Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>]

On 21/01/2004 08:58, Trevor Peterson wrote:

> > ===== Original Message From Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org> =====
> > But Semitists do deal with living languages: Hebrew, Arabic,
> > neo-Aramaic, Amharic etc, modern South Arabian. Or they should - they
> > ignore at their peril modern Semitic languages.
> >    
>
> Deal with them, yes. ... You can say 
> I'm wrong, you can say it's an unfortunate state of affairs, but just check 
> the archives of this list and the ANE list to see how much modern Semitic 
> languages comes into the discussion. It's not a serious need.
>  

Well, if it's true but unfortunate, at least some people may have the 
will to change things, but they can't if you erect barriers by using 
non-standard encodings and different encodings of the same script.

I accept that experts on one ancient Semitic language don't need to know 
about modern ones. But those who do comparative work on ancient 
languages need to look at the modern ones as well, in my opinion.

> [snipped]
>
>  
>
> > Well, unless you are talking about several years back, your recall
> > incorrectly. There are now at least three freely available Unicode texts
> > of the Hebrew Bible, from http://www.anastesontai.com/,
> > http://www.mechon-mamre.org/, and
> > http://whi.wts.edu/WHI/Members/klowery/eL/index_html.
> >    
>
> Perhaps the issue before was whether BHS was available. None of these three 
> is, ...
This is a copyright issue. These texts cannot be presented as BHS. But 
Kirk Lowery's e-text is effectively identical to BHS although for legal 
reasons it has been retyped from the Leningrad codex.

> ... so choosing to use them for intensive scholarly work introduces the new 
> issue of evaluating how good the texts are in their own right. Plus, the first 
> and last at least are very up-front about the errors and problems that remain. 
> I'd have to spend some time actually trying to work with them to determine 
> whether it's a bigger headache to proof everything I use from these texts or 
> to re-key everything I need to reproduce myself.
>
>  
>
> > It is also
> > possible to convert MCW texts to Unicode; I have a draft converter which
> > I can make available if anyone would like it.
> >    
>
> I would be interested. As far as I know, the only (reasonably) reliable 
> electronic text file of BHS is in MCW.
>  

Not true, sorry. This only reasonably reliable text exists in Unicode 
and in a variety of different proprietary legacy formats, as part of a 
variety of commercial and other Bible software packages. But none of 
these, as far as I know, is available as a free download.

The reasonably reliable text is not the one which is a free download 
from Oxford Text Archive. That is an early version with many errors. The 
errors have been corrected in later versions, but these are not so 
freely available for copyright reasons. But Kirk Lowery's text is 
probably much closer to BHS than the old Oxford text is. Even so, if you 
want to be sure that you are reproducing BHS you need to proof read 
carefully.


--
Peter Kirk
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/