[request] Please Support Hebrew (actually)!

What advantage is there in having this capability?

Reuben Helmuth said:

 Keep Smiling 4 Jesus : it may even be said that in the Masoretic punctuation, and the phonology and morphology which it established, the whole of Hebrew grammar was implied.

I'm too tired right now to think straight so I'm just copying this response to KS4J for now. 

It seems to me that your citation partially answers your own question. To adequately elaborate I would need several pages, but suffice it to say that all that we take for granted in terms of grammatical/syntactical analysis is almost if not entirely based on Nikkud. Without Nikkud every grammarian and syntax guru would be almost completely lost. One might argue that we already have grammatical databases that we can consult, but you might be aware that the numerous analyses do not agree. Being able to search on Nikkud/dagesh/form combinations, frees you from the slavery of believing the grammars just "because grammar X says so." Over the past several years I have often wished to search for every occurrence of a specific vowel pattern irregardless of the word (this is currently impossible (in Logos, but not in the competition)).

As far as the cantillation mark side of Nikkud goes there are also numerous ways in which I wished to use this. One significant way (which might strike a chord in you ) is that I wanted to create a visual filter that would highlight/markup the text according to the pausal force if the cantillation mark. This would help hugely in easily visualizing where the different breaks/pauses are (some of which make a significant difference in meaning!). As you may be aware the cantillation marks serve three primary functions...1) musical 2) identifying stress & 3) syntax. It is with regard to the area of syntax that the cantillation is of most interest to Christian scholars, and that I wish to see the ability to do primary rather than secondary research. Let me find all the instances of a certain ta'am and see for myself which environment it occurs in and how it affects it's surroundings, and don't make me blindly believe those who make claims about the cantillation marks!

Sorry if this isn't coherent! I'm literally dozing...zzzzz I've been up for nearly 19 hours if that's excuse enough! Maybe in a day or two I'll find time to respond more satisfactorily.

One wonders how the Jews got on before the Masoretes came along. You put forward some interesting generic notions, but I would like to see a few examples of how cantillation alters the meaning of a sentence. At that point, if I'm sold, then I would jump aboard. I'm aware of 1) and 2), and I check BH for syllabic stress regularly. I'm also aware that cantillation has certain syntactic roles, but I need to see it in action before I'm fully convinced it isn't merely an elaboration of the obvious...sorta like "discourse markers".

I appreciate your post and presentation of the evidence for the impact of cantillation on meaning...but I have to say, I personally find the impact to be negligible, based on the examples you provided. On top of that, I am still not certain what kind of credibility supports these supposed variations in meaning. I suppose a full-blown examination of the Masoretes and their methods would be needed to get answers for some of my questions and doubts, but I'm not fully credulous that they had the critical mass of evidentiary support needed to make the kinds of claims for cantillation that your evidence posits. In other words, what evidence is there that they didn't just "make up" these imagined variations of meaning? Unless I am overlooking something, it seems rather dubious to me that a millennium could pass without the usage of such markings and then, based on verbal tradition alone, and with no tangible mechanism in existence to "attach" these minor variations of meaning to, folks could suddenly posit the existence of these ever so slightly inflected meanings. Generally speaking, people need tangible tokens upon which to affix their notions, and without such tokens, the notions tend to vanish into the ether.

I tend to give a significant amount of deference to the Masoretes' efforts, but I am 100% certain they were susceptible to an occasional error. If the theory behind the syntactical effect of cantillation is that the Masoretes just made up these rules out of thin air, I can live with that and accept it all for what it is. But if there is supposed to be a sense that these meanings are "in" the Biblical text, I must say that concept is going to need a lot of evidentiary honey slathered on it before I swallow it whole. I would be interested in hearing David Knoll's or Vincent's of BKM's views (or the views of others who might have something of value to add).

Fr Devin Roza said:

Asking whether the te'amim really make a difference is like asking whether a text with commas and periods would be any different from a text without commas and periods.

Your comments clarify this somewhat in my mind, and I suppose there's no harm in giving people an opportunity to search this stuff if they want to, but I think I am going to be extraordinarily slow to accept that this stuff amounts to anything of significance. I have become increasingly cognizant of the fact (in my thinking, at least) that tons of what Bible readers focus on in their "studies" has next to no value in getting at the points YHWH would have us derive from His word. There are a variety of reasons why this is the case, but in general, it is because we give our human curiosity far too much sway and play when we engage Scripture. We feel like we are "doing something" if we can determine what we imagine to be "important factual data" about the text, like when it was written, and what the "situation" was in which it came into being. While I don't insist that nothing of value can come from such labors, I don't think that much of significant value is derived from them. In fact, I think that in some ways more harm than good results. YHWH never says anywhere that we should chase down about 80-90% of what scholars and clergy spend their energy trying to ferret out. Not only, imo, is a great deal of it a wild goose chase, some of it, I fear, is a road runner chase...that leaves the chasers hanging in space for that slight second before the plummet ensues.

MJ. Smith said:

The question is less what actions we are performing and more how well we are listening.

I concur with this...and at the same time fear that the busy work you mention is so noisy that the still small voice is never heard in the clatter and hubbub of our close-reading "springboards".

Fr Devin Roza said:

I also think that this danger doesn't mean we shouldn't study his Word, exegesis, theology, etc, just that we need to keep our eyes and heart focused on Him as we do so... even when studying the te'amim.

Interesting.  I periodically have to ask myself, as I just did again this morning, whether I am worshiping God or the Bible.  I was wondering this morning, if the written word was taken away from me today, how well would I be hearing the Holy Spirit?

Reuben Helmuth said:

Please allow searching on Hebrew vowel points, cantillation marks, and patterns/combinations of these using wildcards. 

Are wild card searchs on vowels and cantillation marks a possibility now?

And if so how does one go about running these searches?