Forty Years of Syriac Computing
George A.
Kiraz
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
George A. Kiraz
James E. Walters
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Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
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Vol. 10, No. 1
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https://hugoye.bethmardutho.org/article/hv10n1kiraz
George A. Kiraz
Forty Years of Syriac Computing
https://hugoye.bethmardutho.org/pdf/vol10/HV10N1Kiraz.pdf
Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute,
vol 10
issue 1
Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies is an electronic journal dedicated to the study
of the Syriac tradition, published semi-annually (in January and July) by Beth
Mardutho: The Syriac Institute. Published since 1998, Hugoye seeks to offer the
best scholarship available in the field of Syriac studies.
Syriac Studies
Syriac Computing
Databases
Wordprocessing
Desktop publishing
File created by XSLT transformation of original HTML encoded article.
The term “Syriac Computing” was
coined in 1992 and took shape in 1995 when the First
International Forum on Syriac Computing was held in conjunction
with the Second Syriac Symposium in Washington, DC. The term
was applied to computer-related activities and projects which
support Syriac studies. Syriac computing, however, began much
earlier though on a small scale. On the 10th anniversary of
Hugoye and the 15th anniversary of its parent, Beth
Mardutho, whose contributions to Syriac computing are well
known, this paper aims to outline the history of Syriac
computing and offer some considerations for the
future.
Computational Lexicography
[1] The
first project that is known to me which employed computer
systems for the study of Syriac falls within the domain of
computational lexicography, and is only known through oral
tradition. Stanislav Segert, former Professor at University of
California, Los Angeles (UCLA) from whom I learned this in the
mid 1980s, heard that someone at UCLA had encoded
Brockelmann’s Lexicon Syriacum on a mainframe
computer system back in the 1960s. He attempted to trace down
the data during his tenure, but was unable to find anything.
One can speculate that at minimum these data contained a
transcription of the Syriac lexemes in the Lexicon,
maybe with Latin correspondences as well. It is unknown if more
linguistic data tagging was applied, such as morphological
information. The data must have been entered using punch cards.
Nothing is known about the intention of the project; it may
have been simply a study aid.
Figure 1. Computer system similar
to the one used at UCLA in the 1960s.
[2] Later
lexicographical projects aimed at the generation of
concordances, primarily to biblical texts. These are discussed
below in chronological order.
The Göttingen Project
[3] In 1970,
an ambitious project began in Göttingen to publish
concordances to Biblical texts. The project was called Der
Göttinger Syrischen Konkordanz, and used Fortran IV as its
programming language.
The description given here is based on M. Zumpe,
Technische Aspekte der Göttingen Syrischen
Konkordanz (Deutsche Arbeitsgemeinschaft Vorderer Orient,
September 2001).
The resulting concordances were
subsequently published.
Werner Strothmann, Konkordanz zum Syrischen
Psalter (1976); Werner Strothmann, Konkordanz zur
Syrischen Bible: Der Pentateuch (1986), Der
Propheten (1984).
[4] The data
model of the Göttingen project was a simple one. Tables
were saved in flat files, where each line in a file represented
a record. Fields in each record were fixed-length. Entering
data was a challenge in its own right. Someone who must have
known Syriac, or at least the Syriac alphabet, transcribed data
on data cards. The data was then entered, by someone who did
not have to know Syriac, using a traditional keyboard used to
generate a punch card. The punch card was then fed to an IBM
mainframe computer. Syriac text was entered using simple
transcription (one-to-one mapping from Syriac letters to
ASCII).
The Way International Project
[5] Also in
1970, and probably unknown to the Syriac studies community at
the time, The Way International, a “nondenominational,
nonsectarian Biblical research, teaching and fellowship
ministry” (as it describes itself on its web site), began
an ambitious project to create a Syriac concordance to the
Syriac New Testament. The Way was motivated by George
Lamsa’s unfounded claims that the Peshitta is superior to
the Greek New Testament and represents an original Aramaic
version of the New Testament.
