[sword-devel] Language codes for Hebrew

[Aaron Christianson]

I'm a Biblical Hebrew teacher and I also have taken the highest level
of Modern Hebrew as a foreign language at the Hebrew University in
Jerusalem. I'm not an expert in Sword language codes and their
interpretation, but I can explain a little about the continuities and
discontinuities between ancient and modern Hebrew.

The discussion here so far seems to revolve around the script. The
script used in all printed Hebrew bibles is more or less a "modern"
script, though it goes back in direct lineage to the Assyrian block
script that the Jews began using during the exile, and it is not
unlikely that some of the later books of the Old Testament were
composed using this script. In fact, all extent manuscripts of the
Hebrew Bible (including the Dead Sea Scrolls) are written in this
Assyrian block script, though the character shapes have changed subtly
over the years. The exception to this is the Samaritan Pentateuch,
which is written with special Samaritan characters which resemble more
closely (but not exactly) the Paleo-Hebrew script found in
inscriptions and ostraca from the pre-exilic period.

However, for me, this distinction of script is not the distinction to
worry about! The Sword repositories I'm familiar with have
distinctions between middle English (Wycliffe) and English, which
share the same characters but have huge difference in syntax and
vocabulary. Likewise, while Ancient Greek uses certain diacritics that
Modern Greek does not, it is essentially the same set of characters
(excluding digamma and a few others which do not appear in scripture).
It seems to me that these distinctions are not a matter of epigraphy
(script), but of dialect!

While there is a continuous written history of Hebrew between the
Biblical period and the present day, and Hebrew is much more
conservative than languages like English over a much longer time
period, I can promise you that what you hear on the streets in Israel
today is vastly different from Biblical Hebrew at a syntactic level!

To me, all the OT modules based on the Masoretic Text, DSS or Sam.
Pent., regardless of script, are ancient Hebrew. The NT modules are
modern Hebrew. The Delitzsch NT is actually an interesting case, since
he was working before the reforms of Ben Yehuda had taken root (the
father, as it were, of the revival of Hebrew as a spoken native
language), so he was using something that was sort of a hybrid of
Mishnaic Hebrew (a dialect from the time of Jesus), Biblical Hebrew
and the common pidgin Hebrew that Jews from different parts of the
world used to communicate in his time period.

Still, the language he used is more like Modern Hebrew than it is like
Biblical Hebrew, and the translation itself is still a modern creation
(relatively speaking), even if his language is waaaaay different from
actual spoken Hebrew today.

If there were ever sword module made from the Mishnah or the Bar
Kochba letters or the non-biblical material in the DSS (God willing!),
then you'd have a question on your hands. The Mishnah and the Bar
Kochba letters are definitely very ancient, but not as old as the
Bible, and they do represent major differences from Biblical Hebrew.
The dialect represented in the DSS is much closer to what we find in
the Bible, but it is not the same. If I had to pick ancient or modern
for materials from this time period, I'd still go with Ancient for
sure, but as a linguist, I definitely put them in their own
categories!

(of course, there are dialectical and historical difference
represented to some degree within the Hebrew Bible itself,
particularly in the poetry)

As far as Sword language codes, it doesn't really make a difference to
me, so long as I can get at the content. If I were doing it myself
from scratch, I guess I'd put the OT modules under "ancient" and the
NT modules under "modern" (not by virtue of their being NT and OT; It
just so happens that they divide up along those lines, but there is a
Biblical-to-Modern Hebrew translation of the OT as well, which I have
sitting here on my shelf. If that were a Sword module, it's definitely
modern! -- likewise, there is a translation of the NT into a good
imitation of Biblical Hebrew from like 1823 or something, which one
could argue should be classified as Ancient Hebrew)

However, you're not doing it from scratch. I'm not sure if it's worth
it to make the difference at this point if it involves a lot of extra
tomfoolery. If it's easy and won't break anything for users, go ahead
and make the change.

Aaron

On Sat, Jan 9, 2016 at 9:16 AM, DM Smith <dmsmith at crosswire.org> wrote:
> I don’t think so. I think that unless the text predates 1100AD it should be ‘he’. The Masoretic Text is modern Hebrew. Ancient Hebrew had different glyphs for letters and had additional letters.
>
> Let’s wait and see if we get a response from a Hebrew scholar before we do anything.
>
> — DM
>
>> On Jan 9, 2016, at 8:48 AM, David Haslam <dfhmch at googlemail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I concur.
>>
>> I think we should change the lang code in our Biblical Hebrew modules to
>> hbo.
>> Aleppo, MapM, OSHB, SP, SPDSS, SPMT, SPVar, WLC
>>
>> Our modern Hebrew modules, HebModern and HebDelitzsch should remain with
>> heb.
>>
>> btw. I just noticed that the Xiphos repo also has a Delitzsch module called
>> HebNTFD.
>>
>>
>> Best regards,
>>
>> David
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> View this message in context: http://sword-dev.350566.n4.nabble.com/Language-codes-for-Hebrew-tp4655473p4655669.html
>> Sent from the SWORD Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> sword-devel mailing list: sword-devel at crosswire.org
>> http://www.crosswire.org/mailman/listinfo/sword-devel
>> Instructions to unsubscribe/change your settings at above page
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> sword-devel mailing list: sword-devel at crosswire.org
> http://www.crosswire.org/mailman/listinfo/sword-devel
> Instructions to unsubscribe/change your settings at above page