Biblical Hebrew Forum

[James Read <J.Read-2 AT sms.ed.ac.uk>]

I'm not sure I understand what you are describing and what your end  
goals of the process you describe are but the whole point of the  
methodology I described earlier is to generate a painless learning  
process that better exploits the natural language learning circuitry  
we were born with.

While it may be true that many words in hebrew have a relation to some  
triconsonantal root the average Hebrew child was probably never  
explicitly told this, he just gained a tacit knowledge of this by  
process of induction from examples of language. The emphasis of my  
course design is, therefore, to move away from the medieval paradigm  
of grammar based learning to the more natural paradigm of vocabulary  
based learning and just let grammar come by induction. In such a  
system students learn the meanings of individual words and groups of  
words.

A feature of language is that meaning of a word is often more dictated  
by its usage than by its grammatical or etymological origins. It is  
the usage driven meaning of individual forms and of combinations of  
words that I would aim to teach rather trying to force meaning on  
something to conform to some grammatical theory.

e.g. Let us consider the contraversial ehyeh asher ehyeh

Two main possibilities here. Do we:

a) Let grammar constrain the translation?
b) Attempt to translate the meaning?

If we do a) we get translations like:

1) I am that am
2) I will be that I will be

At some point in history somebody or a group of people attempted b)  
and got something like

1) I am the Eternal (ego eimi o wn)

which seems parallel to the later

1) The one that was, that is and will be (o in, o wn kai o erxomenos)

If we are to understand YHWH as an imperfect (a verb which can be  
understood in senses which are ongoing, repetetive and other  
imperfective senses) then translating YHWH grammatically into  
languages which do not exhibit such a construction with the same range  
of meaning becomes problematic. The translator needs to decide whether  
he wishes to preserve the grammar or attempt to approximate the  
intended meaning. Any translation will be a trade-off between these  
two factors. o in, o wn kai o erxomenos and ego eimi o wn seem to be  
to me translations which give more emphasis to the intended meaning  
than to the preservation of some grammatical construction. Of course,  
there exists the counter arguments that ego eimi o wn is a bad  
translation and o in, o wn kei o erxomenos is unrelated but the fact  
remains that whether we choose to accept ego eimi o wn as a good  
translation or not, that at some point in history some group of people  
understood it to be a good translation for whatever reasons they had.

But anyway, the general point is this. That my intention would be to  
give people the chance to learn Hebrew in a vocabulary oriented  
fashion that provides, as painless as is possible, increments that  
brings the student (in an optimal path) ever closer to being able to  
read the tanakh without need of reference.

Of course, just because some algorithm decides (based on statistical  
information) that one path is the optimal does not necessarily mean  
that it is so for all learners as one learner may be more interested  
in certain vocabulary than others and those interests may continually  
change throughout their journey. The one thing I think we can say with  
certainty is that inquiry based learning is effective and by that I  
mean that students generally learn something better when they are  
provided with information they themselves are looking for in the  
moment that they are looking for it. So I think the architecture  
should in some way be designed to take this into account so that the  
user has some control over the direction that the path takes.  
Obviously, this is not really possible with a book without developing  
some kind of if x then go to page y scheme which gets really tiresome  
really fast after you've been flicking pages backwards and forwards  
for some time. So the course would definitely be better suited to be  
computer based than paper based.

James Christian Read

BSc Hons Computer Science (machine translation)
MSc Human Language Technology (distinction - machine translation)
MSc High Performance Computing (machine learning of multingual
translation tables in massively parallel environment)



Quoting Petr Tomasek <tomasek AT etf.cuni.cz>:

> I had another Idea:
>  1) make vocabulary according to the roots
> (shouldn't be hard if we take the WTS text with analysis).
>  2) choose verbal roots;
>  3) mark roots which belong to particular verb class (פ״נ, ל״ה, ע״יו...)
>  4) make a search engine that will look for text that contain
> specific verb class(es) and do not containt other (/specific) ones.
>
>
> On Thu, May 07, 2009 at 09:21:42AM +0100, James Read wrote:
> > I've been toying with this idea for quite a few years now but never
> > really got round to doing anything about it. I was hoping to do it for
> > Greek as well. My basic plan was this.
> >
> > 1) Choose a fairly complete digital codex (e.g. Leningradis)
> > 2) Run frequency counts on words, n-grams, phrases and natural
> > language templates.
> > 3) Run calculations which calculate the vocabulary driven roots to
> > reading the tanakh and therefore empirically locating the optimal
> > vocabulary path which will fastest take a student from zero to being
> > able to read tanakh with minimal encounter of new words
> > 4) Select the passages which, at each stage of the student's assumed
> > vocabulary, present the least challenge in reading
> > 5) From this information generate a vocabulary and reading driven course
> >
> > If I were to start putting serious effort into designing and building
> > this could the readers of the list give me some indication as to the
> > following:
> >
> > 1) How many people would be interested in using such software personally?
> > 2) Who would be willing to give it a try with their students?
> > 3) Opinions on the right place for this kind of software in the
> > classroom: Should this kind of thing be only used as a supplement to a
> > traditional grammar course? Or would anybody consider basing a course
> > on such a learning method?
> > 4) What features would you like to see in the software? e.g. Would you
> > like to be able to override system defaults and define your own
> > translations of units?
> >
> > James Christian Read
> >
> > BSc Hons Computer Science (machine translation)
> > MSc Human Language Technology (distinction - machine translation)
> > MSc High Performance Computing (machine learning of multingual
> > translation tables in massively parallel environment)
> >
> >
> > Quoting George Athas <George.Athas AT moore.edu.au>:
> >
> > > Hi all!
> > >
> > > In light of recent posts, I thought I'd put a few questions out there:
> > >
> > > (1) Which book did you use when you began to learn Hebrew?
> > >
> > > (2) If you are (or have been) an instructor, which book(s) do you
> > > use in the classroom? Any pro's and con's?
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > Regards,
> > >
> > > GEORGE ATHAS
> > > Moore Theological College (Sydney, Australia)
> > > www.moore.edu.au
> > >
> > > _______________________________________________
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> > > http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
> > >
> > >
> >
> >
> >
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> --
> Petr Tomasek <http://www.etf.cuni.cz/~tomasek>
> Jabber: butrus AT jabbim.cz
> SIP: butrus AT ekiga.net



--
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.