You could—the letters are substantially the same (functionally speaking) as the modern Hebrew alphabet—but it is graphically less sophisticated than its derivatives, namely the Greek & Roman alphabets, and the Assyrian script which gave rise to the revised form of Hebrew from the Second Temple period onwards, known today as “Square Script”:
Continue readingFour years after the start of conversion from Square Hebrew to SimHebrew and compilation, and twenty years after the start of the SimHebrew (simulated Hebrew) project, The SimHebrew Bible: The Hebrew Bible in Simulated Hebrew – with English Guide is finally out.
As evident from my prolonged silence on this blog in recent years, work on this project—one chapter a day—came at the expense of my usual blogposting, in my spare time and in the wee hours of the night.
In the end, given the scope and complexity of the project, this first major application of SimHebrew was a joint collaboration with Bob MacDonald – a retired software developer, composer, Hebrew Bible translator, and author of the Dust blog, and Seeing the Psalter, The Song in the Night, and other books on the Hebrew Bible – whose automated convertor engine (based on the SimHebrew algorithm) complemented my semi-manual efforts, and served as a quality control. His conversion was based on the pointed Leningrad Codex, while mine was based on the unpointed ktiv malé (‘full spelling’) which I ‘semi pointed’ manually (to distinguish between consonantal vav (ו), ḥolam malé (וֹ) and shuruq (וּ), and converted by my in-house convertor app. The final SimHebrew manuscript is therefore a blended and resolved version of the two, to ease reading.
Continue readingMisapprehensions like this are precisely why conventional transliteration of Hebrew is so flawed.
In SimHebrew (simulated Hebrew in Latin characters), the spelling distinctions between those three words are clear, and preserved:
See Modern-day Ecclesiastes for more examples.
Part I of the SimHebrew Bible project is complete.
What began last September with the conversion of one chapter a day, starting with Genesis 1 (based on the Masoretic version in ktiv malé), the SimHebrew Torah (Pentateuch) is now, with the conversion of Deut. 34, has been concluded:
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Notes by Autumn Light 