Hybrid Technique for Arabic Text Compression

Arabic content on the Internet and other digital media is increasing exponentially, and the number of Arab users of these media has multiplied by more than 20 over the past five years. There is a real need to save allocated space for this content as well as allowing more efficient usage, searching, and retrieving information operations on this content. Using techniques borrowed from other languages or general data compression techniques, ignoring the proper features of Arabic has limited success in terms of compression ratio. In this paper, we present a hybrid technique that uses the linguistic features of Arabic language to improve the compression ratio of Arabic texts. This technique works in phases. In the first phase, the text file is split into four different files using a multilayer model-based approach. In the second phase, each one of these four files is compressed using the Burrows-Wheeler compression algorithm

The Tiberian Pronunciation Tradition of Biblical Hebrew

"These volumes represent the highest level of scholarship on what is arguably the most important tradition of Biblical Hebrew. Written by the leading scholar of the Tiberian Masoretic tradition, they offer a wealth of new data and revised analysis, and constitute a considerable advance on existing published scholarship. It should stand alongside Israel Yeivin’s ‘The Tiberian Masorah’ as an essential handbook for scholars of Biblical Hebrew, and will remain an indispensable reference work for decades to come. —Dr. Benjamin Outhwaite, Director of the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit, Cambridge University Library The form of Biblical Hebrew that is presented in printed editions, with vocalization and accent signs, has its origin in medieval manuscripts of the Bible. The vocalization and accent signs are notation systems that were created in Tiberias in the early Islamic period by scholars known as the Tiberian Masoretes, but the oral tradition they represent has roots in antiquity. The grammatical textbooks and reference grammars of Biblical Hebrew in use today are heirs to centuries of tradition of grammatical works on Biblical Hebrew in Europe. The paradox is that this European tradition of Biblical Hebrew grammar did not have direct access to the way the Tiberian Masoretes were pronouncing Biblical Hebrew. In the last few decades, research of manuscript sources from the medieval Middle East has made it possible to reconstruct with considerable accuracy the pronunciation of the Tiberian Masoretes, which has come to be known as the ‘Tiberian pronunciation tradition’. This book presents the current state of knowledge of the Tiberian pronunciation tradition of Biblical Hebrew and a full edition of one of the key medieval sources, Hidāyat al-Qāriʾ ‘The Guide for the Reader’, by ʾAbū al-Faraj Hārūn. It is hoped that the book will help to break the mould of current grammatical descriptions of Biblical Hebrew and form a bridge between modern traditions of grammar and the school of the Masoretes of Tiberias. Links and QR codes in the book allow readers to listen to an oral performance of samples of the reconstructed Tiberian pronunciation by Alex Foreman. This is the first time Biblical Hebrew has been recited with the Tiberian pronunciation for a millennium.

The Tiberian Pronunciation Tradition of Biblical Hebrew

"These volumes represent the highest level of scholarship on what is arguably the most important tradition of Biblical Hebrew. Written by the leading scholar of the Tiberian Masoretic tradition, they offer a wealth of new data and revised analysis, and constitute a considerable advance on existing published scholarship. It should stand alongside Israel Yeivin’s ‘The Tiberian Masorah’ as an essential handbook for scholars of Biblical Hebrew, and will remain an indispensable reference work for decades to come. —Dr. Benjamin Outhwaite, Director of the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit, Cambridge University Library The form of Biblical Hebrew that is presented in printed editions, with vocalization and accent signs, has its origin in medieval manuscripts of the Bible. The vocalization and accent signs are notation systems that were created in Tiberias in the early Islamic period by scholars known as the Tiberian Masoretes, but the oral tradition they represent has roots in antiquity. The grammatical textbooks and reference grammars of Biblical Hebrew in use today are heirs to centuries of tradition of grammatical works on Biblical Hebrew in Europe. The paradox is that this European tradition of Biblical Hebrew grammar did not have direct access to the way the Tiberian Masoretes were pronouncing Biblical Hebrew. In the last few decades, research of manuscript sources from the medieval Middle East has made it possible to reconstruct with considerable accuracy the pronunciation of the Tiberian Masoretes, which has come to be known as the ‘Tiberian pronunciation tradition’. This book presents the current state of knowledge of the Tiberian pronunciation tradition of Biblical Hebrew and a full edition of one of the key medieval sources, Hidāyat al-Qāriʾ ‘The Guide for the Reader’, by ʾAbū al-Faraj Hārūn. It is hoped that the book will help to break the mould of current grammatical descriptions of Biblical Hebrew and form a bridge between modern traditions of grammar and the school of the Masoretes of Tiberias. Links and QR codes in the book allow readers to listen to an oral performance of samples of the reconstructed Tiberian pronunciation by Alex Foreman. This is the first time Biblical Hebrew has been recited with the Tiberian pronunciation for a millennium.

Innovation From Above, Below, and Behind: The Linguistics of the Hebrew Revival

This thesis seeks to investigate the unique example of Modern Hebrew’s linguistic revival and determine the historical and linguistic qualities that made it successful. I intend to challenge the common narrative of Hebrew revival as \u27miraculous\u27 and isolated from Jewish history. I will demonstrate the long legacy of Hebrew creativity, preservation, and reinvention that formed the foundations the Zionist movement was able to build upon. I also seek to expand the narrative of the revival process itself to more accurately account for the modern result that is Israeli Hebrew. The ‘planned’ element of the revival process, i.e. the well-documented top-down impositions of the Hebrew revivalists, was just one of many conflicting forces that converged to actualize a functioning vernacular; in fact, simultaneously, the population was engaging with, and even defying, the rules of the establishment–introducing foreign loanwords, using ‘incorrect’ grammar, inventing slang, and, ultimately, choosing which of the Hebrew revivalists’ innovations would survive. In this way, the organic and unorganized actions of a young Hebrew-speaking population worked alongside the revivalists to determine what ‘correct’ Hebrew is today

