Morphological Markup of Greek Texts in BibleWorks7 and Logos

As I was trying to figure out how to create a 'graduated' Greek reader in the previous post, it gave me the opportunity to figure out how the visual/color markup tools in BibleWorks and Logos work. In particular, I was looking for ways to highlight morphological features that I could use in the Greek classes I teach.

In this post, I will describe what I was trying to do. In the next two posts I will describe how things work in BibleWorks and Logos.

Logos comes with a morphological coding set already in place, but I wanted to create a set of highlights that I was a bit more extensive and easier for me to remember. I ended up with the color scheme shown above. (The screen shot is from Logos, and the ability to display this list is a nice feature lacking in BW7.) I tried to keep all verbal stuff in hues of red (pink and orange: note the demanding imperative and the meek subjunctive!) and noun stuff in blue with the verbal noun participles in purple.

What I was hoping for was an easy way to create and apply this scheme. Next, I want to be able to pick certain elements to highlight singly and in combination. I will provide some screen shots, and I will also have brief videos showing how each program works.

As part of my evaluation, I am also interested in seeing how each program can use the coloring schemes to note certain syntactical features and to compare grammatical tendencies in parallel synoptic passages.

In the BibleWorks7 Study Guide on coloring, they note additional reasons why coloring might be helpful.

• You can better see a passage construction by coloring all verbs in a book in red, and coloring all nouns in blue. Coloring a search for the verbs and another search for nouns makes highlighting easy.
• You can see structural markers by coloring all conjunctions. Coloring a search for conjunctions makes this easy.
• You can color each verb tense in a different color to see where verb tense shifts occur in a passage.
• You can color all first-person verbs in one color, second-person in another, and third-person in yet another color.
• You can manually color significant words in a passage.
• You can compare more than one passage in the Parallel Versions Window or in the Synopsis Window and color words common to your comparison passages.
• For an Old Testament passage quoted in the New Testament, you may choose to color the differences between the Old Testament text and New Testament quotation.