Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

James:

On 8/25/07, JAMES CHRISTIAN READ <JCR128 AT student.anglia.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>
> JCR: That's a good example of the difficulties that
> any reader would face on reading an unpointed text but
> please answer this question:
>
> Given the sentence 'He rd his bike for 10 miles without stop' just how many 
> of these homonyms would fit the
> context?
>
> Or for that matter the following sentences:
>
> 'They left Moses in a basket in the river between the rds'
>
> 'They beat him with a rd 50 times for his disobedience'
>
> 'That boy is so rd. He never says thank you for anything'
>
> 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
> http://www.lamie.org/ngelta
>
What you should have done was to write the whole sentences without
vowels. To use your examples (with a - to indicate a word that starts
with a vowel)

Th lft Mzs -n - bskt -n th rvr btwn th rdz.

Th bt hm wth - rd 50 tmz fr hz dsbdns.

Tht by -z s rd. H nvr sz thnk y fr -nthng.

At first reading such will be difficult, as we are not used to it. But
after reading a few pages written in this manner, it soon becomes easy
as we use context to fill in the missing vowels.

The same thing happens when we read the Hebrew text without points.

Karl W. Randolph.