Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Daniel Lundsgaard Skovenborg <waldeinburg AT yahoo.com>]

Hi,

After the recent questions on accent signs (subject: "question re accent 
signs"), which required detail-oriented searching, I was thinking: Would 
there be general interest in a Regular Expression search application for the 
Leningrad Codex? (Regular Expressions is an extremely powerful search pattern 
language.)

I was able to participate in the discussion using a primitive Perl script 
that uses Regular Expressions to search the Westminster Leningrad Codex. I'll 
consider developing it into something suitable for end-users, if such a tool 
does not exist allready and if there's a general interest. It will be Open 
Source and probably a web-app.

The strength—and weakness—of such an application that it is rigid and 
searches the raw text: You can search for instances of meteg placed before 
the vowel instead of after, but if you search for consonant-qamets-consonant 
it will not match if there is a meteg, unless you include a "meteg or no 
meteg"-pattern it in the rule. Of course, it's easy to create text-versions 
where accents or vowels are filtered out.
Custom classes like "consonant", "vowel", "postpositive disjunctive accent" 
etc. can easily be defined for inclusion in seach patterns.


Regarding existing search engines:

Mr. Ari Kinsberg found results for the discussion based on the Aleppo Codex 
using the Mikraot Gedolot haKeter CD-ROM. It is thus not for the Leningrad 
Codex (or easily available?). The search interface is quite innovative 
(http://www.jewishlibraries.org/ajlweb/publications/proceedings/proceedings2004/aronson.pdf),
 and my proposed search engine will not be as user friendly for users 
unfamiliar with RegExps (unless it would be legal to reproduce the interface 
for generating RegExps, but that would not be in the first version).


Bibleworks can search for accents but not for specific placement of accents. 
Libronix 3 can do regular expressions, but it ignores Masoretic points – 
unless I missed an option to switch it on.

- Daniel Lundsgaard Skovenborg