cellio | (no subject)

I like the web. I don't love the web today, because it only gave me part of what I was looking for, but I still like it.

Our choir is going to do one of the Salamone Rossi pieces from a book I bought recently. I'm re-typesetting the music, though, mainly so I can redo the transliteration. I'm sure the transliteration in the book is perfectly intuitive for a French speaker (it's a French edition), but it's not intuitive to us. And people are intimidated enough by Hebrew without that complication, and I don't want them to be intimidated by Hebrew.

So the problem is that I have this French transliteration, and another ("English") transliteration in a CD booklet, and I can of course listen to the CD. But I'd rather work from the original Hebrew, which I don't quite have. But this particular text is a psalm setting, so I can get that, in theory.

So I searched the web for "psalm 146 Hebrew text" and got a useful hit here. It's a score, but it's not a complete score because it's missing the vowels. (The site's main page is here.)

(Dani actually has a Hebrew-language bible with really teeny tiny type. I wanted to avoid working from that copy as my baseline, but I think I can use it and a good magnifying glass to fill in the vowels on the copy I printed from the web.)

And then, I can do my own transliteration without any risk of compounding someone else's ambiguous Ashkenazi-inspired interpretation, thank you very much. :-)

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One of the things that drove me nuts about Hebrew was the missing vowels.

Yeah. With the vowels, you can read (pronounce) even if you can't comprehend, and on a good day you can even comprehend some. Without the vowels, you're doomed because you need to infer them based on context and grammar -- which requires that you know the language.

The vowels are often left out of things like newspapers and road signs in Israel, but they are in prayer books and printed editions of the Tanakh (most of the time) over here, and there are books that include them. (Mostly children's books, according to Dani, but that's ok.)

R vwls ptnl n nglsh? Wll, srt f. Bt nglsh s mch lss lgcl thn Hbrw -- n rts, n rglr vrb frms...

Ok, I think I proved my point. I'm not sure what it was. Maybe it was that you can leave vowels out in English and still have some legibility. If I'd left, say, 23% of the vowels in, the above would be much more legible:

Ar vwls optnl in nglsh? Wll, srt of. Bt nglsh s mch lss logcl thn Hbrw -- no rts, no rglr vrb frms...

I meant the above to be: Are vowels optional in English? Well, sort of. But English is much less logical than Hebrew -- no roots, no regular verb forms...

FYI, I didn't get "ptnl" on my own.

Sure, if you know a language you can deal with corrupted text. Someone who doesn't know the English language would have just as much trouble with your examples as I have with vowel-less Hebrew; you can only parse corrupted text when you have an idea of what the candidate words really are. I didn't mean to imply that text without vowels is universally bad -- just hard for those not fluent to cope with, is all.

Have I mentioned recently how excited I am about doing this Rossi piece? It's going to be a blast.

My biggest hurdle with Hebrew was the alphabet. As long as I don't have to read the actual Hebrew letters, i'll do fine (and i'd wager so will many other people).

Can't wait.
*bounce*

Yeah, in my opinion Hebrew is easier than some of the languages we sing in. It is much more consistent; once you learn the rules, you don't really have to worry about exceptions. (And certainly not in translit if the translit is done well, which (ahem) mine will be because I've seen so much bad translit that I know what things will confuse people unfamiliar with the language.)

I was aiming to have this ready for last night but ended up spending too much time getting ready for the book review. So it'll be ready for next week. It's a very cool piece; I can send you a MIDI file if you want a preview.

Sure, i'll take MIDI files :-)

Sorry that you weren't able to get to choir when you wanted to. It was good to see you, even if it was for a short period of time.

Yeah, sorry about the late arrival. Aya told me that book reviews usually go about an hour, and we were supposed to start at 7:30, so I figured 9 was a safe bet for getting to choir. But there was a lot of stuff to get through (well, touch), and we had a talkative crowd. And as the person *leading* the discussion, I really didn't have the option to duck out. :-)

Which Armstrong book did you review again? Are you gonna do an LJ review? :)

I bought Holy War</> by her, but haven't started reading it yet.

Also, I'm really excited about the Rossi piece too!

A History of God, yes. Hmm, I hadn't thought about actually writing a review. (I have lots of notes, but they're bullet-points to talk about, not complete sentences formed into coherent paragraphs.) Maybe I'll post some short takes later; I also mentioned some reactions to the book in my long ramble on Sunday.

I read that about a year ago, and really liked it. She has some amazing things to say in general, she just seems to take too many words to say it. I haven't read any of her other books, and since "History of G-d" took a good chunk of time to read (and I read fast), i'm not prone to until I have more free time.

What did you think about it?

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Vwls r ptnl n nglsh?

Re: Vwls r ptnl n nglsh?

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History of God?

Re: History of God?

History of G-d