Language reform as language ideology: an examination of Israeli feminist language practice

textThis dissertation, an ethnographic and sociolinguistic case study of Israeli feminist practices, investigates the relationship between language use, language ideology, and the socio-cultural construction of gender and gender identity. Taking the definition of language use presented by McConnell-Ginet (1988) as a guide, I analyze both the linguistic behavior and the metalinguistic discourse of fifteen self-identified Israeli feminists, to determine how ideologies related to language, gender, and philosophies of social change interact with the structural and sociolinguistic facts of Modern Israeli Hebrew (MIH) to shape these women’s intentional and habitual practices of language use. I used the theoretical concepts of “indexicality” (Ochs 1992) and “community of practice” (Holmes and Meyerhoff 1999) to examine how the participants in my study used the linguistic resources in their socio-culture repertoire to negotiate a coherent social identity in both feminist and mainstream Jewish Israeli contexts. To date, most of the literature on feminist language practice has examined these issues in English or other Indo-European language speaking contexts. This dissertation contributes to the discussion on the relationship between language and gender by examining these issues in a Hebrew-speaking context. Hebrew, a root-and-pattern language, has a binary system of gender based noun classification in which agreement is marked on predicates as well as pronouns and adjectives. Thus, avoiding gender pre-specification of animate referents in language use, particularly spoken language, is extremely difficult. Furthermore, the association of cultural gender characteristics with the grammatical categories of MASCULINE and FEMININE, through the processes of iconization and erasure (Gal and Irvine 2000), has more implications for meanings of gendered forms. Feminist Hebrew is distinguished from the contemporary and the prescribed standard uses of Modern Israeli Hebrew in three specific ways: (1) the use of hyper-standardized FEMININE forms for referential and indexical marking of feminine gender in sex-specific contexts, (2) the use of FEMININE forms for ambiguous generic or definite inclusive reference, and (3) the overt double gendering of nominal or predicate forms (the Hebrew equivalent of he/she) in speaking or writing. The dissertation includes a detailed quantitative and qualitative sociolinguistic analysis of my informants’ practices to explain how they used variables from feminist and conventional varieties of MIH to express both referential and social-indexical meaning. I discuss the possible social meanings of inter-speaker and intra-speaker variation. I explore what these meanings can (or cannot) tell us about each woman’s status in the community as well as the overall relationship between language use and the constitutive nature of the Israeli feminist community. Finally, I examine the sociolinguistic strategies employed by two women, an Israeli feminist politician and a Jewish feminist activist married to an Arab man, to explore how they use the full range of their linguistic repertoires to negotiate their identities in specific socio-cultural contexts.Linguistic

Can the Undead Speak?: Language Death as a Matter of (Not) Knowing

This text studies how language death and metaphor algorithmically collude to propagate our intellectual culture. In describing how language builds upon and ultimately necessitates its own ruins to our frustration and subjugation, I define dead language in general and then, following a reading of Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator,” explore the instance of indexical translation. Inventing the language in pain, a de-signified or designated language located between the frank and the esoteric language theories in the mediaeval of examples of Dante Alighieri and Hildegaard von Bingen, the text acquires the prime modernist example of dead language appropriation in ἀλήθεια and φύσις from the earlier fascistic works of Martin Heidegger. It synthesizes the mood of language death underpinning intellection generally and the linguistic functions of nomination, necessitation, and equation, in particular. These functions are drawn from the tension located between significance and designificance and expounded in the mapping of Daseinlichkeit

Repetition and not Parallelism as the Determinant of Poetry in the Hebrew Bible. A Case Study of Biblical Story of Creation (Gen 1)

The article points to new research on the subject of poetics in the Bible and argues against the thesis that the basic indicator of poetry and poetic texts in the Bible is parallelism.According to the author, repetition is such an indicator. An analysis of the biblical story of creation of the world was used as the case study (Gen 1)

11QAramaic Job: the Qumran Targum as an ancient Aramaic version of Job

The first point of departure for the present thesis is the observation that the Ara¬ maic translation of Job found at Qumran (11Q10) sits uncomfortably in the genre of the 'classical' targum despite the original editors' classification of the text as '1 lQtargumJob'. A second stimulus for the study arises from the author's review of scholarly discussion on 11Q10 in which its comparison with the Targum and Syriac ver¬ sions of Job has been either anecdotal or extremely limited in scope. In light of the obvi¬ ous relationship between these two observations, and in the hope that the investigation of the latter will shed light on the former, the author attempts to take up the question of the classification of the Qumran text through a synoptic comparison of 11Q10 with the Targum and Syriac versions.Moving beyond static definitions of literalness, questions of dating and the de¬ pendence of the Syriac on the targum tradition, the author makes use of recent work in Targumic and Syriac studies which has attempted to come to grips with issues of genre through an assessment of modes of representation and the formal treatment of the He¬ brew text. Having noted that preliminary investigations of the relationship between these Aramaic versions have been limited to a study of addition and substitution, the present investigation attempts to assess the respective translators' attitudes toward the Hebrew text through an analysis of omission and transposition. Following on from these investigations, the Aramaic versions' treatment of that smallest of Hebrew lexemes—the waw conjunction—is analysed as a further index by which the attitudes of the various translators toward their Hebrew source may be assessed.Having investigated the attitude of the respective translators to their source text, the author locates his findings both within the context of the Qumran translation's classi¬ fication as targum and, more broadly, within the study of the Aramaic versions. The author concludes that, in terms of its representation of the Hebrew text, the Aramaic translation from Qumran shares certain fundamental features with the Peshitta of Job rather than with its nominal cousin, the Rabbinic Targum of Job