Typesetting the Holy Bible in Hebrew, with TEX Yannis Haralarnbous To cite this version: Yannis Haralarnbous. Typesetting the Holy Bible in Hebrew, with TEX. Tugboat, TeX Users Group, 1994, Proceedings of the 1994 Annual Meeting, 15 (3), pp.174-191. hal-02100468 HAL Id: hal-02100468 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02100468 Submitted on 23 Apr 2019 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Typesetting the Holy Bible in Hebrew, with TEX Yannis Haralarnbous Centre d'~tudeset de Recherche sur le Traitement Automatique des Langues Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, Paris. Private address: 187, rue Nationale, 59800 Lille, France. Yanni s [email protected] Abstract This paper presents Tiqwah, a typesetting system for Biblical Hebrew, that uses the combined efforts of TEX, METAFONT and GNU Flex. The author describes its use and its features, discusses issues relevant to the design of fonts and placement of floating diacritics, and gives a list of rare cases and typographcal curiosa which can be found in the Bible. The paper concludes with an example of Hebrew Biblical text (the beginning of the book of Genesis) typeset by Tiqwah . Introduction cannot be guessed out of the context (for example in names or foreign words), or in cases where the text is The Tiqwah system uses the possibilities of TEX, extremely important and should by no means be al- METAFONT and GNU Flex to typeset Biblical Hebrew. tered (the case of holy texts, like the Bible), short vow- Ths is not a simple task: (a) special fonts had to els have been added, in the form of diacritics. This be created, described in the section 'Fonts for type- is the first level of hacritization; it can be applied to setting the Holy Bible in Hebrew' on page 177; (b) any text; at school, chddren first learn vowelized He- several levels of diacritics are required; they have brew. to be entered in a reasonable way (see 'Vowels' on A second degree of diacritization is the use of page 176, and 'Masoretic accents and other symbols' cantillation marks or Masoretic marks or neumesm2 on page 176), and placed correctly under or over This method of &acritization applies only to the He- the characters (see 'An algorithm for placing floating brew Bible. chacritics' on page 179). The Bible being the most de- Finally, a third degree of chacritization and manding Hebrew text (from the typographical point markup (less important in volume than the two of view), Tiqwah can trivially be used to typeset any previous ones) consists of using editorial marks for other Hebrew text, classical or modern; in addition scholarly editions (locations where text is missing, to Tiberian vowels, Babylonian and Palestinian vow- diverging sources, etc.). For ths purpose, mainly els are also included in the font, as are special char- two signs are used: the circellus (a small circle) acters for Yiddish. and the asterisk. Also a dot is sometimes placed Ths paper is divided into three parts: the first over each letter of a word-it is called punctum one, more pragmatic, describes the requirements and extraordinarium. use of the Tiqwah system; the second one discusses the design of the fonts and the algorithm of floating One reads in Levine (1988, pp. 36-37): ". .unlike diacritics placement; fmally, the third part gives a list Psalmodic technique which reserves its motifs for a of rare cases and typographical curiosa found in the single syllable toward the phrase-end, Biblical chant Hebrew Bible, and the way to produce them through assigns a motif to each word. It does ths with signs Tiqwah. called neumes (te'amim in Hebrew). .The root of But first, for the reader not familiar with the "neume" in Hebrew, ta'am has several meanings: Hebrew language, a short introduction to the Hebrew 'taste'; 'accent'; 'sense'. Neumes impart taste (into- system of diacritization. nation) to Scripture through melody, accent through placement (above or below the stressed syllable), Diacritization. In Hebrew, as in other Semitic lan- and sense (rhetoric) by their ability to create a pause guages, only consonants and long vowels are writ- or to run words together. In addition to these func- ten as letters: the reading process includes a perma- tions, neumes provide a means of memorizing the nent "guessing" of words out of the available data- intonation, accentuation, and rhetoric of the hand- the consonants and long vowels, as well as the gram- written scrolls read publicly, for only consonants ap- matical, syntactic and semantic context.' To prevent pear on the scrolls. Vowels and punctuation-as well misunderstandings, in cases where the short