bpkantor Posted October 16, 2018 Share Posted October 16, 2018 I am wondering if there is any way to do a reverse sort of search for which accent marks come with which words. For example, if I want to see a statistical representation of all the different accents that might come with a vayyiqtol form, how could I search that? 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Λύχνις Δαν Posted October 16, 2018 Share Posted October 16, 2018 I don't know of a way to get a summary set of stats of this simply and directly but you can search for wayyiqtol verbs with seach accents and compile the data yourself. The basic template for the search I would use would be *@ [verb wayyiqtol] @.֛ and then change the cantillation mark in the last portion of the query and work your way through. When I first thought of this I wasn't aware just how many different accents there are. As the search pasted in reversed I have included a screenshot : Thx D Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Timothy Jenney Posted October 16, 2018 Share Posted October 16, 2018 (edited) First, I wonder if we could display accents and cantillation in the Analysis of Search results. Second, I wonder if we could add an option to the display palette to sort by accent/cantillation (though I have no idea how to rank them [alphabetically by name?] [and what would we do with a word that has two such marks?]). [Note: I'm just thinking out loud here as a scholar, folks, not as an official Accordance representative. I'm curious if this feature would be useful enough to appeal to a wide range of users. After all, of what use are these markers if pulled out of context? I'd think that would be particularly true of those used in Hebrew poetry, where the cadence in so very important.] Edited October 16, 2018 by Timothy Jenney 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bpkantor Posted October 16, 2018 Author Share Posted October 16, 2018 Thank you both for helpful replies. I was afraid going accent by accent was the only way I could do it. But that is helpful Daniel, thank you. Timothy, I think it would still be helpful, even just for statistical purposes. It would of course be much more helpful to see it as a concordance sorted by accent, but it would be quite easy to just set the range to all but the three books (of poetic accents) and then the three books to avoid the confusion of signs. In terms of sorting, conjunctive vs. disjunctive and major disj. vs. minor disj. would be best if possible. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Λύχνις Δαν Posted October 16, 2018 Share Posted October 16, 2018 Welcome. I should note that the initial *@ in my search string is redundant. It should not be required. Thx D Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Timothy Jenney Posted October 16, 2018 Share Posted October 16, 2018 I was curious about the practical application of our discussion here, so I just searched the Hebrew Bible for the disjunctive atnach. It appears some 21.6K times in the MT. Here are the top words in which the accent is found. Anything worthy of a scholarly paper here? Results: (No lexical form) = 4698 יהוה (יה) LORD, GOD = 719 יִשְׂרָאֵל (שׂרה, אל) Israel = 407 אֶרֶץ (ארץ) land, earth = 292 אמר־1 (אמר) to say = 290 זֶה (זה) this (m) = 231 אֱלֹהִים (אל) God = 229 עשׂה־1 (עשׂה) to do, make = 150 מִצְרַיִם (לל) Egypt, Mizraim = 142 יְרוּשָׁלִַם (ירה, שׁלם) Jerusalem = 136 יְהוּדָה (יהד) Judah = 133 מֶלֶךְ־1 (מלך) king = 129 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Λύχνις Δαν Posted October 17, 2018 Share Posted October 17, 2018 (edited) I was wondering about correlation between locations of the atnah, silluq, and the sof pasuq (or other accents) and the syntax phrase/clause boundaries. Thx D Edited October 17, 2018 by דָנִיאֶל Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TYA Posted October 17, 2018 Share Posted October 17, 2018 My first guess, Dr. J., is simply that those are some of the most frequent words used in the Bible Also, a reminder that having the accents / cantillation marks included in the Instant Details would be nice. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Timothy Jenney Posted October 17, 2018 Share Posted October 17, 2018 I was wondering about correlation between locations of the atnah, silluq, and the sof pasuq (or other accents) and the syntax phrase/clause boundaries. Thx D That is an interesting question! The search would combine a character search for the the disjunctive accents @ lexemes syntactically tagged at the end of their respective clauses/phrases. Spunds like a profitable avenue of investigation to me! BTW, I've been in dialog with Dr. Mark Futato, whose Daily Dose of Hebrew I've been enjoying. He pays particular attention to the accents in his videos, something that was missing from my own Hebrew courses. He has directed me to some additional resources, which I don't think he'd mind if I passed along: By the end of the week, I hope to have a completed manuscript on a basic introduction to the accents to my publisher. My guess is that it will be available sometime next year. In my introduction I mention that most students are like you in that most introductory grammars, including my own, do not teach students anything about the accents. My goal is to fill that gap. It is also the case that most reference grammars only give a cursory introduction to the accents. One exception is: Fuller, Russell T., and Kyoungwon Choi. Invitation to Biblical Hebrew Syntax: An Intermediate Grammar. Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Academic, 2017. A monumental concordance of the accents has been published: Price, James D. Concordance of the Hebrew Accents in the Hebrew Bible. 5 vols. New York, NY: Mellen, 1996. This is a wonderful resource, but it is expensive and not easy to get a hold of. It contains all the statistics that one's heart could desire with regard to the accents! A dissertation on one small slice of the accents was completed last year: Lehman, Marcus A. “Reading with the Masoretes: The Exegetical Utility of Masoretic Accent Patterns.” PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2017. 