Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

My point exactly. There will always be arguments for and against any
particular digital reconstruction. We can use automated methods but no
algorithm is perfect. Perhaps best to keep the discussion linguistics based.
Digital reconstruction is a messy subject.

Yitzhak does raise a valid point about the shape of the aleph though. I
haven't checked the image to see if this is true. I haven't been interested
enough by the topic to look into in any depth. Just wanted to make sure list
members were aware of the issues involved with digital reconstructions. We
so often here people talking about digital reconstructions as if they were
reliable or confirmatory in some way. Whereas, in reality, they are as
subjective as the method used to achieve them.

James Christian

On 11 May 2010 19:08, K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com> wrote:

> James:
>
> On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 6:38 AM, James Christian
> <jc.bhebrew AT googlemail.com>wrote:
>
> > YS: If you will view the photo under magnification, you will see that a
> > few darker pixels of the upper portion of the Waw and the Aleph touch
> each
> > other.  It is only a few pixels, and the lighter pixels around them mean
> > that under low magnification the display averages them up as a gap, but
> the
> > darker pixels do connect both parts.
> >
> > JCR: Sounds like digital reconstruction to me. You do go on to mention
> the
> > importance of viewing the originals but as you can't you rely on what
> those
> > who saw them say. You are in essence performing a reconstruction of a
> > digital image guided by what you see in the pixels and what people who
> saw
> > the original say about it. If you don't call this reconstruction then...
> >
> > James Christian
> >
> > If Yitzhak is doing digital reconstruction, so am I. I enlarged the image
> to where each pixel is a small square on my screen. I noticed that the
> darker pixels are no darker than other dark splotches in the leather where
> there are no letters. The letters are in soft focus, like an out of focus
> photograph: is it because the ink faded more on the edges than on the
> centers of the strokes, or did the ink spread slightly under the conditions
> that preserved that scrap? The latter would explain the darker areas that
> appear between many of the closely spaced letters.
>
> For another view, the LXX read it as WR)W with two waws and no yods.
>
> Karl W. Randolph.
> _______________________________________________
> b-hebrew mailing list
> b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
>