George A. Lamsa, The Holy Bible From Ancient
Eastern Manuscripts, Containing the Old and New Testaments
Translated from the Peshitta, The Authorized Bible of the
Church of the East (Nashville: Holman Bible Publishers,
1933, 22nd printing 1981); the NT was reprinted by Harper &
Row, n.d. For Lamsa’s claims, see George M. Lamsa, New
Testament Origin (Aramaic Bible Center, 1976).
During a period of 15 years, The
Way managed to encode the entire Syriac New Testament, with a
comprehensive lexical database. The concordance
The Way International, The Concordance to the
Peshitta Version of the Aramaic New Testament (Ohio:
American Christian Press, 1985).
that came out of
the project was a mere word list, despite the fact that the
data model was sufficient to create a concordance as detailed
as the one produced later by Kiraz.
George Kiraz, A Computer Generated Concordance
to the Syriac New Testament, volumes 1-6 (Brill, 1993).
The Way managed to publish
other useful tools from the project: an edition of the New
Testament in the Estrangelo script,
The Way International, The Aramaic New
Testament (Ohio: American Christian Press, 1983).
an inter-linear
Syriac-English edition of the Peshitta New Testament,
The Way International Research Team,
Aramaic-English Interlinear New Testament, vol. 1
Matthew-John 1988, vol. 2 Acts-Philemon 1988, vol. 3
Hebrews-Revelation (American Christian Press, 1989).
and an
English-Syriac index.
The Way International, English Dictionary
Supplement to the Concordance to the Peshitta Version of the
Aramaic New Testament (American Christian Press, 1985).
At the time, The Way initially made these
publications available to individuals who were not members of
their organization. I managed to obtain a set!
[6] The data
model employed here was based on a relational database. The
data were later made available through the Ancient Biblical
Manuscript Center (Claremont, CA). The Center received this
data on a single magnetic reel-to-reel tape containing twelve
data files. The format was created on an IBM System 38
computer. The files were downloaded onto sixteen 364K, 5
¼" floppy disks in a PC environment with the help of the
Academic Computer Center at the Claremont Graduate School. Each
record type was represented in a flat file, one record per
line. Fields were fixed-length. The data was later utilized by
Kiraz in the SEDRA database project (see below).
Borbone / The Peshitta Institute
[7] During
the 1980s, Pier Giorgio Borbone developed a computational
system with which he produced a number of concordances to
Biblical texts. Description of this system can be found in
various papers.
P. Borbone, ‘L’uso
dell’elaboratore elettoronico per lo studio della
Pešit?a’, Henoch 9 (1987), pp. 55-96; P.
Borbone, ‘Un programma per l’elaborazione di testi
siriaci e un progetto di redazione di concordanze della
peshitta’, in R. Lavenant (ed.), V Symposium Syriacum
1988, Orientalia Christiana Analecta 236 (1990), pp.
439-50; P. Borbone and F. Mandracci, ‘Another way to
analyze Syriac texts, a simple powerful tool to draw up Syriac
computer aided concordances’, in Proceedings of the
Second International Colloquium, Bible and Computers: Methods
Tools, Results, Travaux de Linguistique Quantitative 43
(1989), pp. 135-45.
The Borbone system has been developed further
and is currently being used for the generation of the Leiden
Peshitta concordance, of which one volume has already
appeared.
The Peshitta Institute, The Old
Testament Concordance According to the Peshitta Version, Part V
Concordance (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1997).
Kiraz’s SEDRA Database
[8] The
initial work of George Kiraz’s lexical work goes back to
1984 when he began encoding existing lexica in relational
databases. The first attempt was to encode an Arabic-Syriac
version of Costaz’s dictionary.
For another unfinished computational work on
Arabic-Syriac dictionaries, see George Kiraz and Daniel
Ponsford, ‘Automatic Compilation of Semitic
Lexica’, in Proceedings of the 4th International
Conference and Exhibition on Multi-Lingual Computing
(1994); George Kiraz and Daniel Ponsford, ‘The
Arabic-Syriac/Syriac-Arabic Dictionary Project: Report
II’, in G. Kiraz (ed.), SyrCOM-95: Proceedings of the
First International Forum on Syriac Computing (1995).
