and you have come up with something which is commendably simple
I've attached the scholarly transliteration I was thinking of
(I forgot that pics have to be attached to get through the blogger relay).
The transliteration scheme you describe sounds very similar to a rabbinic one
which is great for people who already know Hebrew and can work out for
themselves when a "s" represents a letter sin or samek,
and can make a good guess at whether a vowel has a vav or yod behind it.
The system I was proposing makes it possible for someone to reconstruct what the Hebrew text is,
even with the correct pointing, (although an occasional dagesh will be lost).
However, I recognise that the scheme you outline is simpler to type
(it uses nothing but ASCII - no curly quotes or underlining).
I'd prefer that it used "q" instead of "k" for qoph
and if we are going to distinguish between b/v or p/ph or k/kh, shouldn't we add t/th?
Having said that, this distinction can be mostly expressed by the normal doubling of letters in English
(like one does for other dagesh letters).
Say to yourself "sad" and "sadder" - only the second has a real "d" sound. The first has a soft "d" which you might transliterate as "dh".
Similarly, when a word starts with a letter, there is no need to indicate that there is a dagesh (as there almost always is, with the bgdkpt letters) because that is naturally what you say at the start of a word.
Say "Dad" and "Daddy" - both have a strong "d" at the start, but the later "d" is very soft unless it is doubled.
The same is true with others: Say "rib" and "ribbing"
However, most English readers, when presented with "Rab" and "Rabbi" will say the "b" with equal force,
as one does when speaking carefully in a strange language, so "Rav" and "Rabbi" helps them somewhat.
But what is the better way to write "house" - "bet" or "beth"?
Neither of them will be pronounced properly, because people will say "bet" as in "taking a bet"
or they'll say "beth" like the name "Seth" (sticking their tongue between their teeth to get a proper "th".
What they should be saying, of course, is "beth" as in Bethlehem (putting the tip of their tongue behind their top teeth. This is somewhere between "th" and "t" (where the tip of your tongue taps the top of your mouth behind your teeth).
What I'm saying is that a transliteration system won't teach people how to speak,
and anyway, if they speak how we tell them to, they won't speak at they did in Jesus' day,
and if they did, they wouldn't be speaking like they did in Moses day.
So is it worth it? Well, maybe, if they have believed their Hebrew textbooks.
But wouldn't it be helpful to give them a transliteration system which enables them to use a Hebrew lexicon without knowing any Hebrew letters?
We could produce a Hebrew Bible in transliteration, and a copy of Strong's lexicon in transliteration.
The scanned copies of lexicons wouldn't be in transliteration of course, but the indexes to them could be.
David IB
At 10:28 12/11/2009, Tyndale STEP Project wrote:
David,
I'm not sure what you understand by the "full-complex scholarly" system
(unfortunately your example didn't come out) but what you've come up
with is pretty close to what I would describe as the scholarly system,
i.e., that used in the IVP dictionaries, NIDOTTE and the Bible Speaks
Today series.
The first two are identical, and I think exactly analagous to yours in
the information they include. BST differs slightly - they don't provide
a transliteration key so I'd need to search through for all the
differences, but unlike IVP, they mark dagesh/non-dagesh forms of the
bgdkpt letters (at least k and p - not sure whether they bother with gdt
where there's no difference) and waw is v, not w.
Comparing the three:
* in consonants, yours is a slight improvement on the others: having
tsade on z rather than s, but why not tz or ts, and shin as sh rather
than an accented s.
* marking the bgdkpt differences where there's a pronunciation
difference I think is important. And I'd do this for kaf and pe as well
as bet - I don't know about modern Hebrew pronunciation but I think all
the textbooks tell you to pronounce them k/ch and p/f, so that makes
sense to follow.
* in vowels, think I prefer theirs, but it's again fairly marginal. I'm
not sure to what extent preserving the information that some vowels
include a letter on the page is useful.
However, to be honest, they're all so close that I think the advantage
of going for an agreed standard is going to be less confusing and
outweighs having a marginally better transliteration scheme.
Given, from what Troy says, we can offer more than one transliteration
scheme, maybe we also offer a straight reading scheme which reflects
pronunciation and disregards differences between letters which sound the
same.
So, alphabet would be something like:
' b/v g d h v z kh t y k/kh l m n s ' p/ph ts k r s sh t
Vav/yodh only included if a consonant. Aleph/ayin only included if
affecting pronunciation (so not start of word, or midword with no vowel)
Vowels are ' (vocal shwah) aeiou with an accent for stronger ones.
So Gen 1:1 becomes
b'rêshît bârâ elôhîm êt hashâmayim v'êt ha'arets.
Colin
--
Posted By Tyndale STEP Project to Tyndale STEP - Programming on 11/12/2009 02:28:00 AM
No comments:
Post a Comment