===== Original Message From Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org> =====
But Semitists do deal with living languages: Hebrew, Arabic,
neo-Aramaic, Amharic etc, modern South Arabian. Or they should - they
ignore at their peril modern Semitic languages.
Deal with them, yes. ... You can say I'm wrong, you can say it's an unfortunate state of affairs, but just check the archives of this list and the ANE list to see how much modern Semitic languages comes into the discussion. It's not a serious need.
[snipped]This is a copyright issue. These texts cannot be presented as BHS. But Kirk Lowery's e-text is effectively identical to BHS although for legal reasons it has been retyped from the Leningrad codex.
Well, unless you are talking about several years back, your recall
incorrectly. There are now at least three freely available Unicode texts
of the Hebrew Bible, from http://www.anastesontai.com/,
http://www.mechon-mamre.org/, and
http://whi.wts.edu/WHI/Members/klowery/eL/index_html.
Perhaps the issue before was whether BHS was available. None of these three is, ...
... so choosing to use them for intensive scholarly work introduces the new issue of evaluating how good the texts are in their own right. Plus, the first and last at least are very up-front about the errors and problems that remain. I'd have to spend some time actually trying to work with them to determine whether it's a bigger headache to proof everything I use from these texts or to re-key everything I need to reproduce myself.
It is also
possible to convert MCW texts to Unicode; I have a draft converter which
I can make available if anyone would like it.
I would be interested. As far as I know, the only (reasonably) reliable electronic text file of BHS is in MCW.
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