Subject: Introduction - Ethiopic texts

From: Margaret Hayon <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 11 Jan 1997 09:40:05 +0200

I would like to introduce myself to this list.

I am doing research on the religious traditions of the Ethiopian Jews (Beta
Israel). 
I live in Israel, and am in close contact with priests and elders of this
community; 
they have allowed me to photograph various manuscripts in their possession.
 
I am now working on one of these manuscripts, known as "Baqadami gabra
Egziabher" ["In the beginning God created"]: I am translating it from Ge`ez,
comparing it with the only other two versions I've found (both in Tel Aviv
University library, Rare Books room; part of the Faitlovitch Collection).
The book begins with an Ethiopic version of Genesis 1, which I am comparing
with J.Oscar Boyd's critical edition "The Octateuch in Ethiopic".  Most of
the book, however, is not Biblical but consists of prayers of various types:
the two dominant themes are the 6 days of Creation; and personal repentance
and petition for forgiveness and purification.   I am trying to get more
information from the priests about the liturgical use of these prayers: they
appear to be connected to the Beta Israel Sabbath liturgy (they have a
7-Sabbath liturgical cycle). There are also some midrash-type passages about
Moses and God.

I am an external MPhil/PhD student of London University: my advisor there is
Dr David Appleyard, Head of the Department of Africa at S.O.A.S.   I am also
in contact with Prof. Gideon Goldenberg of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

I would like to know if there are any other Ge`ez scholars on this list.
Are there scholars of other disciplines who might be interested in helping
me to locate sources/parallels of selected portions of this text?

Margaret Hayon
49 Raanan Street,
Haifa 34385, Israel
e-mail address:  [email-masked]

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From: Patrick Durusau <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 Jan 1997 09:19:51 -0500

Magaret,

I am very interested in your work with original Ethiopic texts as
described in your post to the TC-List. I am the chair of the newly
formed SBL Seminar on Electronic Standards for Biblical Language Texts,
which will be addressing the problems faced by authors and publishers
working with biblical language materials.  

One of the first goals of the seminar is to produce Writing System
Declarations, which are formal ways of defining how non-Western
characters will be represented in a text.  If the standard keyboard
lacked the key for "$", the Writing System Declaration could specify
that sign would be written as "&dollar;" and when the text was processed
for printing or display, appropriate software would display the symbol
"$".  The steering committee will be meeting later this month to decide
which biblical languages should be described first and I was wondering
if you would be interested in specifying the character set we would need
for Ethiopic texts?  It is not necessary for you to cast it into the
technical form needed for creation of the Writing System Declaration,
but such work does require a scholar familiar with the language and
script to be described.  

Each character requires a statement concerning its function in the
writing system, drawn from the following list:

class --    describes the function of the character using a prescribed
classification. Legal values are: 

lexical --    character is used in writing words (lexical items) of the
language (includes members of syllabaries and ideographic systems, as
well as composite letter-plus-diacritic combinations)

punc --    character is a punctuation mark which does not appear within
lexical items

lexpunc --    character can appear as a normal punctuation mark, but can
also appear within a lexical item (and should usually, when occurring
between two lexical characters, be treated as lexical---in English,
hyphen and apostrophe are typically treated as members of this class)

digit --    character is an Arabic decimal numeral (0, 1, ... 9) (does
not include superscript numbers, circled numbers, numeric dingbats,
etc.)

space --    character represents some form of white space (space
character, horizontal or vertical tab, newline, etc.)

dl --    character is a diacritic applying to the following lexical
character

ld --    character is a diacritic applying to the preceding lexical
character

dia --    character is a diacritic which is explicitly joined to a
lexical character by a joiner character

joiner --    character is used to join a diacritic to the lexical
character to which it applies (in some encoding schemes, the backspace
control character may be used as a joiner; in others, a graphic
character is used for the same function)

other --    character does not fall into any of the other classes
(dingbats and other unusual characters fall here)

Another issue of concern to the seminar is a listing of abbreviations or
other special characters that occur within manuascripts.  For each type
of manuscript we would like to compile a listing of common abbreviations
and provide a means to indicate the presence of such abbreviations in an
electronic version of the text.

The contribution of scholars who provide the content for the Writing
System Declarations is acknowledged in the header of the WSD.

I hope that our work will be of interest to you and that you will
consider assisting the seminar by sharing your valuable experience in
working with Ethiopic texts.

Patrick

Patrick Durusau
Information Technology
Scholars Press
[email-masked]
Chair, SBL Seminar on Electronic Standards 
for Biblical Language Texts