Mike Ayers wrote at 10:37 AM on Wednesday, May 26, 2004: >Dean Snyder: >> We also have to remember that the Siloam inscription test: >> * was in "handwriting" incised in stone > > Does this mean that the form of the characters in the Siloam >inscription were different from those typically used in Phoenician and >Paleo-Hebrew texts?
Other than taking into account palaeographic niceties, the answer is no. But I wasn't addressing that issue at all - I was referring to the fact that the glyphs presented in the Palaeo-Hebrew legibility tests exhibited the sorts of irregularities that handwriting does (because they were not, and, of course, could not be printed), which can contribute to more difficult legibility. I used glyphs that were all identically shaped. >> * was in a different orthography than modern Hebrew > > I'm not sure quite what this means. I thought it was agreed that >the orthographies of Modern Hebrew and Paleo-Hebrew were different...? Actually, modern Hebrew includes several orthographic systems and these include those used by scribes writing in Palaeo-Hebrew script - it is an orthographic superset of Palaeo-Hebrew. Modern Hebrew readers are used to an orthography with lots of vowels (matres lectionis) and no word dividers. If I were doing the Palaeo- Hebrew test I would have used a modern Hebrew text rendered in a Palaeo- Hebrew font - less variables to account for in the outcome. >> * using dots to separate words > > This.really.shouldn't.confuse.people.terribly.after.a.few.seconds. But if the script sample presented to you is in (1) unfamiliar glyphs of (2) irregular shape, and (2) spells out the words without the vowels, and, in addition, (4) has word dividers, I am just saying that the cumulative effect of the COMBINATION of all those sorts of variables can contribute to the illegibility. >> * and lacked vowel indicators (matres lectionis), very important >> contextual clues for reading modern Hebrew > > Doesn't Paleo-Hebrew lack them as well? Palaeo-Hebrew is a "script"; matres lectionis were optionally components of its orthographic system. Matres lectionis is an orthographic convention whereby originally consonantal characters are also re-employed as vowel letters. As a SCRIPT, Palaeo-Hebrew, of course, has the characters. Over the centuries that Palaeo-hebrew was used the practice of writing matres lectionis increased - starting from zero matres lectionis in the beginning to extensive usage near the end. >P.S. I think this whole legibility test trip is irrelevant. I'm trying to >figure out what does and doesn't separate things. I concur. Respectfully, Dean A. Snyder Assistant Research Scholar Manager, Digital Hammurabi Project Computer Science Department Whiting School of Engineering 218C New Engineering Building 3400 North Charles Street Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, Maryland, USA 21218 office: 410 516-6850 cell: 717 817-4897 www.jhu.edu/digitalhammurabi
