Transliteration - nearly there

Colin, I think I had a couple of vowels wrong in the first line of the top table
of TransliterationScheme.doc in the Dropbox. I've corrected them in red.
Are there others which were wrong?  Please mark them with a highlight or something.

One thing I'm a little unhappy with (but I think it is ignorable) is that qames-hatuph is ô.
I don't really know about this, because it is supposed to be shorter than qames,
but does that mean it is a short "o" sound, or is it a relatively long "o" sound which is shorter than â ?
But I'm not too bothered about exactly what it sounds like, partly because prob no-one knows,
and partly because it is so much neater to use ô because
* the similarity of ô and â help to make the link with their identical hebrew
* if we used "o" it would be indistinguishable from holem without vav.
* I don't want to use a different accent.

On decisions whether a shewa is transliterated or not,
I'm depending on Matthew Anstey's Transliterated OT in BibleWorks
(called BHS but actually based on Michigan-Claremont-Westminster corrected Leningrad text)
which I'll also rely on for distinguishing between qames and qames-hatuph

About tsade, I guess I can live with Natsareth instead of Natzareth.
After all, TSadducees certainly looks better than TZadducees,
and it does help those who are used to some form of "s".

BTW - to write a circumflex in Word, type ctrl-^ and then the letter.

David IB


At 18:58 24/11/2009, Tyndale STEP Project wrote:

Yes, nearly there. Phew! Just a few outstanding things to confirm or query:

- your description is circumflex for long vowels and no accent for short
vowels but your examples and transliteration table are the other way
round for qamats-qatan and holam. Assuming things haven't caught up yet.
- we talked about "yihyeh", but I assume from the other transliteration
you give that the shewa isn't sounded (so it's yi-yeh and not yi-uh-yeh)
so that's OK.
- tsade: the difference between ts and tz isn't great. However, you
saying that you preferred to pronounce it "tz" has been bugging me a bit
(since I'm fairly certain when we were learning Hebrew and we got a
native speaker along to help us with reading we asked him this specific
question and he said "ts"). So I had a quick check on the internet and
every source I can find where it's non-ambiguous gives "ts" for
pronunciation. For _transliteration_, both tz and ts are in use: however
the former mainly by Judaic sources, the latter mainly by everyone else
(including the Library of Congress and SBL style guides). I don't recall
ever having seen tz in a Christian theological text. So if you're on the
fence, let me give you a little nudge ts-wards ;)

Colin

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Posted By Tyndale STEP Project to Tyndale STEP - Programming on 11/24/2009 10:58:00 AM