Saturday 19 January 2019

Music for Matthew 5:14?

Continuing the prior post.

O what discipline is required to put in the accents. Some editors will allow them. Word-10 works. You have to be using the Hebrew keyboard and then put in the alt-codes (painful memory work -see my cheat sheet here.) The blogger editor is OK for minor adjustments to vowels but the cantillation alt-keys are not supported. Similarly in Muse score, you can paste in the right text, but don't try to enter it with the alt-keys. So the detail must be done in Word or by direct insert in html into the database (even more prone to error).

This is the sample verse. Is Margoliuth good at designing cantillation? Think about it. The ancient unknown people who did this - were they punctuating or were they composing? I think they were composing - forming and releasing harmonic and emotional tension to be resolved at the end of each verse, or continuing, using reciting notes to tell the emotional content of the story.


The sequence of coding is not important. Vowels and cantillation fit together in any order after a consonant. (Programmers beware) The result looked a bit like music. But did I copy his signs correctly? I did not. I did not even transcribe the words correctly. My first correction was still wrong. My eye put the accent on the wrong ayin!

Finally, fixing the words too
Notice that Margoliuth has המנחת rather than ישׁבת (seated, situated, etc). The fifth word is from נוח (Noah) to rest. ִIt is an unexpected gloss. (The form does not occur in TNK).

You are the light of the era.
A city resting on a hill cannot be hidden.

Found another version with yet another verb for 'set'. I think the stem must be שׁכן but again the form never occurs in TNK.
אַתֶּם אוֹר הָעוֹלָם. עִיר שׁוֹכֶנֶת עַל הַר אֵינָהּ יְכוֹלָה לְהִסָּתֵר

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