Only the letters
Olaph-Dolath were entered at the time. In a second attempt
during 1990, Kiraz tried getting an international group of
volunteers to encode Margoliouth’s Syriac-English
dictionary through Alaph Beth Computer Systems. The system was
called in Syriac sedra “array” as
databases are considered arrays of data. The acronym SEDRA at
the time stood for “Syriac Electronic Data Research
Archive.”
George A. Kiraz, ܣܕܪܐ
The Syriac
Electronic Data Research Archive (SEDRA) (leaflet), pp.
1-3.
In this case too, very little was achieved. On
March 2, 1988, Kiraz signed an agreement with the Ancient
Biblical and Manuscript Center and incorporated its data into
SEDRA. The system was used to publish a detailed concordance to
the Syriac New Testament, and a pedagogical word list to assist
students in learning New Testament Syriac.
George A. Kiraz, ‘Automatic
concordance generation of Syriac texts’, in R. Lavenant
(ed.), VI Symposium Syriacum 1992, Orientalia
Christiana Analecta 247 (1994), pp. 461-75; G. Kiraz, A
Computer-Generated Concordance to the Syriac New
Testament, 6 vols. 106. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1993); G.
Kiraz, Lexical Tools to the Syriac New Testament
(Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994; Piscataway: Gorgias
Press, 2002).
Recently, Logos
Research Systems incorporated SEDRA in its Scholar’s
Library.
Logos Research Systems, Scholar’s
Library Silver Editon: A professional-level library of texts
and tools for serious Bible Study using Greek, Hebrew, and
English resources, Logos Bible Software Series X (2004).
In addition, a team of international scholars
are currently using SEDRA to generate an interlinear to the
Syriac New Testament. SEDRA is available for download from the
Beth Mardutho web site (http://www.bethmardutho.org). A number of
online tools have already been implemented using SEDRA.
Examples are Syriac Dictionary, a
useful tool by Abed Daoud (available from ), and a similar
on-line tool at .
[9] SEDRA
went through three incarnations. SEDRA I (1989) derived from
the database provided by The Way International through the
Ancient Biblical and Manuscript Center. As flat files were not
necessarily efficient for modeling databases, the relational
database was converted for use in db_VISTA,
Raima Corporation, db_VISTA
III™, Version 3.10 (Bellevue, WA: 1989).
a database
management system that provided a programmable interface in the
C programming language for writing database applications. In
the next incarnation, SEDRA II (1990), additional tables and
fields necessary for the generation of Kiraz’s
Concordance were added. Moreover, the entire text of
the New Testament was vocalized and pointed, punctuation marks
were added, and the text was normalized to represent the BFBS
edition of the Syriac New Testament,
British and Foreign Bible Society, The
New Testament in Syriac (London: 1919 and subsequent
editions).
as the text used
by The Way was based on other manuscripts, primarily from the
British Museum.
For a list of the manuscripts used, see
The Aramaic New Testament, Estrangelo Script (1983) p.
x.
To accomplish the vocalization and pointing
process, a program was written that skipped over words which
had been already vocalized.
[10]
Initial bgdkpt letters were always marked with a
qushshaya point; an algorithm was written to convert
the qushshaya into rukkakha if the preceding
word, if any, ended in a vowel and was not followed by a
punctuation mark. The dot on the feminine object pronominal
suffix was not included in the pointing, and is to be added by
another algorithm based on the existing morphological data. The
same applies to seyame. Many of the online tools that
generated NT texts from downloading SEDRA ignored these
features and hence produced texts without seyame and
the feminine marker.
[11] The
next incarnation of the project was SEDRA III (1991). The first
change was the move from a relational model to a network model
where ordered, one-to-many parent-child relations provided ease
for concordance generation. The technical aspects of this model
have been described in detail elsewhere.
