Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Matthew Anstey" <manstey AT portal.ca>]

Gday Peter,

Just to clarify further ...

>"Sojourner" may be good for your interlinear because almost no-one
>knows at all accurately what it means, and where its original English
>meaning does not fit with Hebrew "ger". On the other hand, if you
>expect "the user... to have to look up the Hebrew dictionary to
>understand the meaning", then what's the point of doing the
>interlinear?

The interlinear contains a lot more information than just the (hopefully)
correct English equivalent for each word, so it should be helpful in this
regard. Ultimately its usefulness will be proven or disproven when the final
product is used and evaluated. (And one advantage of the electronic version
is the ease of incorporating improvements that experts suggest (before and
after release)).

Also, the interlinear is just one line of information in the program
alongside others that as a total package will hopefully be helpful. An
interlinear by itself is not much help.

Finally, about the dictionary: that will be on the CD so the definition is
only a right-click away. One guideline we are using for the interlinear is
for it to be as least misleading as possible, since, as you appreciate,
*misuse* of (all) computerised biblical-text tools is a problem. For this
reason we are careful with our word selection. For the majority of words we
will use accepted English equivalents, even though those who study BH know
the problems associated with many of these. But for a certain set of words,
such as ger, "leprosy," hesed, etc we are hoping to improve on the problems
*already* acknowledged by English translation experts as particularly
problematic, either due to there being essentially almost no semantically
equivalent term and/or, as in the case of ger, the problem of changing
English words.

On the other hand, we are not wanting to do a new translation of the Bible,
so our focus is on the syntactical features of the interlinear more than the
lexical.

And I am only one member of a team of people working, so you are mostly
getting my perspective on the situation, which although I hope is correct,
occasionally may be slightly inaccurate. One of my tasks is to interact with
people over the net about questions that we have.

With regards,
Matthew Anstey
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on behalf of Summer Institute of Linguistics.
BART (Biblical Analysis and Research Tool) Software Development
Carl Follingstad, Coordinator  cfollingstad AT compuserve.com
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