B-Hebrew: The Biblical Hebrew Forum

Peter (imputerate) brought up the question of transcription in his introductory post, which we’ve kinda kicked back and forth there.

This thread is for discussion of the benefits and drawbacks of BETA Code, academic transliteration, or other non-Hebrew ways of representing the Hebrew text.

I personally prefer the diacritical marks added to letters. I learned it from Seow’s grammar, but I’ve modified it over the years.

It is easily typed if you install and use the transliteration keyboard from the Society of Biblical Literature (see the keyboard drivers on this link).

Genesis 1:1:
בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים אֵת הַשָּׁמַ֫יִם וְאֵת הָאָ֫רֶץ׃
BR)$YT BR) )LHYM )T H$MYM W)T H)RC (no vowels or dagesh forte)
B:R")$IYT BFRF) ):ELOHIYM )"T HA$$FMAYIM W:)"T HF)FREC
bərēʾšîṯ bārāʾ ʾĕlōhîm ʾēṯ haššāmáyim wəʾēṯ hāʾā́reṣ

The latter just seems more precise to me. It also shows where stress is placed in a word when it is not ultimate.

What do you prefer and why?

Hi Jason:

How did it convert

B:R")$IYT BFRF) ):ELOHIYM )"T HA$$FMAYIM W:)"T HF)FREC

to Gen 1:1?

Maybe my question is more - how did it know to put a dagesh on the initial 'bet' (I can see it knew to put a sheva on the initial bet because of the colon : )

And in R" (i.e. the beginning piece 'B:R")', is the double-quotes vowel 'pathach'??????

Glenn Dean wrote: ↑Tue Feb 08, 2022 11:36 am Hi Jason:

How did it convert

B:R")$IYT BFRF) ):ELOHIYM )"T HA$$FMAYIM W:)"T HF)FREC

to Gen 1:1?

Maybe my question is more - how did it know to put a dagesh on the initial 'bet' (I can see it knew to put a sheva on the initial bet because of the colon : )

And in R" (i.e. the beginning piece 'B:R")', is the double-quotes vowel 'pathach'??????

Nothing converted. I typed it out according to the code sheet. You have to determine if the dagesh is lene or forte and transliterate accordingly. According to the system, " means tsere, such that )"T means אֵת (alef, tsere, tav).

thanxs - pretty nice system.

Long time ago when I was building my own "system", I struggled with how to represent complex things like בְּ֫ (not that such a construction is in the Bible, but it was versatile enough that it could represent such a construction), so my system had all these "underscores" and carets and stuff. It was a total mess - but it LOL worked!!

So I'm quite impressed with the coding scheme you use (or shown with the above example)

Glenn

My I offer an historical reflection? The year is 1976. It was my first year at UCLA for my doctoral program. My goal was to create a digital file of the book of Judges tagged at the morphological, syntactic and semantic levels of language. Consider our problem: I only had access to an IBM mainframe computer, using punch cards for input (!) and the limit of the characters (codes) for encoding the Hebrew text was the ASCII set. The complex set of glyphs in Hebrew manuscripts was far beyond what ASCII could represent. So what was the solution?

With an eye for the future the original versions of what was eventually known as "Beta Code" was known as the Michigan Hebrew coding system, since the author was Dr. H. Van Dyke Parunak at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. At the time he was a post-doc and one of his projects was the digital encoding of BHS. I took on Judges to proofread for him and so was involved with the philosophy underlying the encoding system.

Given the technological constraints of the time, the goal was to represent the consonants, vowels, accents, dageshes. The mantra was "Code what is WRITTEN, not what is MEANT". All interpretation was deferred to a future time when computer representation of written documents was more sophisticated. There was no such thing as fonts. UNICODE wasn't even a word then. When I say "interpretation", I mean even the interpretation of dageshes: the dagesh was only represented as a period. Is the consonant doubled? Beta Code was not intended to tell you. You cannot use Beta Code to do transliteration.

As an analogy, think of translating a Cuneiform language, such as Assyrian. First, there is the identification of the symbol. Then the determination of what sound(s) are represented by that symbol (they changed over time). This is called "transcription". Then, how does one associate the symbols into groups to identify words? This is the process of transliteration. Finally, one can translate. Beta Code was designed for "transcription", nothing else.

With the advent of UNICODE in the 1980s, a whole new world opened up. It took another ten years for rendering engines for Window, MAC, Linux and other OSes to catch up and for high quality fonts to be created. Today it is mostly transparent to the end user, although not completely. We can now transcribe, transliterate and translate using personal/mobile computers and apply database tools to add linguistic and literary data to the plain text.

I hope this retrospective sheds some illumination on this discussion.

Blessings,
Kirk