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  • From: Peter Bekins <pbekins AT fuse.net>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [b-hebrew] Matres Lectionis and critical analysis
  • Date: Tue, 28 Aug 2007 17:02:28 -0400

James,

>>He suggested that the oldest texts from which
>>the books of the Hebrew bible were copied had no matres
>>lectionis and were written without spaces.

Which oldest texts was he referring to, the ones Moses wrote or the ones God actually wrote with his finger? :)

You are the computer scientist with electronic copies of the Aleppo codex and lexicon, why don't you write a routine to pull out the spaces, mark the matres as optional and suggest all the possible permutations of the text and then report back to us. With all this talk of reading the unpointed text I would be interested in knowing exactly what percentage of the words are truly ambiguous. You'll have to come up with a methodology to separate historical spellings from true vowel letters (are you going to count the yod of BYT as a mater?) Oh, you'll probably have to throw together a morphological and syntactical parser while you are at it and you can use your concordance to pull out common phrases to mark things that should be unambiguous by context like BN XKM. :)


Peter Bekins
(Sorry for the flippant response, reading all day long is frying my brain.)

PS. Also read all of these books:

Andersen, Francis I. and Forbes, A. Dean. _Spelling in the Hebrew Bible_. Biblica et Orientalia 41; Rome: Biblical Institute, 1986.

Bange, L. A. _A Study of the Use of Vowel-Letters in Alphabetic Consonantal Writing_. Munich: Verlag UNI-Druck, 1971.

Barr, James. _The Variable Spellings of the Hebrew Bible: The Schweich Lectures of the British Academy_. 1986. Oxford: Oxford University, 1989.

Cross, F. M., “The Origin and Early Evolution of the Alphabet.” ErIsr 8 (1967): 8-24.

Cross, Frank Moore and David Noel Freedman. _Early Hebrew Orthography: A Study of the Epigraphic Evidence_. New Haven: AOS, 1952

Garr, Randall. _Dialect Geography of Syria-Palestine, 1000-586 B.C.E._ 1985

Kaufman, S. A., "The Pitfalls of Typology: On the Early History of the Alphabet," HUCA 57 (1986) 1-14.

Millard, A.R. “Variable Spelling in the Hebrew Bible and Other Ancient Texts” Journal of Theological Studies no 42 (1991) pp 106-116

Naveh, Joseph. _Early History of the Alphabet_. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1982.

O’Connor, Michael Patrick. “Writing Systems, native speaker analyses, and the earliest stages of Northwest Semitic orthographies”, in The Word of the Lord Shall go Forth, Ed Carol L Myers and M O’Connor. (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1983), 439-465.

Segert, Stanislav, “Vowel Letters in Early Aramaic”, JNES Vol 37 no 2 (Apr 1978), 111-114.

Sarfatti, Gad B. ראשית אימות¯הקריאה בכתב השמי המערבי ניסיון של סיכים, Leshonenu 58/1,3 (1994): 13-24,27

Zevit, Ziony. _Matres Lectionis in Ancient Hebrew Epitaphs_. Cambridge, Mass: American Schools of Oriental Research, 1980.



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