Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Thomas Baruchel <bereshit AT laposte.net>]

Hi everybody,

this is my first post to both ancient_hebrew and b-hebrew mailing
list, though I subscribed some months ago already. I have been
learning ancient hebrew by myself on my leisure time and I can
now read some short pieces of text without opening my lexicon
which makes me quite happy. For *reading* ancient hebrew, several
pages on the net can provide a good help. But I think I could now
improve my knowledge by trying to *write* some paragraphs. The book
I used for learning the grammar has some exercises for that purpose,
but I got the following idea and would like to know your opinion
about it.

Many people likes to write some pieces of various kind (poetry,
literature, philosophy, etc.) and sometimes make a 'club' with
their friends. Thus I wonder if such a thing could interest the
readers of the two mailing lists.

I already built several web pages, for personal as well as professional
use, and I would be very happy to make something according to the
following way: contributors could send to me (by e-mail) a short
paragraph written in ancient hebrew, anything he/she wants, even some
translation of Shakespeare, Goethe, some personal thoughts, etc.
I think he/she should include the vowels (nikud) in his/her contribution.
Then I would be very happy to type it with the format needed in my site
(I love typography and would like to make something quite elegant with
the submitted paragraph), and after that I could publish the paragraph
with the name of the contributor. The main point would be for the
other users to write comments about the paragraph (the comments would be
published as they are in a blog).

I said I like typography, and some 'visual elegance' would be an issue
for me; thus I would publish each paragraph as an image rather than
anything else (in order to keep the right font and the right format).
For the font I would use the NarkissimHebrew font: see at
  http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/masterfont/narkisim/
For building the site, I would certainly use Wordpress which has
a great tradition of typographical considerations.

Of course such a project has absolutely no meaning if nobody is
interested, but if people are I would be very happy to make it.

Do you think it is a good idea?

  "Would you like to have breakfast in the Writers's Club?"
             (Isaac Bashevis Singer, Shosha)

-- 
Thomas Baruchel