George Kiraz, ‘Automatic Concordance
Generation’, in René Lavenant (ed.), VI
Symposium Syriacum 1992, Orientalia Christiana Analecta
247, pp. 461-475.
SEDRA III
contains 2,050 roots, 3,559 Lexemes, 31,079 word forms and
6,337 English meanings (particular to the context of the New
Testament).
Brigham Young University’s Bar Bahlul
Project
[12] In
early 1998, ISPART (then CPART) commissioned G. Kiraz to
implement a linguistic database of the Syriac language that can
be used as a tool to implement search engines of Syriac texts.
Central to the creation of a searchable Syriac text was an
electronic lexicon compounded with a morphological generator.
As Syriac is a highly inflected language, it is not possible to
enumerate all of the Syriac words that may occur in texts.
Kiraz proposed that a linguistically motivated lexicon be
created, accompanied with a morphological generator that would
create all, or as many as possible, inflected Syriac words, and
named the project after the famous 10th century lexicographer
Bar Bahlul.
[13] The
electronic lexicon was built in Access Format, and populated
with roots and lexemes with many morphological attributes. The
database contains abstract information from which a fuller
lexicon can be generated using a morphological generator. The
morphological generator is expressed in ASCII files according
to a special format. In addition to deriving all verbal forms
for each root based on information provided in the electronic
lexicon, the morphological generator creates forms with object
pronominal suffixes, possessive suffixes, and prefixes.
This approach departs radically from the
more ubiquitous approach of using finite-state technology for
morphological analysis and generation. It was used because of
its ease and the lack of a finite-state engine. For a
finite-state approach to Semitic morphology, see George Anton
Kiraz, Computational Nonlinear Morphology: With Emphasis on
Semitic Languages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001).
The Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon
[14] In
the 1980s, The Comprehensive Aramaic Project was born under the
direction of Stephen Kaufman. The project is ambitious and aims
at covering all dialects of ancient Aramaic. This is probably
the first project involving Syriac wherein the lexical aspects
of the project are primary, and concordance generation is
secondary (i.e., concordance helps in compiling a lexicon).
[15]
Various publications dealing with Aramaic dialects other than
Syriac have already come out.
See for a list of
publications.
The publication of a
concordance to the Old Syriac Gospels has just been
published.
J. Lund, The Old Syriac Gospel of the
Distinct Evangelists, A Key-Word-In-Context Concordance,
volumes 1-3 (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2004).
More information on CAL can be found on the
project’s web site at http://cal1.cn.huc.edu.
Word Processing and Desktop Publishing
[16]
Until the 1970s and even the early 1980s, publishing Syriac
texts used traditional methods such as movable type, and
machine-set types (e.g., the Syriac types produced in the 1920s
by American Linotype, and the Estrangelo type produced by the
British Monotype Corporation in 1954).
For a detailed history, see J. F. Coakley,
Typography of Syriac: A Historical Catalogue of Printing
Type, 1537-1958 (Oak Knoll Press, 2006).
[17] With
the advancement of computers, institutions began looking for
ways to use computer technology to print Syriac texts. The
first publications that employed computer technology for the
production of the text were the concordances of the
Göttinger Syrischen Konkordanz project mentioned above.
The text was produced on a plotter, an output device that draws
pictures and drawings using one or more pens, usually used by
the engineering community for architectural drawings. This
system was not used, to the best of my knowledge, beyond the
project’s publications.
[18]
Another early project, one that made use of a more advanced
technology, was initiated by the Assyrian Church of the East in
the early 1980s. The Church’s Literary Committee
commissioned Purdy and Macintosh to produce a high-resolution
digital phototypesetting system. The term “digital”
here needs to be qualified. The device, and the software that
was implemented on the device, were indeed digital (i.e., a
special-purpose computer). The actual output of the device,
however, was a photographic one. This was advantageous at the
time as photographic type produced better quality than digital
type. The device’s photographic results were of the
highest quality, at a resolution of up to 2602 elements per
inch. In addition to Syriac, the device handled English and
Arabic, catering for the need of the Church. The Syriac fonts
were designed by the Church’s team and included one
Estrangelo and one East Syriac type. The device was announced
in 1985. The Church produced a beautiful lectionary using this
system and a number of publications. Such devices proved to be
quite expensive, which was a factor in their limited
distribution. The general user had to wait until the
popularization of personal computers, and the availability of
Syriac digital types for these platforms.