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michel Gilbert Posted October 17, 2018 Share Posted October 17, 2018 Hi, In my view it would be frustrating if Accordance allotted development time to this when so many basic things are still missing, like right justification of Hebrew in Live Click results and in the Notes, ability to change fonts, and ability to toggle on and off vowels and/or accents (the latter two especially important for Paleo-Hebrew). A display by clause option should also be more of a priority. I’m familiar with the accents and their significance, and I could use a more detailed search algorithm for them, but please put this at the bottom of the list. Regards, Michel 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Λύχνις Δαν Posted October 17, 2018 Share Posted October 17, 2018 By the end of the week, I hope to have a completed manuscript on a basic introduction to the accents to my publisher. My guess is that it will be available sometime next year. In my introduction I mention that most students are like you in that most introductory grammars, including my own, do not teach students anything about the accents. My goal is to fill that gap. It is also the case that most reference grammars only give a cursory introduction to the accents. One exception is: Fuller, Russell T., and Kyoungwon Choi. Invitation to Biblical Hebrew Syntax: An Intermediate Grammar. Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Academic, 2017. A monumental concordance of the accents has been published: Price, James D. Concordance of the Hebrew Accents in the Hebrew Bible. 5 vols. New York, NY: Mellen, 1996. This is a wonderful resource, but it is expensive and not easy to get a hold of. It contains all the statistics that one's heart could desire with regard to the accents! A dissertation on one small slice of the accents was completed last year: Lehman, Marcus A. “Reading with the Masoretes: The Exegetical Utility of Masoretic Accent Patterns.” PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2017. Some new modules for Acc (though I suspect the accent concordance would have few takers) in this list. The accents treatment would certainly be interesting when it's available. Thx D 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Timothy Jenney Posted October 17, 2018 Share Posted October 17, 2018 Here are the most frequent words in the MT, so I think there is some truth to the comment above (Atnach simply occurs in these words more often because they appear more frequently.). I think we can eliminate the common prefixes and particles from consideration in the following list, which makes the list even closer. Still the two lists is not exact, so there may be information here that is worth mining. Number of different forms = 9343:(Triple-click a form to see its occurrences) וְ (ו) and = 50519 הַ (ה) the, Ha = 23962 לְ (ל) to, Le = 20431 בְּ (ב) in, at, with = 15632 אֵת־1 (את) (direct object) = 10944 מִן (מן) from = 7584 יהוה (יה) LORD, GOD = 6828 עַל־2 (עלה) upon, over, above = 5774 אֶל (אל) to, toward = 5517 אֲשֶׁר (אשׁר) which = 5503 כֹּל (כלל) all = 5413 אמר־1 (אמר) to say = 5317 לֹא (לא) not, Lo = 5192 בֵּן־1 (בן) son = 4941 כִּי־2 (כי) that, because, when = 4487 היה to be = 3575 כְּ (כ) as, like = 2910 עשׂה־1 (עשׂה) to do, make = 2632 אֱלֹהִים (אל) God = 2602 בוא to come = 2577 מֶלֶךְ־1 (מלך) king = 2530 יִשְׂרָאֵל (שׂרה, אל) Israel = 2507 אֶרֶץ (ארץ) land, earth = 2505 יוֹם־1 (יום) day = 2303 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Robert Holmstedt Posted October 17, 2018 Share Posted October 17, 2018 We pay attention to the te'amim in our syntax tagging, but don't consider it authoritative. And therein lies the problem, in my opinion, of placing much emphasis (including Accordance time/resources) on this material -- it is a much later, medieval Jewish layer of analysis of the much older Hebrew text. It should never be taken as authoritative in scholarship or, in my opinion, devotional reading (except by someone who also considers the rest of medieval Jewish theology to be part of his authoritative tradition). To make an analogy, who else would consider Luther's NT commentaries authoritative and worth the resources to add to Accordance? Only a subset of Lutherans, I'm guessing. 6 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Timothy Jenney Posted October 17, 2018 Share Posted October 17, 2018 Thank you, Robert! I was hoping you'd weigh in. I know I had a course in Hebrew Psalms with David Noel Freedman at Michigan, balancing poetic lines, poetic exegesis, and the like. Michael O'Connor was still there, so he led the class from time to time when Freedman had to be gone. Neither paid any attention to the accents at all. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Robert Holmstedt Posted October 17, 2018 Share Posted October 17, 2018 I like to teach just a bit of the te'amim in Intro Hebrew classes so that they students have a cue for better phrasing when they read (which is hopefully then carried over to when they speak, which we also do in class). But I never discuss it beyond as a basic reading help. 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TYA Posted October 18, 2018 Share Posted October 18, 2018 (edited) +1 Edited October 18, 2018 by TYA Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MattChristianOT Posted October 18, 2018 Share Posted October 18, 2018 I would also point out that if you are seeking to know what accents are paired with what words, the frequency and distribution will shift in each book based on its linguistic tendency. The accents are meant to mark syntax, not particular words so any pattern you derive will really mean nothing as they are merely meant to mark clauses and rhythmic reading. Just MHO. