Author Archives: Karyn

2nd B2B Contest Winners

Thank you to everyone who contributed opinions and experiences about the textbooks you learned Hebrew with (or teach with). To see the original contest post (and comments), go here.

    

And the winners (chosen via a random number generator) are:

  • Bob MacDonald
  • John Murphy
  • Sytze van der Laan
  • Rick

I’ll be in touch with you to find out if you are going to SBL or if I need to mail the Og comic book to you.

Kids learning Hebrew

Hebrew quizThis is a quiz from 7-year-old Éva. I dictated the names of Hebrew letters and she wrote them down, except for #3, which asked the question, “What sound does בּ make?” She’s doing a terrific job learning Hebrew this year. She can identify all the Hebrew characters by name, tell you what sound they make, and write them all. She can put a set of letters in alef-bet order. She knows some vocabulary and will soon start sounding out and pronouncing words. I hope she keeps this up for the rest of her life. Just think what an advantage she will have!

Oh, and did I mention that I’m teaching her (and her brother) via the internet? We’re using Google video-chat and an eLearning classroom. Her mom scanned her quiz and emailed it to me. I love technology.

Eva

Visual Tools for Learning Hebrew

Some people are visual learners (I’m one of them). Here are a few visual charts to help students remember some details of Biblical Hebrew. Click on the images to download the full size versions.

When I teach weak verb forms, I like to draw attention to the fact that the Qal imperfect, imperative, and infinitive construct often follow similar patterns. I refer to this diagnostic grouping as the Qal Trio (quicker to say than “the Qal imperfect, Qal imperative, and Qal infinitive construct). If you look at my Weak Verb chart (Front, Back), you will see reference to the Qal Trio and how it appears in some of the weak verb categories (look for my “traffic light” for the Qal trio). Rebeckah Groves brought this trio to life with this drawing, which helps students remember which aspects are part of the Qal Trio.

Qal Trio

Continue reading →

Hebrew Font Issues

I am pretty good at getting my Hebrew fonts to play nice on my computer. I use Mellel for wordprocessing most of the time. Scrivener does a decent job handling the mix of R->L and L->R text that I create. I’ve come to accept (after a great deal of weeping and gnashing followed by much counseling) that unless I am willing to shell out hundreds and hundreds of dollars for the Middle East version of Adobe’s Creative Suite, I will have to use workarounds for Hebrew in Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. Now, if someone wanted to send me a version of ME CS4 to review…

What I’m perplexed by is the sometimes funky way that Firefox (3.5.5) and OS X (10.6.1) render the SBL Hebrew font vowel pointing. I’ve got the font loaded on my computer. I’ve got my various preferences set correctly (at least I am pretty sure I do). Nevertheless, things like John Hobbins’ blog often do not look the way they should. Here’s a link to a recent post, and here’s what I’m seeing (this is a screen capture):

SBL Hebrew font sample

Last year, when I was first trying to track down the problem, I received this answer to my post on the Fontlab forum (remember, this was posted 5/2008, hence the references to Firefox 3 as beta):

This is a limitation of Firefox 2. The font rendering technology cannot deal with the font, and so it ignores the font (Microsoft Office does the same thing). Firefox 2 will almost assuredly never support fonts like SBL Hebrew. Firefox 3, of which there is a publicly available beta, does support the font, and it will display the page you linked in SBL Hebrew.
Like Safari, however, even Firefox 3 does not position the vowels and diacritics correctly. This has to do with the technologies that OS X uses to render text. The older technology, ATSUI, does not provide support for complex layouts of OpenType fonts like SBL Hebrew, so one is left with the garbled mess that you now see. There is however, a newer technology called Core Text that does the layouts correctly. You can see the advantages of this API, which does support OpenType layout tables, in TextEdit. If you paste (or type) Hebrew text with SBL Hebrew in it, the layout is generally correct. The major drawback of Core Text is that it is very new and only available in Leopard. As such, it will be quite some time before it is widely implemented. There is some discussion about implementing it in Firefox here , but I would guess it will be a while.

The frustrating thing is that Safari WILL display the font and pointing correctly, so it CAN be done! Even on my iPhone (which, to date, cannot handle SBL Hebrew), I can view John Hobbins’ post with vowel pointing correctly lining up.

What about it, Mac users? What are you experiencing? Will Firefox ever support fonts like SBL Hebrew correctly? What is your browser of choice?

PC users: can you see John’s Hebrew texts in SBL Hebrew with the vowels in correct alignment? What browser are you using?

My other source of frustration is was with WordPress. Not the online blog site, but the program itself. I use WordPress for my blog on a private server. Somewhere in the past I could type unicode for Hebrew and Greek and it would display just fine. Then, more recently, when I typed in Hebrew text, the Hebrew showed up fine in the “New Post” creation window, until I saved the draft or published it, then *POOF* the Hebrew would disappear and be replaced with question marks. Some of my commenters have experienced this problem too. I think I have finally found the solution!! I’m posting the instructions here for others who might be having trouble.
Andre Oboler suggested the following:

If your blog displays question marks instead of Hebrew characters, you may need to tweak WordPress a little bit.
In the root directory of your blog installation, there’s a file called wp-config.php.
Open it in a text editor and replace “define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8’);” with “define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ”);”. That should do the trick.

And the proof…


‏שִׁיר לַמַּעֲלוֹת אֶשָּׂא עֵינַי אֶל־הֶהָרִים מֵאַיִן יָבֹא עֶזְרִי׃
עֶזְרִי מֵעִם יְהוָה עֹשֵׂה שָׁמַיִם וָאָרֶץ׃
אַל־יִתֵּן לַמּוֹט רַגְלֶךָ אַל־יָנוּם שֹׁמְרֶךָ׃
הִנֵּה לֹא־יָנוּם וְלֹא יִישָׁן שׁוֹמֵר יִשְׂרָאֵל׃
יְהוָה שֹׁמְרֶךָ יְהוָה צִלְּךָ עַל־יַד יְמִינֶךָ׃
יוֹמָם הַשֶּׁמֶשׁ לֹא־יַכֶּכָּה וְיָרֵחַ בַּלָּיְלָה׃
יְהוָה יִשְׁמָרְךָ מִכָּל־רָע יִשְׁמֹר אֶת־נַפְשֶׁךָ׃
יְהוָה יִשְׁמָר־צֵאתְךָ וּבוֹאֶךָ מֵעַתָּה וְעַד־עוֹלָם׃

So now, comments can include Hebrew, Greek, and other “complex” fonts that were previously being stripped out!

Snow Leopard 10.6.2 Is Out: Many Bug Fixes

Update for Snow Leopard: 10.6.2 is out! MacStories lists the full changelog:

The 10.6.2 Update is recommended for all users running Mac OS X Snow Leopard and includes general operating system fixes that enhance the stability, compatibility, and security of your Mac, including fixes for:

  • an issue that might cause your system to logout unexpectedly;
  • a graphics distortion in Safari Top Sites;
  • Spotlight search results not showing Exchange contacts;
  • a problem that prevented authenticating as an administrative user;
  • issues when using NTFS and WebDAV file servers;
  • the reliability of menu extras;
  • an issue with the 4-finger swipe gesture;
  • an issue that causes Mail to quit unexpectedly when setting up an Exchange server;
  • Address Book becoming unresponsive when editing;
  • a problem adding images to contacts in Address Book;
  • an issue that prevented opening files downloaded from the Internet;
  • Safari plug-in reliability;
  • general reliability improvements for iWork, iLife, Aperture, Final Cut Studio, MobileMe, and iDisk;
  • an issue that caused data to be deleted when using a guest account.