Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Susan Jeffers <susan AT read-the-bible.org>]

One benefit to such transliterations is that it enables a person to 
spot cognates in languages whose script one does not read.  For 
example I used to miss the point of commentary notes that compared 
Arabic to Hebrew words, because I didn't know the Arabic 
alphabet.  But when both are transliterated the similarities are 
obvious even to me. Of course, I do need to learn Arabic and am working on it!

Also it's my impression that there is a standard correspondence 
between Hebrew characters and the international phonetic alphabet, so 
that pronunciation differences wouldn't come into play - is that 
true? There wouldn't be much point in standardizing on the phonetic 
alphabet if one version wrote the sound as bet and another as beis, 
for the same Hebrew letter.

I'd certainly be grateful to know of work already done on this, as well.

Susan Jeffers

Date: Wed, 31 May 2006 11:40:28 +0100
From: "JAMES CHRISTIAN READ" <JCR128 AT student.apu.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Phonetic text of the tanach

Thanks for your reply Kevin. Its not a quest for
anything more 'accurate'. Its a quest for phonetic
representation that can be used universally with all
other languages. An engine that processes transliterations
would have to have different logic for each language
and each transliteration system and would be a beast
to write and maintain. I could write an engine which
attempts to parse a text into a phonetic representation
but as you have noted textual ambiguities would greatly
increase the complexity of such a parsing algorithm.
That is why I was hoping that somebody had already
made an attempt so that I could benefit from work
already done.


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