The DOS Era
[19] With
the release of the IBM Personal Computer in the early 1980s,
the age of personal computing really began. Individuals were
able now to obtain such machines. By the mid 1980s, PCs were
competing with the Apple Macintosh system, and to a lesser
extent with the Atari system. This period witnessed a number of
attempts by various individuals to implement Syriac fonts for
various platforms. It is difficult here to give an account of
all such efforts for the lack of documentation. Instead, I
shall outline here my personal experience in developing Syriac
fonts, mentioning the work of others when possible.
[20] I
began looking into the problem of Syriac fonts and word
processing in 1984. My first attempts to represent a Syriac
letter digitally revolved around hard-coding a representation
of each glyph manually. I began by drawing an 8-column grid on
a piece of paper. The choice of eight was because a byte, the
unit of storing information in computers, consists of eight
binary bits. I then drew the letter in the grid. For each row,
a filled cell was assigned 1 and an empty was assigned 0, and
these were then put together to form an 8-bit byte as shown in
Figure 2. The collection of bytes (one per row) were then
represented in the C programming language as an array; e.g.,
the letter Beth was represented as follows:
int Beth[14] = { 0x00, 0x00, 0x3E, 0x41, 0x01, 0x0E, 0x00,
0x00 };
Figure 2. Crude binary
representation of beth. Binary numbers shown in black
and red; hex numbers are shown in blue.
This crude attempt produced ugly output. The lack of a word
processor that would communicate with such a representation of
fonts made the result useless.
[21] In
1985, I came across two products from a Colorado-based company
called Data Transforms Inc.: Fontrix™ and
Printrix™. The former product allowed the user to type
text on a graphic screen using bitmap fonts. The input method
allowed left-to-right as well as right-to-left writing. What
made it interesting is that it came with a font editor that
allowed the user to create new fonts. The Printrix product
allowed the user to print larger documents avoiding the
graphical screen. Fontrix and Printrix had a number of serious
limitations. The font editor did not allow scanned images,
forcing one to rely on manually drawn glyphs. Marks could not
be placed above or below base glyphs. As the input was drawn on
a graphical screen, one could not edit the text without having
to delete it first. There was no text wrapping either. Despite
these deficiencies, I produced a few crude fonts for private
use as shown in Figure 3. Independently, Touma Issa produced a
Syriac font in Fontrix with the help of his father Corepiscopos
Butros Touma, and used it to print church banners in 1986.
Figure 3. Crude Fontrix and
Printrix fonts (1985).
[22] In
1986 Gamma Productions of California issued version 3.0 of its
multi-lingual word processor Multi-Lingual Scholar™
(MLS). This software was truly multi-lingual in the sense that
if the user was typing in a particular language, the
typographical rules of that language applied. Indeed, it
remained for PC-based systems the only unchallenged
multi-lingual word processor until very recently when Microsoft
released its multi-lingual operating system Windows 2000. MLS
came with Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic, with the
possibility of adding other languages. Its importance to Syriac
resided in the fact that MLS came with a font editor that
allowed the user to create new fonts, indeed, new languages.
The font editor was able to read scanned images; hence, one was
able to design high-quality fonts based on books published from
metal types. The word processor worked bi-directionally. One
was able to place up to three marks above and below a letter
(ample for Syriac), and the font allowed for twenty such
marks.
[23]
Alaph Beth Computer Systems, a company that I founded in 1986
and was operational until the early 1990s, produced a suite of
Syriac fonts for MLS. Two Estrangelo fonts, one similar to the
Monotype design, and the other based on a type originally
designed by W. Drugulin of Leipzig ca. 1880; one Serto font
modeled after a type whose original design dates back to a type
associated with the famous diplomat and printer of Arabic,
Savary de Bréves, before 1614; and one East Syriac font,
based on a type by Drugulin ca. 1880, designed with helpful
comments from Mar Emanuel Emanuel of the Church of the
East.
