Concordance and vowel patterns

 All 401 posts of the concordance have been refreshed. They now show the vowel pattern. I don't know about you, but I can now see and almost hear the SimHebrew as clearly, in fact more easily, than I can read the vowels of the square text. It's all there in the concordance and with some updated intro pages as well. The one on pronunciation is a copy of what I had on the SimHebrew Bible. That blog was one too many to handle so I have made it private. The concordance is a fixed set of pages - so only a slight regenerating pain when I have to change it. For the SimHebrew Bible, we won't use a blog apart from the few examples I have on this blog. You will need to buy the book. The wrappers are not yet finished. The Biblical text is done and designed, but we have the issue of getting just the right introductions and just the right set of 'helps' as appendices. And just the right set of acknowledgements etc.

The concordance will remain fully online. It is too useful as a teaching and analysis tool and the online format is perfect for it. It is my gift to y'all. It was not available anywhere in 2006 and now it is. 

< begin rant>The glossaries and dictionaries and analyses that I read when I began were like fighting with blankets in a nightmare. I met many people who learned just enough Hebrew to get through their exams for the ministry and then gave up with a sigh of relief. What a travesty for their learning. The 19th century analyses (the so-called Strong's numbers) have infected the learning of the last 2 centuries. All this exposure of a badly defined identifier is an atrocious way of teaching a language. A language can never live if you turn it into a bunch of numbers. (Unless you are writing AI speech recognition, but that's a different story.) </end rant>

Enough negatives. With the vowel patterns exposed, I think a little selective analysis will reveal some useful grammatical results. By all means study ctb again.

For instance: 

actbnh

_e_:_:a_e_a_

1

אֶכְתֲּבֶ֑נָּה

I will write it

Just look at the simplicity: the first /a/ in actbnh carries and _e_ vowel, the c carries a schwa, the t carries a lesser a vowel, the suffix is joined to the root ctb with a vowel pattern.

I expect to find consistent rules for forming vowel patterns, of course for the binyanim (conjugations  building blocks for verbs) and also for the prefixes and suffixes. I know, I could get them all from Lambdin or Gesenius or any of the many other online grammars, but just imagine if I were able to make it easier to learn with SimHebrew! To the point where you could read without the vowels. (That's not quite possible since there will be ambiguities, but when we can identify them, then perhaps we will know the language a little better.)

Notice too how actbnh is on a rest! You know where it's from, it's a unique form in Jeremiah 31. Just look at it.

Jeremiah 31:33

This was referred to in the lesson at Evensong today in Hebrews 8. Now there's a coincidence...

Moses may break the tablets, but God will write the law on their hearts. (Of course we all know how to break hearts!)