Biblical Hebrew Forum

["biblical hebrew" <jcr.bhebrew AT gmail.com>]

Thanks Karl. This is kind of along the lines of what I was thinking. I'm
trying to invent a system  of digitally representing human understanding of
a text. I want the digital understanding to represent everything that a
human reader would understand when reading a text. My n-gram approach takes
you quite far to such an understanding but n-grams of the type 'I saw her'
present a problem. Is the 'her' a female person? Or an object of feminine
declension? See the following link for examples of the kind of structure I'm
talking about.

http://www.lamie.org/hebrew/concordance.php?q=%20%D7%90%D7%AA%D7%94%20

>From what you've said and my own thoughts on the subject I'm thinking
something like this: The human brain makes use of mental variables to track
the objects referred to in a narrative. When we encounter pronouns we refer
back to the mental variables we have stored and start to employ logic to
resolve which object the pronoun is referring to. As you have noted the
first use of a pronoun is likely to not be too far removed from the last
explicit mention of the person/object it is referring to and examples where
resolution presents difficulty for a human are rare (see the much discussed
example with Moses, his son, his wife, Yhwh's angel and the circumcision
fiasco).

I think the logic we use to resolve pronouns may have similarities in all
languages but the problem is in specifying just how exactly we do it and
more specifically just how would a native Hebrew have done it. I think one
of the tools in a native Hebrew's toolbox could be the instinctive knowledge
of masculine and feminine nouns and in many cases pronoun resolution could
be as simple as referring back to the only mental variable which matches.
What do you think?

I suppose the real problem comes about when more than one of the mental
variables available matches the pronoun to be resolved. What mechanisms do
we use to make this resolution?


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James Christian Read - BSc Computer Science
http://www.lamie.org/hebrew       Thesis 1 - Aleppo codex machine translation
http://www.lamie.org/lad-sim.doc  Thesis 2 - language acquisition simulation

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On 9/11/07, K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Dear James:
>
> I hate to sound almost trite, but for me it is a combination of formal
> attributes and contextual clues.
>
> Unless a sentence is a verbal response in a conversation where missing
> parts are taken from the context, all sentences have at least a
> subject and a verb, usually an object as well as well as other parts
> of the sentence. Usually it is obvious which is which, in which case
> the sentence can be read right off. Sometimes two, rarely three, words
> have the formal characteristics that they could be either a verb or a
> noun or another part of speech, in which cases the context almost
> always answers which is which part of speech. Usually, as one is
> reading along, he has the context in mind that predisposes what to
> expect in idea communicated, hence he will choose which words will
> provide which functions to make a continuation of the idea
> communicated by the context. However, there are plenty of times that
> as I read a verse, I stop, then go back to the beginning and change my
> understanding of a word or words based on context and formal
> characteristics of words. In order to do this, one needs to recognize
> all forms and do so accurately, in spite of the often fluid spelling
> employed by authors of that time.
>
> As for pronouns, they are almost always explicit (if not always) with
> the only question being which are being used in a sentence. But then
> my understanding of explicit includes that the personal pronoun is
> included in the form of the verb when there is no other subject. The
> context, which can often be several verses away, has the identity who
> or what is referred to.
>
> Does this help?
>
> Karl W. Randolph.
>
> On 9/8/07, biblical hebrew <jcr.bhebrew AT gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi All,
> >
> > I have a question for everybody which I would greatly appreciate _any_
> help
> > or suggestions on. One of the problems in any translation exercise is
> the
> > resolution of pronouns (he/she/it/they) either explicit or implied (by
> verb
> > forms). So the question I want to ask is the following. What techniques
> do
> > you use to resolve who or what implicit and explicit pronouns are
> referring
> > to in any given biblical Hebrew text?
> >
> > -------------------------------------------------------
> > -------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > 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
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