These fonts were later redesigned for use in
Meltho OpenType suite. They correspond to the following fonts,
respectively: Estrangelo Edessa, Estrangelo Nisibin, Serto
Jerusalem, and East Syriac Adiabene.
[24] MLS
used the bitmap font technology; i.e., drawing glyphs by pixels
similar to my early crude attempt but using a more
sophisticated font editor. This meant that a font was designed
for a specific point size; another size would require designing
a new font (usually copying the old font and editing it).
Additionally, as each printing device had a different
resolution (i.e., printed a different number of pixels per
inch), each font at each size had to be designed for various
printer solutions. 300 dots-per-inch (dpi) laser printers, 240
dpi 24-pin dot matrix printers, and 180 dpi 9-pin dot matrix
printers in both draft and quad-density modes.
[25] MLS
had a number of shortcomings. Formatting commands had to be
typed within the text. No file could be larger than 64K bytes,
including formatting commands. This meant that a complicated
document, such as my Concordance to the Syriac New
Testament (1990), could not be more than five or six pages
long. The 4,640-page Concordance had to be split into
928 files, but MLS had the ability to link each document to a
“previous” and “next” document,
creating a chain of documents. (Luckily, I had my
concordance-generation software create and link the 928 files
so that with one print command I was able to print the entire
text). While such limitations would be unacceptable to the
modern computer user, the user of the 1980s was satisfied to
have such a multi-lingual capability, with a high-resolution
output.
[26] The
MLS Syriac fonts were used in a number of other scholarly
publications, but more so amongst the Syriac-speaking
communities. Bar Hebraeus Verlag in Holland published over 50
books with these fonts. The fonts appear in journals, wedding
invitations, and even tombstones! A screen shot appears in
Figure 4.
Figure 4. Screen shot of MLS 3.2
showing Kiraz's Syriac, Arabic and cuneiform fonts, along with
Gamma Production's Hebrew and Greek fonts (1986).
[27] In
the 1988 Symposium Syriacum held in Louvain, I declared that
MLS is “the most sophisticated word processor that has
all the requirements needed [for Syriac]”.
G. Kiraz, “Computers: Innovation and
New Future to Syriac Studies.” René Lavenant, S.J.
(ed.), V Symposium Syriacum 1988. Orientalia
Christiana Analecta 236, 1990, pp. 451-8.
Bill Gates of
Microsoft is also quoted to have said in 1981, “640K
ought to be enough for anybody”. Syriac desktop systems
would continue to advance.
The Windows Age
[28]
During the 1990s, users started shifting from the DOS-based
operating system to the more user-friendly Windows operating
system. At the time Microsoft had different language-based
operating systems. A Middle East version supported
right-to-left writing. During this period, a number of fonts
were produced by various people. Fonts for the standard Windows
operating system were limited as users had to type texts
backward, or use a utility program that switched the text for
them. Those designed for the Middle East Windows version worked
perfectly. In essence, the font designers designed an Arabic
font, replacing Arabic glyphs with their corresponding Syriac
glyphs. There was one problem that was ingeniously overcome by
the font designers: The letters Sodhe and Taw
are right-joining in Syriac but their counterparts in Arabic
are dual-joining. As the rules of joining letters was
hard-coded in the operating system, the fonts used the Arabic
ta-marbuta position for Taw, and a similar
letter for Sodhe. The font methodology of the time was
using TrueType fonts. These were outline fonts rather than
bitmaps. The font designer had to define the shape of a glyph
in terms of Bezier curves using a user-friendly font tool. One
design is good enough for all sizes and resolutions. The
computer takes care of figuring out the size of the font. One
popular font was suryani2 whose origins I do not
know.
[29]
During this period numerous other fonts were designed by
various people. Listing them gives an indication of the
widespread use of computers and web sites:
I am grateful to Nicholas Al-Jeloo who
provided me with this list (Email personal communication,
November 15, 2001).
