Another brief introduction to SimHebrew - for the record

SimHebrew is a tool for learning, using, and understanding the Hebrew language. It helps those who are not used to the traditional Hebrew script to learn, read, write and know Hebrew using a precise and consistent mapping from square text to Latin characters.

Reading and writing Hebrew in one's locally used character set is an ancient practice. Hippolytus in Greek characters, calling the book of psalms Σέφρα θελείμ (Sepra theleim). Jerome in Latin characters, called it SEPHAR THALLIM. In SimHebrew it is spr thlim, (roughly pronounced sefer tehelim) the book of praises. If you are learning Hebrew whether reading a fully spelled modern Hebrew text or the Biblical traditional text, The SimHebrew Bible will give you insight into the sound of the language using letters that you are familiar with. You will rapidly learn to sound it out, just as an English speaker can learn how to sound out French or Italian. All these languages, English, French, Italian, and SimHebrew use the same Latin letters, but they all use them with differing conventions.

Look at that word thallim that Jerome used. The word has a root made up of three consonants - hll. The leading t is a consonant that in this case creates a noun from the root. It is pronounced as the English 't'. The 'im', pronounced as you see it, a short 'i' and the same 'm' sound as in English, is a plural ending. The root by itself is a verb meaning praise or boast. It could be read as 'he praised'. It is pronounced hallel as in hallelujah. Here is the first few words of Psalms 150: 

hllu-ih hllu-al bqodwo. 

It is a trochee: -..- / -..-..- Hallelu-ia / Hallelu-al beqodwo  - where the w is an sh sound. With a two-beat pause at the /, the music of the psalm (embedded in the text itself) opens with a triple rhythm.

 

SimHebrew limits its use of vowels so that it can be exactly mapped back and forward from Latin characters to the traditional Hebrew script (commonly known as "Square Hebrew", since its characters are based on a square template). This allows for the technical use of SimHebrew within URL's and computer programming.

For biblical researchers—or anyone interested in the Hebrew Bible— square text is a visual and often technical hindrance that gets in the way of the language itself. To the untrained eye, some characters look alike, so errors are often made in word spellings, and spelling patterns or word roots are not readily apparent. Even modern copy and paste can be unreliable. In some instances, Hebrew characters are not even technically accessible and will turn into a series of question marks, or if they are accessible, the letter or word order is corrupted, given that not all environments correctly handle right-to-left text. Errors happen on web pages and even in ancient and modern scholarly books. The proof-readers miss them. 

SimHebrew (simulated Hebrew in Roman characters) eliminates these problems by providing a precise one-to-one simulation of the Hebrew text in Roman characters, based on historical affiliations between the two scripts, and a "reverse engineering" of the process by which the ancient Hebrew/Canaanite alphabet gave rise to the ancient Greek and Roman alphabets.

When you use SimHebrew, you can read, copy, paste as reliably as you do in English and with English interspersed to explain whatever you are doing. There are no right-to-left and left-to-right problems. Whatever word-processor you are using, (and they all implement these rtl and ltr mixed text differently), you can be sure of clarity and correctness. There will be no confusion with numbers and punctuation, parentheses, reversed letters or any of the other nuisances noted with mixed text.

The result enables the average Western reader to appreciate the many unique hallmarks of the the text in Biblical Hebrew—such as its brevity; its use of prefixes and suffixes to denote conjunctions, prepositions, possessives, plurals, and verb forms; its frequent wordplay; and above all, the consonantal roots that are fundamental to the language. 

Fully electronically searchable, and coupled with an English guide side-by-side, The SimHebrew Bible offers unprecedented access to the Hebrew of the Hebrew Bible, without the distraction of having to master the Square Hebrew script. It also makes learning the traditional script far easier for those who want to persevere with it.