Yo, Alef Bet in the House.
This is the Aleph-Bet song that the kids I’m teaching Hebrew like best.
There are many other Aleph-Bet videos on youtube, but this is their favorite (for now).
It’s part of the EKS Publishing Sarah and David Aleph Bet Story materials. In addition to the publisher’s site, there is an online site specifically for the Sarah & David materials.
This 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.
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.
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):
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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!
A few weeks ago I reviewed some Hebrew vocabulary resources (Part One, Part Two) that readers submitted for my first B2B contest. There are a few vocabulary resources that were not mentioned, but which I want to draw attention to. The first one is a project from The University of Auckland (that’s in New Zealand, folks). Davar is a “dynamic illustrated vocabulary resource” for Biblical Hebrew. The academic leadership for the project is Dr Tim Bulkeley and Dr Lynne Wall (I’m looking forward to hopefully meeting Tim at the upcoming SBL meeting in New Orleans). This project has been designed with a great deal of thought. Their design rationale can be found here. Basically, Davar is a database of web “cards” for Hebrew vocabulary. Each card has animation showing the word being typed from right to left, audio to hear the word, visual images illustrating the meaning, mnemonics to trigger a gloss, parsing, a verse with the word in context, and a semantic field (based on the domains found in the Louw-Nida Greek Lexicon).
Students can access the vocabularies online without registering (actually, anyone can access them). Teachers can register to gain access to the vocabularies in order to provide customized lists to their own students. The next step of participation is as a “contributor.” This level of access allows you to add or change information in the vocabulary database. A peer review process is in place to make sure all changes are appropriate before they go “live.”
So, what does it look like? Here are some screen shots from my MacBook Pro running OS X version 10.6.1 (and using Foxfire 3.5.5), the Hebrew vowel pointing is not quite lined up with the consonants. I’d be interested to hear how other people are viewing this resource.
This first image is the opening splash.
Here we have the vocabularies navigation page.
This final shot is an individual vocabulary window.
As far as I can tell, there are 554 vocabulary entries (so far). This is a work in progress, and they are definitely willing to have people come on board with them to help out. They also acknowledge that no project is perfect and that there is always a different way to do things–but this is somewhere to start!
Take a look, let me know your thoughts. Or, better yet, if you see Tim at SBL, talk to him about the project!
Here’s who to look for:
Many of you are familiar with the MP3 files of the Tanakh that are available online at Mechon Mamre (if you are not aware of them, stop reading this and go to the site right now and start downloading some Hebrew to listen to!). Mechon Mamre links to the files made available at the Israeli Snunit Kodesh site. You can download individual chapters or entire books. Explore around the site for many more resources. The Academy of Ancient Languages also makes the readings available. But I digress.
Anyone who has listened to these audio files will forever be able to remember the cadence and pronunciation of the reader. But do you know who that reader is? His name is Abraham Shmueloff and he has quite a story! I found a short biography online a few years ago and I quote it below (the full bio can be accessed here). In classes, we referred to the reader as the “rabbi,” but as you can see from his story, it’s a little more complicated than that! Continue reading
Pete Enns is the Friday “guest voice” in the science and religion dialogue over at Science and the Sacred (the BioLogos blog).
He says this post is the first of several. Should be interesting! Check out what he has to say about Science and an Incarnational Approach to the Bible. In this first post, he sets out the problem as he sees it, then in subsequent posts he will define what he means by “incarnational model” and then will look at specific implications for reading the bible with this model in mind.
UPDATE: We have our winners–Bob MacDonald, John Murphy, Rick, and Sytze van der Laan. Congratulations!
Time for another B2B contest. This time I want to know what Biblical Hebrew textbook you used when you first learned Hebrew. Leave a comment and tell me the name of the textbook and a little bit about whether you thought it was helpful. What did you like/dislike about the book?
Also, if you have taught Biblical Hebrew to other people, let me know what textbook you chose to use and why.
Your reward for your comments? I’m giving away some Og the Terrible comic books. I’ll put everyone who has contributed a comment into a random generator to select the winners! You can enter more than once by describing your experiences with different textbooks.
In light of some of the recent discussions on illegitimate word studies, this post by Scot McKnight seems appropriate to point out. McKnight highlights Manfred Brauch’s book, Abusing Scripture: The Consequences of Misreading the Bible, which Scot does not think is getting enough discussion. McKnight quotes 5 common ways that Christians abuse Scripture and then asks, “Which of these abuses do you see the most? Do you see others that concern you?”
Yesterday, I heard that young Éva thought we should cheer for the Phillies because her dad’s name is Phil.
That reminded me of some other crazy intersections of words.
We usually drive on the parkway, but park on the driveway. Although, one can drive on the driveway (from the street to the garage) and also park on the parkway (if you aren’t too concerned about getting hit).
Why is it that kidnapping is a federal offense, while catnapping is merely an enjoyable pastime?
Why are things which are transported by ships called cargo and things transported by cars called shipment?
Why does your nose run and your feet smell?
If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?
Why do people recite at a play and play at a recital?
If people from Poland are called Poles, are people from Holland called be Holes? and are the Germans, Germs?
(A few of these and quite a few more can be found here.)
We laugh at these because we understand that the meaning resides in more than the form of the word. This is harder to see in another language and we are tempted to make connections where they do not exist. I think these English wordpairs highlight this type of (mis)understanding of language that we know as illegitimate semantic transfer.
If English isn’t enough of a potential hotbed of misapplied word etymology, try throwing Greek and Hebrew into the mix. Which is how you end up here: