@curiousdannii I don’t know anything about the lexicalist hypothesis. But you’re suggesting that every entry in the Hebrew lexicon is a separate root? (I do appreciate the part of that edit that made it, “Are there...?” rather than a statement assuming that “there are...” since the answers both indicate that "There are not...”! A possibility I hadn’t considered.)

(cc: @Davïd)

@Susan In linguistics there is little consensus over the meaning of words, roots, lexemes etc.

"Words" seems least useful to me, because based on the final letters used, of course there are two distinct words for fish in that chapter

The lexicalist hypothesis is about whether or not derived words should be considered to have separate entries in our mental lexicons

Actually sometimes maybe even whether each differently inflected word is distinct too

David must see a difference between 'roots' and 'lexemes', and maybe that's a convention in Hebrew studies, but I'm not sure what it would be

@curiousdannii What I think about as “roots” in Hebrew tend to be tri-literal and have no vowels...I think David puts a checkmark before them...but I don’t know of a parallel in other languages.

@curiousdannii Interesting.

@Susan Ah, yeah that would be a Hebrew-specific sense of root

But if that's the case, then I don't see what was wrong with my question

biconsonantal vs triconsonantal

@curiousdannii Just that nobody (including the lexicons with two separate entries) is arguing that these have different roots.

@curiousdannii Yeah, not sure how a word like this fits into that system. Looks like there’s sometimes an aleph in the middle.

@Susan But there's two distinct entries?

@Susan Maybe it's mixing up etymological roots with synchronic roots

@curiousdannii Yes.

They're obviously historically related, but at the time of writing they were either one "root" with optional affixes, or two roots, with the morphology set in stone

@curiousdannii I don’t really know enough to respond intelligently to that. But thanks for filling me in on where you’re coming from.

@Susan If one has an optional aleph and the other has a obligatory he, I can't see how they would be considered one "root" in the Hebrew sense

@Susan Linguists like me get frequently frustrated with the ways Biblical scholars talk about language :P

@curiousdannii I imagine the aleph is “there” in (the root of) both forms. It doesn’t have a vowel of its own in the Neh. passage, so it would be “quiescent” by the rules I learned. (I don’t normally think about that meaning it can drop out, but hey....) The he is a feminine affix.

@curiousdannii And I’m neither, so I’m even worse...

@Susan If it was just a male/female difference that would make perfect sense, but the question mentioned a collective form

The image you just linked to doesn't mention that though :(

oh wait, I see that it does, with the unhelpful abbreviation coll

@curiousdannii If a single fish can transition between genders it would make sense. Or the rabbinical interpretation. Otherwise not really.

@Susan I meant it would make sense having two roots. Like for man and woman

actually this situation seems exactly like ish/isha

@curiousdannii It’s helpful in my version because when I hover.... ;-)

the masculine can be both singular and collective

feminine is a subset of masculine, so it's not too surprising that a single feminine fish would be referred to by both words

anyways, you've got two good answers there :P

@curiousdannii I’m not sure how to think about ‘roots’ for Hebrew nouns that don’t have obvious verbal counterparts.

@Susan Language is usually more complicated the more you think about it :P

@curiousdannii Yeah. Hey linguist, want to comment on this?

@Susan I've been trying to come up with more examples, but I haven't actually been able to find any words which rhyme with prophesy!

Haha, I've actually been looking into that for the last 10 minutes

@curiousdannii After Caleb brought up -ify I was wondering if it might be somehow derived from that. Those words also tend to have the antepenult accent, and the vowel is the same. prophecy-->*prophecify-->*prophesify-->prophesy? It really just involves dropping an ‘f’.....I’m making all of this up...

Prophecy and prophesy probably split before they came into English

I'd need ODE access to check for sure

@curiousdannii OK, in whatever language those -ify words came about. I read somewhere googling this that the spelling difference wasn’t documented until the 1700s, but that’s probably secondary to the vowel difference. (Still making all of this up....)

It might be a -ise derivation rather than -ify

One of my favourite examples of etymology is why pronunciation is spelt and pronounced differently from the pronounce family of words

pronounce came through french, but pronunciation came directly from latin

@curiousdannii Ah: prophecy-->*prophecise-->prophesy. That gets you the /ai/ vowel too. Hm. Isn’t there a semantic difference between what those two suffixes do to words? It’s not obvious to me.

@Susan From looking at Wiktionary, it looks like -ize comes from the Greek, and -ify is from Latin

But -ize got borrowed into Latin too

@curiousdannii -ιζω, definitely. Never thought about that.

Thousands of years later they end up in English with the same meaning

and now we can put both of them on any words we like

@curiousdannii Except most of the time we’d be wrong.... but nobody would misunderstand, so maybe from a linguist’s perspective we “can”. ;-)

@Susan Exactly!

@curiousdannii (Of note, it’s not an -ιζω verb in (at least koine) Greek. And that’s probably where the noun came from (προφήτης), although I guess via Latin. So probably not an ize derivation.)

@curiousdannii I have to differ - fairly strenuously! There's quite a clear understanding of the distinction between "roots", "lexemes", and "words", and this is in linguistics, not just semitics!

@curiousdannii See the link provided at my comment. I don't know your linguistic background, nor you mine, so "citations" are helpful here!

@Susan Don't know if "defence/defense" and/or "offence/offense" provide examples, or simply transAtlanticism?

@Davïd Those are all nouns...

@Susan ha, so no.

@Davïd Not exactly....I was thinking about -ize vs -ise, though. Here the Americans seem to be closer to -ιζω!

@Susan @curiousdannii Them's no "check marks" (✓), that's a square-root symbol (√).

@Susan Americans and Oxford. I follow the latter. ;)

@Davïd I know, I was kind of joking. Not very adeptly. But the use of that extension of “root” is kind of silly too.

@Davïd Yeah yeah, forgot about that.

@Susan Silliness hallowed by decades (or more!) of usage is ...

@Susan ..."conventional", I guess. Silly or otherwise.

@Susan Would be interesting to know when the practice began.

"Practic/se?

@Davïd Still silly for (most normal) people who’ve only ever seen it amongst numbers and start wanting to mathematical operations as soon as they see it.

@Susan That's the same with any discourse one needs to learn, of course. It all sounds like gibberish at first.

@Susan "Normal" here meaning...? ;)

@Davïd Interesting. I was assuming there was a vowel shift and the c-->s was secondary, trying to reflect the pronunciation somehow, but that’s just a guess. Practice/se is the same pronunciation, yes?

@Davïd Me.

@Susan :)

@Davïd OK, it’s obvious you’re right (as of a few pages back), I’m really just...

@Susan Pronunciation - I assume so. Reminds me of (unrelated) "envelope".

@Davïd Shifting the accent. But prophesy doesn’t.

Maybe the verb has a secondary accent on the last syllable, or it just sounds a little like that because the vowel is longer.

ENvelope = noun; enVELope = verb. Do you distinguish "prophe-/sigh/" and "prophe-/see/"?

@Davïd Envelope - right. Where is the accent on prophesy/cy? Now I don’t know. Was thinking it’s on the first syllable in both.

But yes on the vowels.

If /sigh/ is how you represent that. I was doing /sai/, but...ok.

@Susan Yeah, /sai/ - I'm just waking up and trying to avoid ambiguity. Two operations which stand in some tension. :)

@Susan I think first syllable in both, too.

@Davïd But back to the checkmarks.... what do you do for nouns like דג? Or, as curious brought up, איש?

@Susan Do ... about what?

@Davïd Do they have triliteral ‘roots’ that you can annotate like that?

I only think about it when I know the verb.

@Davïd It's highly contentious - "lexemes" will be different depending on whether you subscribe to the lexacalist hypothesis

@Susan bi-, tri-, or quadriliteral the check-mark simply indicates the abstract base for related forms.

@curiousdannii Hi! :)

Hi! Roots are probably more consistent, but for something like Distributed Morphology would have different connotations

@curiousdannii And how would you see that making a difference in how the term "lexeme" is understood?

