Simtho Quick Start Guide

By Kristian Heal

The Simtho/a corpus, a project of Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute, is already transforming the way that we do Syriac Studies by providing concordance search facility to a large and varied corpus of Syriac texts. This is the largest electronic corpus of Syriac texts ever assembled. And it is growing still. Each new version of the corpus adds greater functionality. However, the tool is new and the search environment can seem unfriendly to begin with. To help get over the initial barrier, I’ve written the following quick start guide. This will facilitate the most basic (and most frequent) searches

Getting Started

1. Go to the home page: https://simtho.bethmardutho.org/#open
2. To get started, select a corpus and then Select “Concordance” to do key-word-in-context searches.

The Simple Search (Basic tab)

1. Type a word/token on the line under “Simple search” where you see “abc” for example, ܡܠܟܐ
2. You can then scroll through the results page by page.
3. Information about the text is found by clicking the “I” on the left.
4. If you want to search for the plural, add a seyame to the last letter of your search: ܡܠܟܐ̈. Simtho also recongizes the final feminine dot on ܗ̇
5. Simtho does not recognize any other diacritics in the search.
6. If you want to search for the word with any prefixes, then add an “*” before the word: ܡܠܟܐ* (just type the “*” and then switch the keyboard to type ܡܠܟܐ).
7. Similarly, if you want to search for a stem with different endings, then add the “*” to the end. For example, *ܡܠܟ
8. If you find a result that you want to keep, add a tick to the box on the left and then press “Copy” below and then paste into your document.
9. If you want to download a larger number of results, select the downward arrow on the tool bar above the results.
10. To start a new search, or change your search, select the magnifying glass with an arrow on the tool bar above the results.

Phrases (Basic tab)

1. You can also use the simple search box to search for phrases of two or more words, for example: ܡܠܬܐ ܕܐܠܗܐ
2. Again, if you want to search for instances of a phrase with a prefix before the first element, use the “*”: ܡܠܬܐ ܕܐܠܗܐ*
3. Also, in the basic search you can use the “*” to search for an unknown word. For example, ܒܪܝܫܝܬ * ܗܘܐ ܡܠܬܐ, or even ܒܪܝܫܝܬ * * ܡܠܬܐ, which gives a couple of unexpected results!

Regular Expressions

1. Under Advanced/phrase, you can type regular expressions directly into the phrase line. Regular expression are universal mathematical notations used to describe classes of things.
2. For example, if you want to search for ܡܠܟܐ with inseparable prefixes then add [ܒܕܘܠ] before the word and it will find any instances ofܡܠܟܐ  that has any one of those prefixes (the square brackets mean that you search for any one of the letters included within them). The search would then look like this ܡܠܟܐ[ܒܕܘܠ]. The [ܒܕܘܠ]ܡܠܟܐ should all be typed with the Syriac keyboard.
3. If you want to find words and only know a couple of letters, then you use the “.” for any character. For example, ܡܠ.ܐ will find ܡܠܟܐ or ܡܠܬܐ.
4. If you one have the first few letters of a word and want to see what options there are then add the “.” followed by “+” (means followed by one or more characters). Again, type with the Syriac keyboard.  For example, ܚܛܘܦ.+ will give results for ܚܬܘܦܐ, ܚܛܘܦܝܐ, and ܚܛܘܦܘܬܐ.
5. If you have a phrase, but you think the second (or other) word might be different, then use “.+” to indicate that it could be any word, or just put the first letter followed by these two. For example, ܒܪܝܫܝܬ .+ ܗܘܐ ܡܠܬܐ gives one unexpected result.  And ܒܪܝܫܝܬ ܐ.+ ܗܘܐ ܡܠܬܐ gives the same additional result