[sword-devel] Strongs and Real Strongs

[Aaron Christianson]

The Strong's part of both versions are equally real.  As already mentioned,
it's the original languages that are "real" in Strong's real Hebrew and
Strong's real Greek.  I am actually a linguist (well, more or less), and the
"Real" versions are easier to use if you know your Hebrew and Greek
alphabets, and they help if you want to look it up in another dictionary and
just use Sword to identify the lemma.  If you don't know the Hebrew or Greek
alphabets, it is possible that the Strong's transliterations will be more
helpful to you (though those may also be in the 'real' versions, come to
think of it).

The "inverted real" versions allow you to search for the word in the
original language yourself, rather than having to rely on an available
Strong's link.  This would be nice if Sword had more substantial
dictionaries, but I'm curious about a word I'll usually look it up
elsewhere.  Strong's is helpful for reading on the fly, but it is not a
scientific tool for preparing in-depth word studies.  For this reason, I
highly advise learning Greek and Hebrew alphabets (each of which can be more
or less learned in a day and mastered in a week), using "Strongs Real"
modules, and looking up important words in an external dictionary.  Diogenes
is an excellent open and free tool for studying Greek texts with a
comprehensive dictionary of ancient Greek built in (for all dialects, not
just Koine).  There is nothing so nice available for Hebrew, but you can
free, legal (enormous) PDF's of Brown Driver Briggs Hebrew and Aramaic
Lexicon at archive.org, which are quite usable.  There are also searchable
PDF's of the same document floating around the internet, but it is not
intended to be free by it's creator and the free ones are presumably
illegal  (not sure though, as the content is based on a document in the
public domain).  Getting BDB (Brown Driver Briggs) is the easy part,
however.  Learning to use it is something else altogether.

Probably more than you wanted to know.  My email is always open to those
with any biblical-language-related questions, particularly those regarding
Hebrew and Aramaic: ninjaaron at gmail.com
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