Also, some distinguish between roots and stems. I'm not very familiar with those kinds of usages though

@curiousdannii I'm not bothered about "roots/stems"; I am interested in how you think the meaning of "lexeme" changes based on one's commitments around a "lexicalist hypothesis"!

@Davïd The meaning doesn't change, but what you consider to be lexemes does

lexemes are the base level vocabulary items

@curiousdannii Exactly - and that's what we were talking about in the Jonah Q&A! (See also "lexeme", fwiw)

@curiousdannii Roots, stems, whatever you want to call them, are abstract etymological projections -- and that's not the point of the Jonah Q&A!

If the feminising He suffix has no unique idiomatic contribution to the word for fish then non-lexicalists would say there is only one lexeme, while lexicalists would say there are two, because there are two words.

(Ignoring the possibility of a distinct collective sense, which could be another lexeme too.)

@curiousdannii Okay - now I see what you're after. But quite practically, every dictionary of classical Hebrew lists them separately (dictionaries compiled by "lexicalists", after all).

@Davïd I meant lexicalists in reference to the lexicalism hypothesis, not lexicographers ;)

@curiousdannii ...which is, I think, the point of having two entries, and this is non-controversial among Hebraists. What is weird is the usage that @Susan was asking about in Jonah.

@curiousdannii :)

@curiousdannii Are we any clearer on what constitutes the best way to frame the question for the mass of readers looking for help on this issue?

I'll stand by my claim that "roots" is simply a red herring (intended) here, but if there's a better way of putting it so "normal" people understand, that would be good to know.

@Davïd Well, no. Assuming that the collective sense warranted its own listing, and the He suffix was entirely regular, then I would have one entry for the collective דָּ֣ג, and a second entry for the singular male/female דָּ֣ג/דָּגָֽה

@curiousdannii Beautiful. :)

@curiousdannii And if you don't want to call those "words", I don't know how to improve it.

Whereas HALOT combines the (potential) polysemy and separates the regular inflections?

@curiousdannii Give me a minute here....

(or two)

Actually it's also got a diminuitive sense too.

Oh, the collective thing is a complete red herring, HALOT says that only about Neh 13:16

@curiousdannii Right, sorry, we sorted that out a while ago but I never changed the question, which is incorrect. The first couple comments under Scott’s answer also point this out.

@Davïd I think it might be better to frame it entirely differently: does the He- suffix indicate the fish was feminine the whole time (in which case why do the other two verses leave it out), or does the He- suffix mean something else?

No idea on a catchy title though

@Susan Haha, okay, I only just figured it out myself

@curiousdannii Have a look at the HAOLT entry, p. 213, col. a, near bottom.

@Davïd That's the same as Susan's right? i.imgur.com/wdFbfYP.png

@curiousdannii So it would appear!

@curiousdannii At least as regards content!

@curiousdannii :)

A really common mistake, for reasons I don’t fully appreciate...

@Susan Sorry!

@curiousdannii But I need to scoot now, too. Enjoyed the chat! We'll have to do it again some time. :)

I need to go too

Essay's don't write themselves.

@curiousdannii Good timing all round. Too right!

But, they do present new questions to ask on the site

@curiousdannii No problem. :-) 5 letters, CVCVC...

@curiousdannii Looking forward to it.

ScottS’s proposed panel of close reasons is now active. (@ScottS @JackDouglas)

Anybody here know anything about problems displaying Hebrew diacritics in Chrome? I can't seem to tease out what happened here (all other browsers display this properly):

@Caleb It looks like it's picking up its Hebrew from Linux Libertine. Your ☒ typie characters are coming from that source anyway. What's your font stack?

@Davïd font-family: Libertine, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; with Libertine being defined as @font-face { font-family: "Libertine"; src: local("Linux Libertine"), url("/fonts/libertine/LinLibertine_R.woff") format("woff"); }.

@Caleb LinLib doesn't include the cantillation marks. Is there any markup that can help you target the Hebrew? [and "typie characters"! sheesh...]

And TNR is known-flakey for accented Hebrew.

I guess the other question would be is my source text even sanely encoded and is it rendering correctly in other browsers? Here's the same clip in FF.

@Caleb Squiffy, but legible. Quite a few vowels/accents wrongly placed, but easy enough to read.

@Davïd All the text is inside markup that has classes with the translation code as well as lang attributes (i.e. <div lang="iw"> for the Hebrew text) so yes it can be targeted.

@Caleb If Chrome is the real problem, you could use the Update 2 method to target the Hebrew. Wouldn't work for FF, but maybe it doesn't need to.

@Caleb Ah, that's excellent.

You could use the sort of font stack this site uses (which includes a .wrap_hebrew class).

.wrap_hebrew{font-family:"SBL Hebrew","Taamey Frank","Ezra SIL",Arial,Tahoma;font-size:116%;}

@Davïd So the first one of those it's hitting on my system seems to be Ezra SIL, but that sure does something different. What does the sanity meter say about this (ignoring for now the crappy typesetting because it's justified and Chrome can't hyphenate):

@Caleb (No idea what this conversation is about.) Wow, that’s really hard to keep track of which line you’re on when 5 of them start with the same word! I suppose because it’s relatively long and keeps forcing a line break. (I’m ignoring the suggestion to ignore crappy typesetting.) The vowels look about right to me, FWIW. If not it’s subtle. (I dunno, David, are accents allowed to push around hireqs like that so that they’re off center? I never paid attention.)

@Caleb Of the three so far, that's the best one. Ezra is large-scale compared to SBL Hebrew (which is pretty much industry standard) or Taamey Frank (great font, great license, same "engine" as SBL Hebrew, but not so widely installed). As @Susan notes, the hireqs (single dot under) are getting "pushed around", but not hideously. The descenders/ascenders could get in a tangle.

@Davïd That site's code gives the the creeps. Tables? For layout? Wrapping each Hebrew word separately in LTR order in the code but in reverse order to make them come out in a sentence?

@Davïd If I take Ezra out of the font stack that site seems to render fine in Chrome w/ Libertine. In fact it's very close to their reference image.

There isn't a SBL Hebrew WOFF yet? Pshaw.

@Davïd I'f you had your druthers and were going to be comparing multi language texts side by side, which would you rather see the Hebrew in? User generated mixed language content will be Libertine, but the scripture text body is easy to target and I'm not opposed to a separate webfont load. If I do should that be Tammey Frank or SBL?

@Susan and anybody else with an opinion, same question^^^. Your first choice in fonts for Hebrew scripture text?

@Caleb If you want me to answer that you’re going to need to do a little bit of translating. I don’t quite follow.

@Caleb Right, what I’m not following is the message above. Are those names of fonts and I’m supposed to know what they look like? Or it’s supposed to be apparent from the conversation earlier?

@Susan Nevermind the conversation earlier. Yes there are font names in there but it doesn't matter. If you don't know names or how font stacks work (who would want to know that!) a "this site/book here is my favorite to read" would answer my question.

@Caleb I don’t think I pay enough attention to have much discernment on the topic. My ability to make it out is directly proportional to how big it is. Because I depend a lot on the vowels. As long as I can distinguish them, I’m happy.

Contrast, chat: בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית בָּרָ֣א אֱלֹהִ֑ים אֵ֥ת הַשָּׁמַ֖יִם וְאֵ֥ת הָאָֽרֶץ

If you already know the vowels, they’re there. Otherwise, they may as well not be. Even if I make the whole thing huge they’re still blurring together.

@Caleb Front runner is SBL Hebrew. Does license matter? If so, see SBL's "embedded license"; Taamey Frank (all the Culmus Project fonts) are FOSS (MIT/GPL2). I've seen people confuse the SBL beth/kaph, though, so if woff'ing guarantees the font, then perhaps Frank. :)

@Caleb SBL Hebrew license also on p. 20 of the Manual.

Is that sane comparison of how that text should look in each font?

That's LibreOffice. I'm trying to get a benchmark so I can compare how various browsers are handling the font stack, but since I don't know what it's supposed to look like I'm a poor judge of which ones are working and which ones are spitting dirt at me.

