My Facebook posts often say something to the effect of, “Editing Hebrew with some coffee and a purring cat in the chair in the back room…” I thought it might be about time that I gave my readers a glimpse into my Hebrew editing life. I hope that my Hebrew colleagues will indulge me a bit of non-technical Hebrew explanation. Most of my readership are not linguists, and I want them to have a glimpse into what goes on back here besides coffee drinking and cat petting.
I have been working with the Bartimaeus Alliance of the Blind on the project of digitizing J. Weingreen’s A Practical Grammar for Classical Hebrew in a format that can be downloaded and sent to a braille embosser. Someone else first scanned the hardcopy into digital form–yes, this can be done with braille books just like print ones–and then the digital files went to another braille proofreader for correction of scanning errors. I became involved after she had been working on the project for some time. She and I worked together for a while, and she eventually stopped working with the project.
This project turned out to be a lot more work than what we expected. In addition to the scanning errors, we felt it was important to correct some things that had been neglected and/or mishandled in the original transcription. The transcriber had invented symbols for Hebrew characters where she did not know them; and in reality symbols do exist for those characters. So we set about the task of replacing those symbols throughout the text. We also read every line of text to make sure that the characters were correct. In doing this, we found lines of missing text and even some missing pages that we needed to retype. We were fortunate to obtain an electronic copy of the printed text so that we did not need to have a sighted person read all this extra text to us.
In most Hebrew braille books, the marks that indicate cantillation–very simplistically, marks that tell Jewish people how to chant–are omitted. Only the Hebrew spelling and a few basic marks that are considered equivalent to punctuation are used. In the JBI Tanakh, the notations that indicate “qere” and “ketiv” (read” and “written”) are also included. However, many other notations are omitted.
While I have seen Hebrew books that list the metheg symbol in the front matter as if it is important to know, I have never actually seen a metheg in text. This grammar is the only piece of Hebrew braille I have ever seen in which the metheg is included in the text–even the JBI braille version of the Tanakh does not include methegs. In the process of making choices about what to do with the metheg and the silluq (a symbol which JBI does use and which is visually identical to the metheg), I learned more than I thought I was ready to learn–about the two symbols and about why JBI may have made the choices they made. In braille, the silluq differs drastically from the metheg; and very important transcription choices were made concerning how to represent it.
One of the biggest parts of the project is the reformatting of the verb paradigm charts. In print, these charts span numerous columns–sometimes all the way across facing pages. A sighted person who tutors Hebrew told me that they are supposed to be read down the left side. But how a person reads the chart depends on why one is consulting it. If one is reviewing all of one type of verb, he reads down. If one is looking for a particular form of a particular type of verb, one might read down and across, or across and down. In putting that information into braille, it is important to make it most usable for both review and for searching. Doing that in a concise way is not an easy task.
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Hi, Sarah, Do you know if there are any accessible modern Hebrew grammars? I’ve got one as a pdf, in addition to tons of miscellaneous handouts, but was wondering if there was something more systematized and easy to reference.
Hi, Lauren.
I’ve been hoping to find just such a thing. So far I have not. I continue to hope and to keep my eyes open. Once the Weingreen project is done, I am hoping to initiate some communications via the B-Hebrew list and see whether any modern Hebrew grammar authors would be willing to grant permissions for their work to be transcribed. I’ve also been hoping that Logos might come up with something, but so far no luck.