Blog haitus

 Oct 5th  - 11 days ago - I have been very busy - but silent as to posting. Still here though, not a dead parrot.

The past 9 days have been experimenting with e-books. 9 of my 10 volumes on The Bible and its Music are completely updated and ready for release when the SimHebrew Bible is released. We are getting close and may well meet the target of November 11.

As part of this I have completely redesigned the concordance here. Notice the headings - effectively splitting the display in two:

Design for my concordance of the Tanach

The left hand columns in a table + grid format (Root / Domain / Hebrew Word / Gloss / Word) allow you to concentrate on the root (ab in this case) and its form (ab) itself.

The middle two cells Word and Vowels let you construct the sound in SimHebrew. If you read the square text, it will agree of course. In this case we have two consonants a and b and one vowel 'a'. Put the two consonants a and b in the _ slots in the vowel string and bingo: aab is what you get. Remember that the consonant a (like y - ayin) is a guttural - not a vowel. The first a in this case carries the vowel a. It may carry other vowels - as in abn (stone) abn _e_e_. English does this too - anyone (eny-one) - so don't be surprised by it.

The right hand columns Previous word / Word / References and Count give the context. Hover over the reference to get tooltips in both my translation and the NRSV. (Courtesy of the Bible Gateway links). The previous word is the Hebrew word. In the first case above, read v/ain (and there is none or something like that) - if you are not sure of the root just look at the URL or click it, so don't read it as English.

This concordance will also be available as an e-book (when the new versions are released). That will give it longevity. The concordance blog has likely been updated for the last time unless I find an easier way to do it. [I need a technique for automatic update of posts and one that confines the translation to a single instance for the tooltips. JSON? + popups? Help me if you can.]

Books are software and require the same care with controlling the master copy - it takes away from leisure time, as Qohelet 12:12 notes.

ib viotr mhmh bni hizhr // ywot sprim hrbh ain qx vlhg hrbh igiyt bwr

[For anyone who has the skill of suggestion, this is a sample of my code for the section (the ninth column spanning the two right sections of the grid) that is inconvenient. The code is all generated from the database. Any solution needs to be similarly simple in blogdom and Oracle. In other words, I need something more complex than tooltips and some way of referring to the text other than repeating it.

<div class="tdcl9"><span title="And stand in holiness for the entanglements of the house of the ancestors, for your kin, the children of the people,
and the divisions of the house of the ancestor of the Levites.">2Chr 35:5(11)</span> 
</div>]