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In this example we shall see how the criteria for choosing sentences and choosing sentence units can be different, and we shall see how you type words in a non-Latin alphabet.
In this and all subsequent examples it is assumed that you have already started the program by double-clicking the 3ET icon on your desktop.
Select the menu item File > Load exercise and open the exercise
number_state.3et in the folder 3ET\WIVU
or
At this point a short introduction is needed for people who do not know Hebrew: In Hebrew, nouns can be inflected for number (singular, dual, or plural) and state (absolute and construct). State is somewhat similar to the case concept found in many other languages. Furthermore, a noun can have a suffix, which is inflected for gender, person, and number, and which indicates an owner: Thus, Hebrew says “horseour” instead of “our horse”.
The purpose of this exercise is for you to train the inflection of nouns for number and state. The exercise will show you the basic form of a noun and ask you to provide, say, the plural construct form of the word.
Let us first take a closer look at the five tabs:
This tab indicates that we are going to work with the WIVU edition of the Old Testament. WIVU is the Werkgroep Informatica at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. Depending on which edition of 3ET you installed, the database may be limited to the first three chapters of Genesis. You can also see this under the “Universe” tab. (As in the previous example, you need not worry about the word “Advanced” here.)
The “Sentences” tab shows the criteria that the program uses when choosing sentences for the questions:
The tab shows that 3ET will choose sentences containing words...
If we only had the first criterion (that is, if we had instructed the program to search for all nouns), would would run into two problems: Firstly, we would get quite a few sentences that only contain words in the singular absolute form, which is the basic form of the noun (the form found in a dictionary). This is not very interesting. Secondly, we would get a number of words with a suffix indicating an owner, and this would make the exercise more complex.
By demanding that the state be construct, we make sure that the chosen sentences will contain at least one word in the more interesting construct form. And by demanding that the words have no suffix with a gender indication, we avoid all words with suffixes.
In the previous example we used the same criteria for choosing sentences and choosing sentence units. We do not do so here. Therefore the “Sentence Units” tab is active. It looks like this:
Here you can see that 3ET intends to ask questions about all nouns without a suffix indicating gender – not just words in the construct form. We known that 3ET will only choose sentences that contain at least one construct form; but the program will ask the user about all suffix-less nouns in the sentences, including the ones in the absolute state.
The last tab, “Features”, shows how questions will be presented:
3ET will show the lexeme (that is, the dictionary form), gender, state, and number of the sentence units. And the user will be asked to type “Text (no cantil.)”, that is, the actual word found in the sentence, but without the Hebrew cantillation marks (which you rarely need to know in detail).
As you run the exercise, it will become clear how this works. Select the menu item Run > Continuous and, as usual, the program will choose a random sentence that meets the above criteria. For example this one (from Genesis 3:14 – “and you will eat dust all the days of your life”):
You will immediately notice an important difference from the previous example: Some of the words have been replaced by a number in parentheses. The reason is that in this case 3ET asks the user to provide a word that is actually part of the text; therefore the word must not be shown in the window. The program has therefore replaced the interesting sentence units with numbers.
Let us start with word number 3: The program informs you that the dictionary form of this word is יוֹם (which means day); the word is masculine and appears in the sentence in the plural construct form. Your job is to write that form in the field below “Text (no cantil.)”. Of course, you immediately know that the correct answer is יְמֵי, but how do you type that?
If you have a Hebrew keyboard on your computer (or at least have installed a Hebrew keyboard driver), you can type the word directly, but only if you have told 3ET that you have such a keyboard. This can be set up in the program preferences. But presumably you do not have a Hebrew keyboard. 3ET allows you to type Hebrew letters using a normal (Latin) keyboard: Every Hebrew character is coded as a Latin character. For example, the letter מ is written as M (note: Capital letter) and ְ (shewa) is written as :. This manual contains a complete description of the key codes for Hebrew here.
The word יְמֵי can be typed as J:M;J on your keyboard. As you type the characters, the Hebrew word will be built to the right of the input field:
Word number 1 (עָפָר, dust) is indicated as having an unknown gender, but a dictionary will tell you that the word is masculine. This is a speciality of the WIVU database: It marks the gender of a noun as “unknown” if you cannot discover the gender by looking at the text. The program here asks you for the singular absolute form, but as that is in fact the dictionary form, the answer is identical to the lexeme and can be types as <@P@R.
Word number 2 (כֹּל, all) must be given in the singular construct form. Let us (erroneously) try typing K.OL (which is the same as the lexeme) and then click “Check answer”:
The program shows that the second word is wrong and the other two are correct. Clicking “Show answer” will display the correct answer:
You may have noticed that there is no space between וְ and (1) in the sentence. This is because the two words וְ and עָפָר are written together: וְעָפָר. The complete sentence in the Bible reads: וְעָפָ֥ר תֹּאכַ֖ל כָּל־יְמֵ֥י חַיֶּֽיךָ (The extra mark below פ in the first word is a catillation mark, but we were asked to type the text without them.)
If you are good at Hebrew, you may have noticed that the last word in the sentence (חַיֶּֽיךָ) was not chosen as a sentence unit even though it is a noun. But the word means “your life” and thus has a suffix that indicates ownership. Such nouns were excluded from the exercise.
If you want to be able to type Hebrew characters directly into 3ET and other programs, you may be interested in the program EzerKB. This is a free program and you can read more about it here.
Go to main page Updated: 2009-11-25 10:46:23