vowels as neumes-appear only in printed editions of the tr t rd ths t s wht I mn - try to read this to see Hebrew Bible." what I mean. TUGboat, Volume 15 (1994), No. 3 -Proceedings of the 1994 Annual Meeting Typesetting the Holy Bible in Hebrew, with TEX It follows that printed Hebrew Biblical text can Tiqwah pa~kage,~consisting of a preprocessor writ- globally be subdivided into four strata: ten in GNU Flex, fonts written in METAFONT, and TEX 4. Editorial marks macros. The preprocessor being written entirely in 3. Cantillation marks GNU Flex (without using any system-dependent sub- 2. Vowels, semi-vowels and Sewa routines), can be compiled in a straightforward man- 1. Text ner on any platform having a GNU Flex executable and an ANSI C (preferably gcc) compiler. The placement of diacritics falls into the following Once Tiqwah has been installed, typesetting is groups: done in two steps: an input file is prepared using the 1. inside the letter: the dageS or mappiq dot; syntax described below; the preprocessor then reads 2. over the letter: vowels (holem in the Tiberian this file, and produces a LATEX^^ (or plain TEX) file system of vowelization, and all Palestinian and which can then be run through TEX in the usual way.S Babylonian vowels), Spirantization (rafe), can- fieparing the input file. If you wish to write your file Idlation marks (zaqeph, rebia, gerei, garia~~~fin LATEX^^, you have to include the line etc.), editorial marks (circellus, asterisk, punc- tum extraordinarium); \usepackageCti qwah} 3. under the letter: vowels (hireq, sere, segol, etc.), semi-vowels (hafeph-patah, etc.), absence of vowel (Sewa), cantdlation marks (silluq, atnah, in the preamble. Plain TEX users will write etc.); 4. before the letter (on its right): prepositive can- \input tiqwamac. tex tillation marks (dehi, yetib, etc.); 5. after the letter (on its left): postpositive cantil- at the beginning. However, the author recommends lation marks (segolta, sinnor, etc.). the use of LATEX&, because of its powerful font se- All strata of diacritics can be combined. It has lection scheme. always been a typesetter's nightmare (or delight, de- A Tiqwah input file contains text, TEX/~X pending on the case) to produce fully diacriticized macros, and preprocessor directives. The latter Hebrew text: sometimes the combinations of dia- concern only Hebrew script. To type Hebrew text critics get even wider than the character that carries you need to enter Hebrew mode; ths is done by the them; in these cases, dacritics will float under (or preprocessor directive <H>. To leave Hebrew mode, over) the irnmedlately following letter, according to enter the directive </H>. For Yiddish, the directives rules given in the section 'An algorithm for placing are <Y> and </Y>. The drectives <H> and <Y> floating diacritics' on page 179. These actions can are the only ones recognized by the preprocessor eventually change the appearance of the whole word. outside Hebrew/Yiddish mode. In that section we give an analytic approach of float- Once you are inside Hebrewfliddish mode, you ing diacritic placement, and the corresponding algo- type Hebrew text in Latin transcription, from left rithm used by Tiqwah's TEX macros. to right. No special indication needs to be given to The reader can find more information on the TEX about font or writing direction switching-this is grammar of Biblical Hebrew in Lettinga (1980); for an done automatically. The following sections describe introduction to the modern edition of the Bible BHS the transcription you have to use as well as all other (Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia), see Wonneberger features of the preprocessor. (1990). Letters. The Hebrew transcription of letters (conso- nants and long vowels) is given in Table 2 of the ap- Using Tiqwah pendix (page 187); the Yiddish one will be given to- gether with all other features of the Yiddish part of Requirements. To typeset in Biblical Hebrew using Tiqwah, in a forthcoming paper, dedicated entirely Tiqwah, one needs a decent TEX ~ystem,~a relatively to th~slanguage. powerful machine (being able to run BigTEX) and the Here is a simple example of code producing non- In this context, by 'decent TEX system' we mean a vowelized Hebrew text: TEX implementation featuring Peter Breitenlohner's Tiqwah will be included in ScholarT~X;it is part TEX--XET as well as a METAFONT implementation of the long awaited version 1 of the latter, together with user-configurable parameters (the internal pa- with new Greek, Arabic, Estrangello, Serto, Chaldean, rameter max-font-dimen of METAFONT has to take Coptic and Akkadian cuneiform fonts.