Biblical Hebrew Forum

[James Christian <jc.bhebrew AT googlemail.com>]

Hi Joseph,

there are many problems with defining grammars from examples of text.
Anybody that has tried to define a grammar of a language to work
algorithmically soon finds that high level textbook presentations of rule
systems just don't work. Perhaps one of the most sophisticated attempts at
defining a generational grammar of modern language is the wide coverage
grammar worked on by the likes of Mary Dalrymple at Xerox PARC using the LFG
(lexical functional grammar) theory of grammar. Even such wide coverage
grammars still suffer from problems of over generation and undergeneration.
In fact, currently the best grammars available for NLP are statistical
grammars based on n-gram models. I have real serious doubts that the paper
you are referring to was written by somebody with the correct computational
linguistic and natural language processing background to understand what he
was really talking about.

James Christian

2010/2/6 Joseph Justiss <jljustiss AT msn.com>

>
> Dear Friends
>
> I know of a Hebrew Bible scholar who has tagged almost every clause in the
> TaNaK into a databse designed to analyze textgrammar. He agrees with Barr
> that the "authors" (defined as those responsible for the final canonical
> form of biblical books, those who "make" not "write" books) were not
> themselves native BH speakers and learned the language in much the same way
> you and I do. He says he can prove this by the mistakes they make in the
> grammar of the text. It is hard to argue with him since he can show you the
> undeniable statistics in the computer database-stored information.
>
>
>
> I bring this up for this reason. Suppose the examples given by Karl Randolf
> of weqatals which do not refer to events subsequent to the discourse are
> just such examples of the "misuse" of weQatal in the text. I'm curious to
> see if any of the list members would even entertain such a possibility.
>
>
>
> Joseph Justiss
>
>
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