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:
Working in ancient languages requires patience when working on a computer. This little bookmark is a handy reminder of the keyboard map for inputting cuneiform and transliteration using the Durham font set. I created and used this bookmark frequently when typing up papers for our Ugaritic class. You can download a PDF with two copies of the bookmark on it here.
The top line is the cuneiform (which, I really think students should learn and continue to use rather than just transliteration), the second line is the transliteration for that character, and the bottom line (greyed out) is the US English keyboard equivalent. Even if you are not trying to type up translation worksheets or charts, the bookmark is a handy reminder of the cuneiform transliteration.
As I said, I think students should not learn the cuneiform solely to know the alphabet, but to be able to actually read/analyze/vocalize texts. With the ability to access high resolution texts (the Inscriptifact database, for instance), knowing the cuneiform is rewarded.
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
If you read Fred Putnam’s piece about teaching/learning that I mentioned the other day, then you would probably be interested in looking over his very detailed proposal for The New School of Theology.
Here’s a snippet from the proposal, which gives a a basic overview of the vision (later in the proposal are more details):
This paper proposes the creation of a unique graduate school that will prepare Christians to minister and to live in light of their faith by becoming thoughtful, reflective men and women. Its curriculum and pedagogy reflect the conviction that fundamental to good ministry and leadership is the ability to listen to and understand three voices: (1) the voice of the author in whatever text is at hand, especially the text of Scripture; (2) voices that express the opinions, fears, hopes, and concerns of others, and the ideas of their culture; and (3) the voice of their own hearts.
The program has three primary aspects, any one of which would make this program unique: (1) all courses are required/prescribed conversational seminars without testing, grades, or lectures (lectures are public supplements to the overall curriculum); (2) all class texts are primary texts, not textbooks (except in Hebrew I, Greek I, and Music I); (3) music is integral to the program.
The goal of this program is to foster an ongoing conversation, an intellectual and spiritual community of maturing learnersin other words, a place where students and faculty together read, think, converse, and thus learn to live and minister by pondering the most important ideasthe permanent ideasas they are found in the great texts of the Western world.
His ideas are very intriguing to me and I wonder what others think of this kind of education (both content and methodology). I do wonder what other texts could be included that are not Western (although that might be difficult unless you work with translations). I understand prioritizing Western texts because we live in the Western world, but I would not want to exclude studying other texts and worldviews and would be careful about privileging Western texts as the primary source of important, permanent ideas.
Anyone know someone with a few million dollars to get it started?
Gary Manning, on his blog Eutychus, has gone through the effort to produce a very good line by line refutation of the argument found in the Alef-Tav video that I pointed out at the end of my post ( Etymology Studies Live ) the other day.
I am going to bump a comment into this post to hopefully get some discussion going.
Bob Macdonald commented on my original post:
I wondered if you would get any comments on this painful video. The poor fellow is looking for certainty and absolutes where there is a different kind of knowledge available but its absolutism is unspeakable. Still it may be that by the foolishness of such preaching, even the wrongly impressed will find themselves moving towards a refreshed image.
To which I replied:
Bob, I struggle with these kinds of videos (and whether or not I should draw attention to them) because I vacillate between wanting to point out the misuse of language and recognizing that he is (probably) not trying to be deceptive/manipulative. On the one hand, his air of authority is distressing because I know an entire congregation is hanging on his every word as truth (and its not). On the other hand, his methodology seems to be simply an overly creative type of midrash (perhaps on steroids) and as you point out, may lead to a refreshed image. I dont agree with what he is doing, but I dont want to mock it either. It actually saddens me. There are a lot of people like this who are part of the Church, and as such, are brethren. How to lovingly relate, correct, challenge, and encourage are the tasks I wrestle with.
I think it is important to point out things that are erroneous or untrue. But I also think we sometimes cross a line and forget that some of these people who err (in our opinion) are often brothers and sisters in Christ. Would I say the same things that I do in a post (or in jest to a friend) to the person in the video? Do I take too much delight in pointing out someone’s shortfall? I also care about the people listening to this kind of teaching and wonder about the misunderstandings being fed to them. But the last thing I want to come across as is a “know-it-all” (which I don’t) who is tearing down without building up.
What is the best way to handle these types of issues? We all know churches and individuals who are different than us. When do we step up and try to correct, when do we sit back and let things go, and how do we do all of this in a godly manner?
Great news!
The nonprofit body that oversees Internet addresses approved Friday the use of Hebrew, Hindi, Korean and other scripts not based on Latin characters in a decision that could make the Web dramatically more inclusive.
Entire article here.
HT: Mark T.