![]() ![]() So, for example, someone might want to make a child’s siddur or a siddur for people who don’t know understand or read Hebrew well that contains definitions (perhaps at the bottom of the page or in the margin) for some of the less common Hebrew words. Ze’ev: Having a standard “dictionary” in Open Siddur allows us to provide new functionality that we didn’t have before. Why was updating Strong’s Hebrew Dictionary to Unicode and XML such an important target?ĭavid: The existing ASCII transliterations were neither fully accurate, nor a faithful representation of the ones in Strong’s printed dictionary. I asked David, Ze’ev and Efraim if they would comment on their work together contributing to the Open Siddur Project. Were Strong to look down from his perch in the heavenly yeshiva/academy at our work, I think he might be quite pleased with this collaboration. James Strong is best known for his concordance and the scholarly tools he innovated show a prescient interest in linked data. Efraim helped define the tag usage for the Open Siddur extension to the TEI - the JLPTEI. Efraim Ze’ev converted the XML to the Text Encoding Initiative ( TEI) standard used by the Open Siddur Project. Troidl then parsed out the data and converted it to the Open Scripture Information Standard ( OSIS) XML schema, “using the best available OSIS structure for the data, since OSIS has no official dictionary module,” he explained. (The data is the basis for Instone-Brewer’s website 2 Letter Lookup). Initially, David obtained Strong’s Hebrew data in the form of a PHP script from Dr. (Ze’ev is a regular contributor to the Open Siddur Project and creator of innovative Jewish educational software for the iPhone/iPad platforms (so far)). Ze’ev initiated the project in a forum discussion, here. The three main contributors on the project were David Troidl, Ze’ev Clementson, and Efraim Feinstein (lead developer of the Open Siddur). The project served to test our transliteration engine and develop a good working and ecumenical relationship between two worthy open source projects sharing technology for advancing the digital humanities. The data and XML is available as public domain text, here. Work began early in February and was completed by the second week of April. In partnership with Open Scripture contributing developers, the Open Siddur Project created a quality XML encoding of Strong’s dictionary. Converting the digitized, machine-readable text to an open standard format was a milestone sought by a number of projects including OpenScriptures, an open source project digitizing and encoding variant manuscripts of the Gospels. Strong’s dictionary was digitized ( PDF) in 1998 by unknown contributors. By formatting the words in the dictionary and replicating the transliteration as it appears in the dictionary the Open Siddur Project could test the transliteration engine that will be used to transliterate Hebrew text with nikkud (vowels) to any other script (Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic, Amharic, etc.). Strong’s dictionary, prepared as a companion to his famous concordance, contains a complete list of Hebrew words that appear in the TaNaKh, transliterated with a consistent ruleset. But in order to provide these features, the dictionaries must be digitized and their contents encoded in a standard searchable format. ![]() Both translations and transliterations are features we would like to provide for users of the Open Siddur application we are developing. Dictionaries also include transliterations. They are also useful features in online applications–and not only for their definitions. Marcus Jastrow’s Dictionary of the Targumim, Talmud Babli, Talmud Yerushalmi and Midrashic Literature (1903), Brown-Driver-Brigg’s Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (1906), and James Strong’s Concise Dictionary of the Words in the Hebrew Bible with their Renderings (1890) are all standard reference works still used today.īut dictionaries are not only invaluable reference tools for scholarly research. The mark of a particularly valuable dictionary is how long it is still being used years after it’s introduced. ![]() Testing Our Transliteration Engine with help from James Strong’s Biblical Hebrew Dictionary 18:53:08 Text the Open Siddur Project the Hierophant the Hierophant the Hierophant Development transliteration dictionary ![]()
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