Exceptions to my rules of concordance

As I think about this project of reading in Hebrew and writing in English a close translation for the music, I realize a design factor that I must expose to the readers of this translation.

I am a regular user of the English language. It is my native tongue. Hebrew is not. Every one of us has a tongue we take for granted. We don't ask how it works. We just do it. Linguists ask the questions we haven't thought of. One of the reasons learning a language is difficult is that we learn it wrong. We learn its grammar first and then use it. We never did this as children. We knew our language before we learned its grammar. And even then, when we know grammar, we never analyse first and then speak.

And vocabulary? That's even a bigger problem. What is the word for that? we think. Or what does this mean? Or can you remember that word for ..., you know what I mean?  These things never bother us much, except for the natural degeneration of our abilities as we age. But with a tongue that is foreign to us, we are initially lost, and I am not sure we ever find ourselves.

Is fluency in multiple languages possible? Yes, of course. And it is demonstrated by many people we know, especially those who grew up with two or more languages, and by others who 'have the gift' for it. It was not a gift that I have had.

I accept exceptions to glossing rules in my native language. I can spot them, both the apt Malapropism, and the creative use of a term in a new context. I hear puns and humour where I would miss it in a foreign tongue. Our French and Latin teachers were entirely without humour - at least for the boys they taught. So even for those tongues I learned in my youth, the nuance was lacking.

But what I learned from design and programming I can share. And a fundamental principle is that one must identify and press on the weak spots in a design.

So here is my mediated list of significant exceptions, Gloss, Stem, and Semantic domain (always a work in process). The full list will be in the alphabet book when is it published. There are very few that do not cross semantic domains and which are therefore legitimate homonyms in Hebrew. And there are several that are exceptions for a specific reason: they are Aramaic or they are part of an acrostic. Some of them are grammatical, and we know prepositions and conjunctions don't behave according to rules across languages.

I thought I knew of the significant compromises. These involve words like come, go, bring, set, put, and so on. I made no attempt after working the Books of Truth and the Scrolls to make these stems concordant. Some of them may be distinguishable using the preposition.

But the list turns out to be even smaller than I thought it would be. Some stems that are obviously related like לב and לבב I left separate. They are among the insignificant compromises. Some like bring are still well distinguished by the preposition that is part of the verb, bring out, bring up, bring back, etc.

The following are glosses that could be revisited, but when I try now, I am forced into the circle I avoided at first. And the status quo looks reasonable. I have spent a long time combing the hair of glossaries and being horrified at the tangles therein. To have combed them out to this point with just over 25 examples in 305,000+ words should let me leave them in the hair as adornments. (A few in the list below can be deleted since they are doubles in English , like came, come, goes, went, end, ends, which my lemma algorithm does not recognize or they are doubles in Hebrew which I have separated arbitrarily, like לב, לבב, צדיך, צדך.)

I do not know of any other translation project that publishes its list of exceptions to concordance.

Puah	פואה	PERSON
Puah	פועה	PERSON
birth	חול	BIRTH
birth	ילד	BIRTH
blow	נדף	WILD
blow	פוח	WILD
came	מטא	APPROACH-A
came	סלק	APPROACH-A
come	הלך	WALK
come	יצא	WALK
crush	דכה	INJURY
crush	דכא	INJURY
cut	כרת	CUT
cut	נתח	CUT
east	זרח	MEASURE
east	קדם	MEASURE
end	אפס	DISTANT
end	קצץ	DISTANT
ends	אפס	DISTANT
ends	קצץ	DISTANT
extreme	אפס	DISTANT
extreme	קצה	DISTANT
fly	זבוב	WINGS
fly	עוף	WINGS
goes	בוא	WALK
goes	הלך	WALK
kind	חסיד	WHOLE
kind	חסד	WHOLE
knee	ברך	BODYPART-A
knee	רכב	BODYPART-A
less	מעט	MEASURE
less	קטן	MEASURE
many time	רב	MEASURE
many time	רבה	MEASURE
men	מת	HUMAN
men	אישׁ	HUMAN
never	עלם	TIME
never	עוד	TIME
offer	עלה	OFFER
offer	זבח	OFFER
offering	זבח	OFFER
offering	עלה	OFFER
point	להב	STRENGTH
point	צור	STRENGTH
quiet	שׁקט	QUIET
quiet	לט	QUIET
quiet	שׁתק	QUIET
right	צדיק	HOLY
right	צדק	HOLY
righteousness	צדיק	HOLY
righteousness	צדק	HOLY
rot	רקב	DESTROY
rot	מקק	DESTROY
set	שׂום	RULE
set	שׁית	RULE
side	שׂטר	BODYPART-A
side	צד	BODYPART-A
sight	פקח	LOOK
sight	ראה	LOOK
south	נגב	MEASURE
south	ימן	MEASURE
southern	נגב	MEASURE
southern	ימן	MEASURE
tail	זנב	BODYPART
tail	ערף	BODYPART
went	בוא	WALK
went	הלך	WALK
wrap	עטה	CLOTHE
wrap	רדד	CLOTHE

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