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gedalya Posted October 18, 2018 Share Posted October 18, 2018 (edited) I wonder what Prof Holmstedt is referring to when he writes that the te'amim should never be taken as "authoritative in scholarship"? What scholarship is he referring to? When a scholar like Simcha Kogut writes a book in Hebrew, entitled in English: Correlations between Biblical Accentuation and Traditional Jewish Exegesis" published by the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, is Kogut not doing something worthy enough that we would call it "scholarship"? Is the study of this material that has been a part of the MT for more than a millennium and no doubt preserves older traditions of how the Biblical text should be understood, not worthy of scholarly attention? Furthermore, I would suggest that modern Biblical scholarship has much to learn from the traditional medieval Jewish exegetes. The NJPS translation together with the JPS Commentary series certainly qualifies as an authoritative, scholarly production which often makes use of the insights of the Masoretes and the medieval Jewish exegetes. Edited October 18, 2018 by Gordon 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Robert Holmstedt Posted October 18, 2018 Share Posted October 18, 2018 (edited) What scholarship? Modern scholarship. If you take the medieval Jewish Masoretic tradition (and which one, by the way?) as authoritative, it's a religion decision, not a scholarly one. The Masoretes and their accents (the vowels are arguably a slightly more complicated phenomenon, but some of this does apply to them as well) are nothing more than one layer of interpretation for the biblical text. The title of the book you reference says it all -- the topic is about the history of a specific strand of interpretation. It's not different than if someone were to publish the history of Karaite Jewish interpretation, or correlations between early Kabbalah and traditional Jewish exegesis, or compile a list of correlations between the interpretations of the various reformers. That's historical scholarship. This thread discussion about the accents was about whether Accordance should spend the time/resources to address the complexities of the te'amim in their word/phrase/clause searching. And I made my comment to head off what I find to be a very common notion that the accents are somehow critical to interpreting the text. They are no more critical (or "authoritative") for scholarly investigation of the textual meaning of the Hebrew Bible than any other exegetical tradition along the way, from how the community behind the Qumran scrolls read Bible, to how the NT authors read the Bible, to how medieval Jews and Christians read the Bible, to the Protestant and then Catholic reformers, and so on. Now, if you're reading the text from a specific religious perspective that is tied to one of these traditions, then they might be authoritative. But in what tradition are the te'amim authoritative? Only in some strand of Judaism. Your mention of the JPS and NJPS as well as the related commentary series is apropos -- it may be a well done translation (and interesting commentaries), but it's also specifically Jewish. They do not adopt any emendations of the Leningrad Codex, which was used as the base text. That departs from every Christian *or non-sectarian* translation of the last century. So no, I wouldn't consider the JPS to be at all "authoritative," both as a scholar and as a goy. And as for the commentary series, the audience is specifically Jewish and doing a simple comparison of, for example, Michael Fox's JPS Qoheleth with his other works on Qoheleth illustrates the difference that the audience makes. In his JPS volume, Fox excludes many critical issues he discusses in his other *volumes, while he also lightly explores issues that are more theological, which are absent in his other works. The former makes for a nice devotional read of the Hebrew; the latter works are for the scholar. Whether I have at all convinced you on the point or not, I stand firm in my desire not to see Accordance prioritize working with the te'amim. There are many other more important research and teaching priorities for them to work through. *additions/corrections Edited October 18, 2018 by Robert Holmstedt 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Robert Holmstedt Posted October 18, 2018 Share Posted October 18, 2018 MattChristian: The te'amim do not pattern with syntax. They pattern with prosodic phrases, which often but do not always, line up with syntactic phrasing. The best article on this remains Elan Dresher's 1994 article, "The Prosodic Basis of the The Tiberian Hebrew System of Accents," in Language (vol 70, issue 1, pp. 1-52). It's a bit dense reading for the non-initiated, but the main (and compelling) points will come through. 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Timothy Jenney Posted October 18, 2018 Share Posted October 18, 2018 One of the best things about working for Accordance, in my opinion, is learning from discussions like this. Thank you, everyone! 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Robert Holmstedt Posted October 18, 2018 Share Posted October 18, 2018 (edited) It's a good way to start the day, eh? ;-) Edited October 18, 2018 by Robert Holmstedt 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Graham Buck Posted October 18, 2018 Share Posted October 18, 2018 (edited) Edited October 18, 2018 by Graham Buck 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Abram K-J Posted October 18, 2018 Share Posted October 18, 2018 not enough coffee.jpg "Mornings are for coffee and contemplation."¹ ¹ of the te'amim 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Λύχνις Δαν Posted October 18, 2018 Share Posted October 18, 2018 One of the best things about working for Accordance, in my opinion, is learning from discussions like this. Thank you, everyone! It's a good way to start the day, eh? ;-) True, but such threads play havoc with my reading list ! Still banging my head against David Tsumura's, The earth and the waters in Genesis 1. Now I'll have to add Dresher's paper. On the up side one is never short of things to read Thx D 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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