Biblical Hebrew Forum

[FPutnam AT biblical.edu]

Not quite the same question, but an interesting article by James Barr, in 
a helpful book on graphology:

"Reading a Script without Vowels"
pp. 71-100
in *Writing Without Letters*
W. Haas, ed.
Manchester U. Press/Rowman & Littlefield.
1976
US ISBN 0-87471-850-3

Peace.

Fred

Frederic Clarke Putnam, Ph.D.
Professor of Old Testament
Biblical Theological Seminary
Hatfield, Pennsylvania
215.368.5000x150

"And all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things 
shall be well."
>From FPutnam AT biblical.edu  Fri Apr 29 10:17:16 2005
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Subject: [b-hebrew] how does the eagle become new?
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Since the same word is also glossed as "vulture" (in, e.g., Pr 30.17), 
perhaps it refers primarily to any large bird, rather than specifically to 
"eagles"--a typical case of translational over-specification. Of course 
you can see why "eagle" is a more popular rendering for such vv. as Ps 
103.5 and Is 40.31!

Fred

Frederic Clarke Putnam, Ph.D.
Professor of Old Testament
Biblical Theological Seminary
Hatfield, Pennsylvania
215.368.5000x150
>From klowery AT whi.wts.edu  Fri Apr 29 10:25:05 2005
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From: Kirk Lowery <klowery AT whi.wts.edu>
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Dave Washburn wrote:

> Working under Fedora Core 3, using Mozilla, Netscape and Firefox with the 
> Ezra 
> SIL font, the vowels don't display properly.  They appear as separate 
> letters, displaced into their own slots, rather than under or over the 
> consonants.  Any ideas?

Make sure that it is the Unicode Ezra font. Using Debian 'sid', with
SBLHebrew, the vowels are offset to the left; the text barely readable.
This is due to the fact that X-Windows does not recognize combining
characters and do not handle OpenType kerning rules. There are some
applications that can render vowels and consonants properly (yudit, for
example), but no browser yet. We're probably *still* five years away on
Linux systems... <sigh>

Kirk
-- 
Kirk E. Lowery, PhD
Director, Westminster Hebrew Institute
Adjunct Professor of Old Testament
Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia
--
"Good boy, Dex!"
   -- Joseph "Sky Captain" Sullivan