Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Kirk Lowery <klowery AT wts.edu>]

c stirling bartholomew wrote:
> on 5/30/03 9:02 AM, Kirk Lowery wrote:
>
>
> > If you are adding lemmas to a database (as
> > we do here), then there is the question of spelling ...
>
>
> Kirk,
>
> When building your tagged Hebrew texts what do you do with a medial nun in
> the final position? Do you put it in your database as a final? I know this
> isn't a common thing, perhaps a few instances in the DSS. The question came
> up in a dispute between F.M. Cross - E.Eschel and A. Yardeni over reading
> the last word of line 8 of an ostracon from Qumran. I will bring that up in
> a different thread.

The raw database is in the Michigan (ASCII-based) encoding, which does 
not distinguish initial-medial/final forms. In the next year we are 
migrating the basic encoding of the database from ASCII to UNICODE. In 
Unicode, the final forms are separate codes of the medial ones, and so 
it should do The Right Thing: when we break up a word into morphemes 
the medial will continue to be rendered as a medial and not a final. 
But I've not yet investigated or tested this yet. The rendering of 
Hebrew in browsers and word processors is still pretty primative...

Blessings,

Kirk
--
Kirk E. Lowery, Ph.D.
Director, Westminster Hebrew Institute
Adjunct Professor of Old Testament
Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia

Theorie ist, wenn man alles weiss und nichts klappt.
Praxis ist, wenn alles klappt und keiner weiss warum.
Bei uns sind Theorie und Praxis vereint:
nichts klappt und keiner weiss warum!