Glossaries and Concordance Generators for the Mac

[Angelika Meyer]

Regarding the recent discussion about generating glossaries - Mac users
should take a look at a program called "Concorder".

[I'm joining this discussion late since I was away from my e-mail for a
while but I don't think this program has been mentioned here.]

At the San Diego AATSEEL conference, I gave a talk on "Concordance
Generators for Russian Electronic Texts." Two of the programs discussed
there were "Conc" and "Concorder." Both work with *any* Russian font.

"Concorder" has some highly sophisticated functions for generating glossaries.

First, the program generates an index of each word in the text with the
number of occurrences. Next to the column with the Russian entry, you can
then add the English translation. (The font can be different in each column
). You can add more columns - for part of speech, lesson number, or
whatever.

You can then resort the resulting dictionary according to whichever column
you like (alphabetical according to the English or Russian alphabet, by
frequency, in reverse order, etc.)


"Conc" also does indexing, but it has no second column for the tranlation.

BTW, the statement recently made here that "Conc" does not allow boolean
searches is incorrect. You can do boolean searches and much more than that.

"Conc" is extremely versatile in its search capacities. It uses something
called pattern matching. (To unix users, this will be familiar as "grep
searching"). With the help of some special characters, pattern matching
allows you to formulate queries like "make a concordance of all the words
that start with a vowel," "find all the words that contain three consonants
in a row"  or "find all the words that begin with "pri" and end in
"-shchii" ". (Pretty nifty, hm?)
It is not very difficult to learn the syntax of these queries, and it is
well worth the effort. This is a tremendosly powerful tool for linguists.

"Conc" is freeware; "The Concorder" is a commercial program, but there is a
demo (fully functional, but limited printing and very little documentation)
out on the net. Here are the specs:


The Concorder/Le Concordeur

v 2.0, Dec. 8, 1994

Copyright by David Rand, Centre de recherches math'ematiques, Universit'e
de Montr'eal.
C. P. 6128, succursale centre-ville
Montr'eal, Qu'ebec H3C 3J7, Canada
phone: (514) 343-6111, extension 4726, Fax: (514) 343-2254
E-mail: Rand at ere.uMontreal.ca
The program was developed in cooperation with Tatiana Patera, Dpt. of
Russian and Slavic Studies, McGill University

Price: $100 CDN, or $92 US, plus $3 for shipping

Demo version available from:

sumex-aim.stanford.edu:    \info-mac\text\concordance-20-demo.hqx


Conc Concordance Generator

v. 1.71 beta, July 1992

Copyright by John Thomson and the Summer Institute of Linguistics,
Academic Computing Department
7500 West Camp Wisdom Road
Dallas, TX 75236
phone: (214) 709-3395 and (214) 709-3387
E-mail: evan at sil.org (Evan Antworth)

Freeware

ftp.wustl.edu:         /systems/mac/info-mac/Old/app/concordance-171.hqx
sumex-aim.stanford.edu:/info-mac/app/concordance-171.hqx
mrcnext.cso.uiuc.edu:  /pub/info-mac/app/concordance-171.hqx
ftp.wustl.edu:         /systems/mac/info-mac/app/concordance-171.hqx



Greetings, Angelika Meyer
ameyer at leland.stanford.edu