As shown in the table above out of the 5850 unique Greek stems for the 7 Greek codices we considered only 19 words had variant accenting. We therefore removed the accents from both variant form in these 19 cases. So the accenting is actually irrelevant in the Greek since there is a one to one correspondence between the unaccented and the accented word for the other 5812 cases.
This is not the case with the Hebrew however. The original Pentateuch (the 5 books of Moses, the first 5 books of the bible) and in fact the entire Old Testament had no vowel pointing at all
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jehovah). In fact the letter Aleph was originally related to a, Hey was related to e,
Yod was related to i, and vuv to o or oo or u. It is interesting therefore to note that the Tetragrammaton (the 4 letters which make Jehovah's name)
YHWH hwhy are also vowels. So one might argue from this that one should pronounce the divine name as Yiheyvooh or the likes (using the first three of the consonants as vowels too). In any event the original lettering of the language had 4 vowels which doubled as consonants (typical Hebrew) - not sure about Ayin. Then the
Masoretes
introduced umpteen other vowels in the form of vowel pointing. But not satisfied with that, a whole bunch more of accents were introduced. So that in the end there were more vowel points and accents than there were letters in the original alphabet (alpha beta - aleph beth). This is the path to phariseeism. You end up with a word so covered in vowel points and accents that you can hardly see it, read it, or understand it.
All of these vowels and accents are of course is a disaster for computer matching of Hebrew stems with Lexicons. So we decided the following.
1. Remove all Hebrew accents, since we are not that interested in how classical Hebrew was pronounced.
2. Standardize the vowels so that there is only one way to depict any Hebrew word.
Vowel standardization is critical because there are 3 positions for the holem vowel point (each of which is a different extended character), and 2 for all the others and then in some fonts such as SBL Hebrew one can manufacture a Shin with a Dagesh in several different ways. This again is a disaster for computer matching. Incidentally we reject
entirely unicode fonts because mankind has enough trouble dealing with a code page with 255 characters in it. In any event unicode fonts only half work in their aim of being able to translate between one another without a code page conversion. And that is useless. Either they should work perfectly or we should find another method. Also the complex script idea of Microsoft to have fonts type one way but read another is diabolically confusing. If you press the right arrow on your keyboard the cursor moves left - wonderful! So in the end we chose the regular non unicode true type Hebrew font of
Bwhebb from bible works. A very nice looking a well coded font which has only two floors in it. Firstly you cannot easily see the vowel pointing until you reach 23 point size. Secondly the vowel pointing goes wrong and the vowels bump into each other at 28 or 29 point. So we only use 23 point and 26 point in this font. This is the standardization we went for...
Vowel Sign Vowel Name
Key Stroke Pronounciation
'
Qamets
' = alt + 0039 All, Are, Qamets
;
Pattach
; = alt + 0059 Man, Pattach
]
Sheva Pattach ] = alt + 0093
Hat
e
Tsere
e = alt + 0101 They, Tsere
,
Segowl
, = alt + 0044 Men, Segowl
/
Sheva Segowl / = alt + 0047
Met
.
Sheva
. = alt + 0046 Average, Sheva
i
Chiriq
i = alt + 0105 Pin, Chiriq
O
Howlem
O = alt + 0079 Whole, No, Howlem
\
Sheva Qamets \ = alt + 0092
Not
u
Qibbuts
u = alt + 0117 Rude, Qibbuts
The table above is for long Hebrew letters a b d h x j k l m s [ p c q S f v
t.
The table below is for the short Hebrew letters, g w z y n
and for r
Vowel Sign Vowel Name Key Stroke Pronounciation
' Qamets
" = alt + 0034 All, Are, Qamets
; Pattach
: = alt + 0058 Man, Pattach
] Sheva Pattach
} = alt + 0125 Hat
e Tsere
E = alt + 0069 They, Tsere
, Segowl
< = alt + 0060 Men, Segowl
/ Sheva Segowl
? = alt + 0063 Met
. Sheva
> = alt + 0062 Average, Sheva
i Chiriq
I = alt + 0073 Pin, Chiriq
O Howlem O = alt + 0079 Whole, No, Howlem
\ Sheva Qamets
| = alt + 0124 Not
u Qibbuts
U = alt + 0085 Rude, Qibbuts
The vowels in the lower table for the short letters are short vowels. Short in the sense that they do not extend much past the short letters. No other vowels and no accents are used either in the Hebrew text or in the Hebrew stems or in the Lexicons. It was quite a challenge to convert SBL Hebrew to BWhebb. But having written the conversion tables, these should in theory apply to all unicode fonts. These are the fonts which you cannot type and which work backwards.
We exclusively used keystroke A for A rather than keystrokes wO which also give wO.