spreadsheet. That disrupts context. The most that the spreadsheet will do is let you list the citations of the examples.

But for prepping the data to find all the material to examine, a digitized searchable text is far and away better than what the old scholars had.