Biblical Hebrew Forum

[David Kummerow <farmerjoeblo AT hotmail.com>]

Perhaps these are useful to you then:

Price, James D. 1990. The Syntax of the Masoretic Accents in the Hebrew 
Bible. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen.

Price, James D. 1995. A Concordance of the Hebrew Accents in the Hebrew 
Bible. 5 vols. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen.

Price's database is in BibleWorks. Perhaps it could be used there or 
exported? Meaning you don't have to start from scratch with creating 
your own database?

Regards,
David Kummerow.


> Friends,
>
> Thank you for your mail and links.
>
> The names and forms of cantillation marks are, and
> have always been, subject to heated debate, which is
> why a statistical database would be useful.
>
> A great amount of care has been given to such issues
> as pasek/legarmeh, which does not seem to be a big
> problem. The meteg/silluk problem has not yet been
> satisfactorily resolved, but it concerns only half a
> dozen verses in which silluk may be in median verse
> position. Otherwise verse-final meteg is silluk.
>
> Musical configuration involves other problems, for
> example revia mugrash is considered two signs, geresh
> and revia, but we have dealt with this problem.
>
> We can extract cantillation data in Unicode, with only
> a few fairly predictable left-to-right problems. This
> is all carefully documented along with our best
> solutions.
>
> Since we make no claim to know what cantillation marks
> are or might mean, we make as few assumptions about
> them as possible. We take into account their form and
> sequential order, but not much else.
>
> Two hypotheses are supported, syntactic and musical,
> which are wildly different, both in the interpretation
> of the signs themselves (their number and identity)
> and of their hierarchy, rabbinical
> conjunctive/disjunctive or superlinear/sublinear.
>
> The goal is simply to create a database of all
> cantillation marks, with an application to perform
> statistical analysis and pattern recognition, and then
> to allow the user to adopt an informed opinion based
> on the data, rather than on tradition or anecdotal
> evidence.
>
> Once we get a lead programmer interested, we will
> prepare a mock-up. It might be a good project for a
> graduate student.
>
> Best Regards.
>
> Gabriel