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  • From: "JAMES CHRISTIAN READ" <JCR128 AT student.anglia.ac.uk>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [b-hebrew] Karl's lexicon
  • Date: Tue, 28 Aug 2007 09:37:49 +0100

Hi Karl,

KWR: Strip off all waws from the beginning of words with very few
exceptions (there are so few exceptions that they are easy to
memorize)

JCR: These need to be specified so that the program can
check for them before making the generic step of
stripping the waw.

KWR: Strip off but make note of hehs at the beginning of words. Again words
that start with a heh are rare and easy to memorize.

JCR: Ditto.

KWR: Strip off a following yod mem as that almost always is a sign of a
masculine plural. Surprisingly, there are relatively few verbs that
end with a mem that conjugate to a yod mem in the hiphil, and those
are usually easy to recognize.

JCR: Double ditto.

KWR: Were I to come across a sentence where I didn't know a word, the first
thing I would do is to look over the sentence for obvious grammatical
clues—which is the verb, which is a noun, is there the direct object
sign,

JCR: Not a good idea to start including clause grammar
into the decision process of an automated program. Too
many opportunities for bugs which cause incorrect
decisions. What we need is simple generic rules that
can be hard programmed. Better to concentrate on the
form of the word and what we can get from that alone.

KWR: what combination of prefixes, suffixes, infixes can I
recognize that tells me what sort of words to look up

JCR: This is something we can work on when those
affixes form part of the word. But we need to come up
with generic rules that can be applied taking good care
to consider exceptions and to test for them before
applying any generic rules.

KWR: Right now I'm torn between helping students, and the best way to do
so. If I do too much hand holding, will I interfere with basic
language learning? In other words, if they come to depend on me to
supply all the forms, then if they come across a regular form that is
not found in Tanakh, e.g. in the DSS, and therefore I didn't include
it, would they not be lost? If I do no hand holding, will it not
discourage students when they can't find words? What is the best
middle ground? What would you suggest?

JCR: There is no need to *teach* grammar. The human
brain is hardwired to figure it out for itself. In
fact, being taught grammar is the most unnatural and
way of learning grammar that can possibly be conceived.

The natural mechanism for learning grammar works like
this. The human brain receives as input a series of
hard examples and automatically looks for patterns so
that it can make generalisations and therefore save on
memory usage. Let me give you a hard example to work
from.

The English brain hears examples of present and past
verbs like (put,put), (go, went) and (come, came) and
as there is no pattern it has to learn and store each
example as hard wired neurocircuits. But when it hears
examples like (start, started), (want, wanted) and
(hunt, hunted) it can make the generalisation that
actions ending in 't' (except for list of known
exceptions) have the phonetic suffix 'id' in spoken
English.

I would therefore suggest that we hand-hold for the
core vocabulary which would enable the student to
read large amounts of natural Hebrew text to the point
where the meaning of unknown words can be guessed from
context (research shows that if a reader knows 9 out of
10 words in a sentence they have optimal chances of
guessing the meaning of the 10th word) in the hopes
that this provides enough irregular and regular
for them to figure out their own mental grammar by
natural process of generalisation. To illustrate the
point here are some examples of made up language:

thrrf - he went
ghtrf - he came
sdfrf - he gave
wsdrf - he took

By process of generalisation can you figure out which
affix indicates the 3rd masculine singular in the
verbs above?

-------------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------------

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

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