dirkroorda wrote:It's only an approximation, the lexicon I use is not carved in stone, it is a by-product of the work of the Eep Talstra Centre for Bible and Computer, when they produced their syntactic database of the text and linguistics of the Hebrew Bible.
I have helped them put several versions of their database online (5 versions from 2011 till 2017), and no two versions of their database have the same number of words, let alone the same lexicon.
This is not meant as a deprecation!
Dirk Roorda
Dear Dirk:
I can appreciate what you mean that there’s no fixed list of words.
To give you a bit of background of myself, I had one year formal training in Hebrew decades ago, then had no contact with Hebrew scholarship for decades. The only English translation i had used archaic English which I found difficult to understand. So I read Tanakh in Hebrew. The only tools I had were a copy of Davidson’s Analytical Lexicon, an English translation of Gesenius’ lexicon, and Lisowski’s concordance. BDB was still under copyright and selling for an inflation adjusted $200–$250, which I couldn’t afford.
Davidson’s lexicon taught me derivation patterns, because all entries were listed under roots. However, there were many times I had to disagree with the derivations listed, they made no sense.
Even early on I found Gesenius questionable based on how I learn vocabulary in modern languages. I started writing corrections in the margins.
The tool I found most useful was Lisowski’s concordance. The glosses tend to be more accurate than Gesenius, more in line with how the words are actually used in Tanakh. Plus, if I had further questions, I could check the uses myself.
I continued writing corrections in the margins, this time in Lisowski’s concordance, because the margins were wider. Eventually I had notes on almost every word in Tanakh, which I realized was the beginning of a full-fledged dictionary of itself. So I digitized it into a stand-alone dictionary, and with updates, that’s what I use today.
Based on the above, I understand what you mean that the word list keeps changing.
My biggest question for you now is, what is the data base upon which you build your lexicon?
Again a bit of background. I never learned the cantillation points. The more I read, the more I realized that the Masoretic vowel points are not always accurate for meaning. That’s not counting that they don’t convey Biblical era pronunciations. Therefore, I stopped using the vowel points. The only thing I rely on is the consonantal text. The consonantal text is my data base for my dictionary.
What is your data base?
Yours, Karl W. Randolph.