Things I discovered while doing something else.

Direct speech and vav

While searching with some automated assistance for typos in my text, I have discovered that there is no instance of direct speech anywhere in the Biblical text where the spoken word begins with a vav.

So while we might think that the Hebrews wrote with rather too many instances of the vav as connector, in fact their speech writing would seem to confirm that they did not speak that way.

Also, 1% of the time, direct speech is introduced immediately following the atnah (the main pause in a verse).

Another word I never used

The King James peppers its translation with heathen for גוי. For me, גוי is nation for 559 of 561 instances. The other two are national and nationhood, i.e. directly related, just not reduced to the lemma form, since my algorithm does not analyse or remove those suffixes, al or hood. A nation is a recognizable and somewhat cohesive subgroup of the human family. There is no cause for a hymn about heathen lands afar in Bob's Bible.

What was I trying to do?

Stop myself from imploding after finishing the first full draft of the libretto for the music of Tanakh.

A boxed set of Bob's Books

And try to define what I hope to accomplish in the next say 3 years. A full set of examples of the music with Hebrew and English underlay to accompany a release of my work in ebook form and possibly paper form. This would be the translation of the whole in a readable form and several pertinent examples of the music. Certainly examples from all I currently have in performance, and a few others.

What do I need?

I need critical readers and musicians ready to say no and yes. I need to prove the translations through setting them to music and through other means of validation some of which I will need to invent. I want to see what emerges from this study of this text.

What do I discover?

I find I have set some of the music already but the translation I now have bears little relationship to what I set 5 years ago! In some ways the older is better. But I know there were some cogent (to me) reasons for the changes made over the last 5 years. They weren't always musical reasons though.