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b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] Hebrew Textbooks

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  • From: James Read <J.Read-2 AT sms.ed.ac.uk>
  • To: Petr Tomasek <tomasek AT etf.cuni.cz>
  • Cc: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Hebrew Textbooks
  • Date: Thu, 07 May 2009 13:27:15 +0100

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
>
> _______________________________________________
> b-hebrew mailing list
> b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
>
>



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Petr Tomasek <http://www.etf.cuni.cz/~tomasek>
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--
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.






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