Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Read, James C" <K0434995 AT kingston.ac.uk>]

Quote:
There are three places where Moses is said to have written something- Ex 
24:4, Dt 31:9, 31:22.  An even not so careful reading will show that the 
reference to Moses writing refers only to the present pericope.
end quote.

Have you read Deouteronomy 31:9 closely?
What did he write?
The law???
How do you say 'law' in hebrew?
Isn't it something like 'torah'?
And the name of the book attributed to Moshe?
The torah???

My! What an amazing coincidence!!!


-----Original Message-----
From: b-hebrew-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org on behalf of Jim West
Sent: Fri 7/29/2005 6:22 PM
To: Dave Washburn; b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Author of the torah
 


Dave Washburn wrote:

>That's hardly the only argument necessary.  Unbroken tradition from then 
>down 
>to "modern" times attributes it to him, and must be taken into account.  And 
>there are more references in the Torah to him writing down what he was told, 
>and none of them say he merely "scrawled a few things."
>

Tradition doesn't matter a tinker's tin. 

There are three places where Moses is said to have written something- Ex 
24:4, Dt 31:9, 31:22.  An even not so careful reading will show that the 
reference to Moses writing refers only to the present pericope.

Best

Jim

-- 
D. Jim West

Biblical Studies Resources -  http://web.infoave.net/~jwest
Biblical Theology Weblog -  http://biblical-studies.blogspot.com

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Thread-Topic: Machine translation of the Bible,
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From: "Read, James C" <K0434995 AT kingston.ac.uk>
To: "Peter Kirk" <peterkirk AT qaya.org>
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Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Machine translation of the Bible,
        was:  heno- v's poly- theismin the torah
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The major reason for their failings is the presupposition that our 
division and definition of words is correct. Current translating 
programs are largely literally based and for this reason they produce 
such poor translations.

I agree that the project is complex but I have full faith in its possibility.
The very fact that children can learn a language without having to depend on 
translations shows that the algorithms exist and the program will just as 
much 
a pyscholgical one as a linguistic one.

The secret is in finding the algorithms which I believe lie more the minds of 
children than in the prowess of 'scholars'.

-----Original Message-----
From: Peter Kirk [mailto:peterkirk AT qaya.org]
Sent: Fri 7/29/2005 5:54 PM
To: Read, James C
Cc: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: Machine translation of the Bible, was: [b-hebrew] heno- v's poly- 
theismin the torah
 
On 29/07/2005 16:39, Read, James C wrote:

>...
>In fact, I firmly believe that grammar is more of a hindrance 
>than a help to learning a language and I intend to demonstrate 
>this with my AI project.
>The purpose of my project is to develop algorithms which analyse 
>any input of language. The alphabet it will use will be based 
>on phonemes and not the inadequate arrays of alphabets that 
>modern languages use.
>The algorithms will completely avoid grammar and rely entirely 
>on examples and contexts to learn the meanings of words (a word 
>is a series of sounds/phonemes and may not necessarily agree with 
>the classical division of words we are accustomed to).
>It is my aim that this tool will produce a translation of the 
>hebrew bible, which is completely devoid of doctrinal influences, 
>as a demonstration that the natural way of learning languages 
>is the superior one. It's a big project and the algorithms have 
>many challenges but I am benefitting from the thoughts posted 
>in the various threads.
>
>  
>
James, I wish your project well, but I am not very hopeful for you.

After all, researchers have been working on machine translation between 
major world languages for many decades, and the best results that they 
can come up with are appalling. For example, a few years ago I used 
Babelfish to translate Psalm 23:1 from English to Chinese to English and 
from German to English, and in both cases got the result "The Lord is 
not my shepherd"! (The "not" was wrongly transferred from the second 
clause.) And even when used on actual web pages the results were 
frequently incomprehensible.

To come up with a useable Bible translation from Hebrew you will have to 
do very much better than such programs can do even from German. And yet 
the only way you can do this in a way which "is completely devoid of 
doctrinal influences" (a laudable aim, although I don't think an 
achievable one) is to avoid "teaching" the program with ANY 
human-generated translations of Bible passages. But then, as I 
understand it (although I am not at all an expert), the only way that 
the current generation of machine translators can make any real progress 
is by matching to patterns found in real examples of human-generated 
translation. So you will need to find a new approach here.

Sorry to be discouraging. I fear that your aim is unattainable. But I 
hope that it is not.

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



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>From dwashbur AT nyx.net  Fri Jul 29 14:49:40 2005
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From: Dave Washburn <dwashbur AT nyx.net>
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On Friday 29 July 2005 12:28, Read, James C wrote:
> Quote:
> There are three places where Moses is said to have written something- Ex
> 24:4, Dt 31:9, 31:22.  An even not so careful reading will show that the
> reference to Moses writing refers only to the present pericope.
> end quote.
>
> Have you read Deouteronomy 31:9 closely?
> What did he write?
> The law???
> How do you say 'law' in hebrew?
> Isn't it something like 'torah'?
> And the name of the book attributed to Moshe?
> The torah???
>
> My! What an amazing coincidence!!!

It gets even worse, because I also mentioned other places in the OT that
attribute authorship to Moses, but he wrote that off with "Tradition doesn't
matter a tinker's tin."  I find this statement amazing, as it implies that
anyone with the sense God gave a stale doughnut knows it, yet we have people
of just about every possible tradition right here on this list, including Jim
himself who obviously adheres to the tradition (that's all it is, Jim) called
"scholarly."  So if other people's tradition, and especially folks who were
so much closer to the actual events than we, "doesn't matter a tinker's tin,"
then neither does Jim's.

Another amazing coincidence, I guess.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: b-hebrew-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org on behalf of Jim West
> Sent: Fri 7/29/2005 6:22 PM
> To: Dave Washburn; b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
> Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Author of the torah
>
> Dave Washburn wrote:
> >That's hardly the only argument necessary.  Unbroken tradition from then
> > down to "modern" times attributes it to him, and must be taken into
> > account.  And there are more references in the Torah to him writing down
> > what he was told, and none of them say he merely "scrawled a few things."
>
> Tradition doesn't matter a tinker's tin.
>
> There are three places where Moses is said to have written something- Ex
> 24:4, Dt 31:9, 31:22.  An even not so careful reading will show that the
> reference to Moses writing refers only to the present pericope.
>
> Best
>
> Jim

--
Dave Washburn
http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur
"Well, if I'd wanted a safe life, I guess I wouldn't have
married a man who studies rocks." - Betty Armstrong (Fay Masterson)