@Davïd If I'm going to use SBL via WOFF (which seems like a good idea over listing it in the local stack considering there are version problems with it as well), I'm not sure what the point of adding Frank to the stack would be. Maybe I could include that in an attempt to find local fonts, but in that case it end up in front of SBL for some folks.

@Davïd What does WOFF have to do with not confusing beth/kaph in SBL?

@Caleb Matches what I get very well, and what I would have expected.

@Caleb Nothing - not saying things well today. I just mean, if you're "providing" the font to the user (rather than relying on it being installed on their system), the "providing" Taamey Frank might be preferable, as I have seen (on a number of occasions) novice and not-so-novice Hebrew readers confuse SBL Hebrew's beth/kaph.

@Caleb But the "install base" of SBL Hebrew will be much higher. It's the standard classical Hebrew (vowels, accents) font in academic publications these days.

It's a shame Libertine's Hebrew is so poor. (Oodles of misplaced elements.) And I'm no fan of the Greek. But I love the "Roman".

@Davïd Aaa, that makes more sense. And looking at the glyphs I can see how that would happen.

@Caleb Actually, as I look at your PNG, the Frank line looks odd. Glyphs thicker than I have on my system. Any chance it's picked up the "bold" version rather than regular?

So if I understand correctly, if my stack was something like local(Taamey Frank), local(SBL Hebrew), woff(Taamey Frank) I might save a download for anybody who is actually educated in Hebrew but provide the most readable font available if it does fall through to downloading a web font.

@Caleb That makes sense to me, yes.

@Davïd No. But there is a really good chance its the wrong font entirely. That would be Frank Ruehl CLM, whatever that is and however it got onto my system.

@Caleb Ah! That makes sense. Frank Ruehl is a fine font, possibly was in some MS releases?

(And where the "Frank" comes from in Taamey Frank, of course.)

@Davïd Oddly enough the TTF for that came out of the Culmus package out of the Archlinux AUR. But apparently whoever packaged that up didn't actually use the Culmus project fonts because it's full of the namesake fonts, not the Taamey versions. Weird.

@Caleb Very. I actually prefer the Culmus project version - more ... refined? better definition of characters? If you compare alephs or sin/shins the difference is fairly clear.

@Davïd If your PDF is any guide, it also has the significant advantage for me in that the kerning is very close to that of Libertine, which by necessity I will be using in a few other places where input is mixed and I can't target it.

@Davïd The plot thickens. If you download the culmus-0.130.tar.gz file from Sourceforge via the link on the Culmus project website, it's got the TTF's for FrankRuehlCLM in it. But if you download the culmus-src-0.130.tar.gz file it has the font forge source for the TaameyFrank font in it! Looks like somebody did an oopsie.

Also the source you get when you download just the Taamey Frank font is different than the version in the whole Culmus project package with all the fonts. Significantly. But not the Ruehl version either.

Oh GAH. Its time for me to go home. I just found a bug in Firefox's handling of CSS sibling selectors when RTL text is involved. Two browser bugs in one day is two too many for me.

Does anyone else find our conventions about RTL and LTR backwards? It seems like English starts on the right side (of the paper or of the screen or of the writing) and moves left. I know what the convention is (and AFAIK nobody thinks it should be my way), but every time I read RTL I first think that means English's direction, and then I have to correct myself.

@Susan I have no idea what you mean :)

unless you are imagining someone facing you behind the paper holding it up?

@JackDouglas (I'm clearly wrong but) I'm not 'imagining' it. The paper is there, and on its right side starts the English text.

It also starts on the right side of the text itself.

And propagates in a leftward direction.

I'm nuts.

But for some reason I can't get it re-wired to be intuitive thinking of the way everybody else does.

@Susan doesn't that depend which way the paper is facing (or rather which way you imagine the paper is facing)?

@JackDouglas The paper is 'facing' me! The backside is facing the desk. That part of it I think is standard. (Like on a copier, face down is....not the way you write on/read a paper.)

on a similar note, do you know what percentage of galaxies in the universe rotate clockwise, and anti-clockwise?

