Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peter.r.kirk AT ntlworld.com>]

On 16/07/2003 08:47, Trevor Peterson wrote:

> > ===== Original Message From Peter Kirk <peter.r.kirk AT ntlworld.com> =====
> > But the question I asked was not what we think should be done, but what
> > actually is done, or perhaps what would be done apart from purely
> > mechanical typographical restrictions.
> >    
>
> And that's the only reason that I resurrected the issue--because I think we're 
> emerging from a set of constraints that have just recently been removed, and 
> it's hard to say which way things are going to go. As far as noting the 
> comparative data in a dictionary is concerned, my perspective is that 
> gobbledygook in transcription is still gobbledygook. If a person doesn't know 
> Ethiopic, an Ethiopic citation is not going to be terribly useful, whether 
> it's transcribed or not.
>
>  
I disagree. It can be very useful to our understanding of Hebrew to see 
its relation with cognate languages, where loan words come from etc. Our 
recent discussion on this list of the background of SARIS would have 
been impossible, for me and for most of us on the list, if the related 
Akkadian forms had been given in KB/HALOT etc in cuneiform - even if 
this list could handle cuneiform. Not sure if the list software can 
handle Ethiopic, well here's a sample ሀሁሂሃሄ, but even if it can that's 
not a reason to use it as most of us can't read it.

--
Peter Kirk
peter.r.kirk AT ntlworld.com
http://web.onetel.net.uk/~peterkirk/