Biblical Hebrew Forum

["K Randolph" <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

James:

On 8/25/07, JAMES CHRISTIAN READ <JCR128 AT student.anglia.ac.uk> wrote:
> Hi Karl,
> ...
>
> KWR: Making a quick electronic count of irregular forms and forms which 
> could come from two or more sources, I got a result of 777 entries in my 
> dictionary. The problem is that I know I am missing many such forms.
>
> JCR: How did you make such an automated count?
>
I have a special symbol used only to indicate either an irregular form
or word that can come from two or more sources. It's mentioned in the
introduction to my dictionary.

> KWR: Because I don't know data base programming, I don't understand how 
> this would work.
>
> JCR: I actually made a mistake. A database table is basically a set of rows 
> (each row is unique) with columns. The columns hold different pieces of 
> information. To achieve the functionality you suggest we would need to have 
> one massive table with two columns. The first column would be the word we 
> are looking up. The second column would be the root it is derived from. 
> When looking for the definition of a word found in the text the application 
> would ask the database to return the row which has the word in its first 
> field. Taking the root from the second column it would be able to query a 
> second table dedicated to your dictionary entries to return the desired 
> definition.
>
I can understand where there are alternate spellings, I would have to
have an entry for each of the alternate spellings. But what about
where a spelling can come from two or more sources? For example, Y$B
would have to pull up three entries, Y$B, $BH and $WB because Y$B is
found as a derivative from all three roots. It's the context that
tells which root is the one to use. Moreover, it could be a 3rd p. s.
qal imp. or a participle or a ... depending on which root and part of
speech it has in the sentence. There are many such examples. How would
your database deal with those?

> ....
> James Christian Read - BSc Computer Science
> http://www.lamie.org/hebrew - thesis1: concept driven machine translation 
> using the Aleppo codex
> http://www.lamie.org/lad-sim.doc - thesis2: language acquisition simulation

Karl W. Randolph.