@JackDouglas Well no, as a matter of fact I don't. (That's 'counter-clockwise' to me, but I get the gist.)

@Susan I think that is a different sense of the word face!

@Susan depends which side you are looking at them from ;)

@JackDouglas Why? Presumably it's all anthropomorphized.

@JackDouglas Oh, hm....

@Susan because there is no ambiguity - so it doesn't really matter what metaphor you use: face is short

you could say " writing down" instead but it's longer

the little graphic on the photo-copier does that

(it would be very odd if it had a picture of a face on it instead I think!)

in the case of me a human looking at a piece of paper, the issue is more "which of us has hands" than "which of us has a face" I think

@JackDouglas I got lost. But the 'active' side of anything is the 'front' or the 'face' of it, and it seems reasonable to ascertain R/L with reference to that. Reasonable in my mind.

I think that might be because you are comfortable extending metaphors

@JackDouglas The face thing?

yes - paper has face so therefor has hands

what if the paper was a cube - 6 faces, writing on one side, would it still have an intrinsic RHS and LHS?

@JackDouglas Do we need "hands" in order to reference R/L? It has a face. That's enough directionality for it to be unambiguous in my mind.

Anyway, I'm clearly out in left (!) field here. Oh well.

does it have a face before you write on it?

if not then this gets interesting, because the act of writing determines which way up it was :)

@JackDouglas mmm, the act of setting down the paper seems to provide enough guidance. Is this getting philosophical? I'm not really up for it.

er?

not philisophical

@Susan you still don't know which way up it is

ie which edge is the 'chin' and which the 'hair'

until you write

anyway, my only point (if I even have one) is that it's easy to extend any metaphor to the point where it doesn't work any more

and I think the convention the way it is is because most people don't imagine a piece of paper to have a POV regarding LHS and RHS, unless the paper is shaped like a creature with obvious hands

at which point writing gets pretty difficult either way round :)

@JackDouglas chin and hair? I’m thinking a coronal....oh sheesh, that’s probably why I’m doing this. Never mind, I’m nuts. As previously stated.

OK hair and feet then, it makes no difference :)

and for the record I don't think you are nuts

but it is a quirky way of looking at it, and not one I'd ever heard before

@JackDouglas a coronal plane, so right ear-->left ear

@Susan yup, now rotate 180 degrees while leaving it flat on the table

it's now upside down and RHS and LHS have switched

@JackDouglas Nobody does that. People have faces.

I'm just saying the paper has no intrinsic orientation

180 degrees rotate = back to the start

unlike you and me who look different standing on our head

at least up until the point you begin to write

then immediately it becomes clear 'which way up' the paper is

@JackDouglas And I’m saying functionality defines face as far as I’m concerned. And the text isn’t defined until then anyway.

yes, so the act of writing defines the orientation of the paper, which is not true of humans

and the metaphor breaks down at that point

I really think it’s just a matter of the perspective of the writer vs the paper, and different conventions. I’m accustomed to a different convention in a different arena, so I get confused. I’m not thinking of it metaphorically, just have my intuitions defined in terms of something else (which happens to be a human body, but....really, not a metaphor...)

when the paper has writing on both sides, RHS and LHS from the POV of the paper would then be ambiguous, whereas RHS and LHS from the POV of the eyeball is not

conventions and metaphors are basically the same thing

the key thing in my view is how much ambiguity exists in the communication, not how it's derived

^^^^ Whaddaya think, folks. Is this a dupe?

^^^^ and after reflection, I'm thinking "yes", and have VtC'ed (duplicate).

That transcript of Susan and Jack's chat is the weirdest thing I've seen for a while. And we've got some weird things to chose from.

@Davïd Is πρόσωπον πρὸς πρόσωπον a Semitism? It feels very clunky in Greek. (I can see that it’s used (along with π. κατα π.) to translate ‏פָּנִ֣ים אֶל־פָּנִ֔ים; I’m just curious if it was normal Greek apart from/before that.)

@Davïd Weirder than I was planning for as well, yes.