Elaine Keown
still in Madison for a few days
Hello:
> Therein lies a problem in attitude: encoding of scripts, and doing it well,
> takes an on-going commitment and presence from people who have expertise on
> the scripts in question. It does not happen if an expert sticks her/his
> head in the door momentarily, makes a few comments and then disappears.
Well, yeah, I am an irresponsible fly-by-night.
After all, so far I only spent 4 years and 3 months
on the Hebrew character set, including the time I spent
in Philly taking Biblical/inscriptional Aramaic and
textlinguistics. That leaves a mere 3 years in libraries
from Washington D.C. to Philly to NYC to Boston to LA
to Stanford to Berkeley and the library depository n of
Berkeley in Richmond (great place, well worth a visit).
In 2001 I crisscrossed the country 3 times.
Last year I spent learning generative phonology and more
modern Hebrew so I can read the thousands of pages of modern
and medieval literature on the "cantillation marks."
And I only published one paper on the complete Hebrew
character set (Revue des Etudes Juives last year),
presented two conference presentations on Semitic collation
(Hong Kong, IUC18) and at the Denver SBL (Society of
Biblical Literature).
And next week, God willing, I'm far going away to read
original Hebrew manuscripts.
But I can see why you think my attitude stinks,
I've accomplished so little in these years.
---Elaine