Gamma Productions redid my Alaph Beth Computer Systems
fonts to be used for their Windows-based tools in 1995.
Steven J. Lundeen of Emerald City Fontworks, Seattle,
designed a decorative font in 1997.
Yakob Ishak Oraha, Europe, designed a collection of East,
West and Estrangelo fonts in 1998.
Tony Khoshaba, Chicago, IL, designed Ishtar Web in
1998.
James Adair designed an Estrangelo font called SPEdessa
based on the Leiden Peshitta edition in 1998.
Dawod Abed, Germany, designed a Serto font called
“Dawod” to be used in his Aramaic Write word
processing program in 1998.
Ashur Cherry of Ontario, Canada, designed 15 East and 4
Estrangelo fonts for the Ashurbanipal software and made them
available on the Internet in 1999.
Nabu Publishing in Australia designed East Syriac fonts
in 1999.
Mesut Tan, Germany, designed four Serto fonts and one
Estrangelo font in 2000.
Michael Davodian, Germany, designed fonts which were then
used on Web sites.
David Chibo and the Assyrian Youth Group of Victoria,
Melbourne, Australia, produced fonts in the Assyria’s
Letters series. These included two East, one Serto and two
Estrangelo fonts.
International Systems Consultancy, Australia, produced an
East Syriac font named Assyrian Web. It was used by the
makers of the Farsi-based Parsnegar word processing
system.
[30]
During this period, Yannis Haralambous designed Sabra,
Yannis Haralambous, ‘Sabra, a Syriac
TEX System’ in G. Kiraz (ed.), SyrCOM-95: Proceedings
of the First International Forum on Syriac Computing
(Cambridge: The Syriac Computing Institute, 1995).
a
collection of outline fonts and macros for use in the
TEX typesetting
languages. The project was part of a wider activity under the
auspices of the ScholarTEX project. The encoded text was
processed by TEX—XET, the bidirectional version of
TEX. A preprocessor,
written as a set of macros and directives, allowed the user to
encode texts in a more user-friendly fashion. The Haralambous
fonts included all scripts. His Serto script was the first to
use fine ligatures based on manuscript tradition (e.g.,
changing the angle of Gomal depending on if the following
letter is Lomad, `E or otherwise). I am not aware of how many
publications made use of this system. I used it to produce my
Comparative Edition of the Syriac Gospels.
G. Kiraz, Comparative Edition of the
Syriac Gospels, Aligning the Sinaiticus, Curetonianus, Peshitta
and Harklean Versions, 4 vols. (Brill, 1996; Gorgias
Press, 2004).
[31] By
2000, Microsoft decided to collapse its different
language-based operating systems into one, and hence
multi-lingual computing took a new shape with the release of
Windows 2000. Coupled with this, a consortium of companies
proposed a new font format called OpenType. These would be
TrueType fonts with additional information built into them.
Whether a letter is right-joining or dual-joining would now be
stored in the font (not hard coded in the operating system).
The distance of a diacritical point can be defined per glyph
and that also can be saved in the font. Ligatures, kerning and
other typographical data can all be part of the font now. The
font designer will no longer be at the mercy of the operating
system (as long as the operating system renders OpenType
technology properly).
[32] Paul
Nelson, Sargon Hasso and I embarked on putting specifications
for Syriac OpenType fonts, and the results were the fonts in
the Meltho font package, available as a free download from
http://www.bethmardutho.org. Alas, we have never
documented in detail the technical aspects of the Meltho fonts.
OpenType technology brought Syriac font design to a new level,
and it would be useful to document this not only for practical
reasons, but also for historical purposes. In brief, the fonts
contain rules that specify the position of each letter, the
distance of each mark from each glyph, and many additional
rules that fine-tune the appearance of fonts. For instance, a
kerning rule will distance a final Nun from a Dolath if the Nun
hits the Dolath as depicted in Figure 5. Other rules may
elongate the line joining letters. Such fine-tuning rules may
be specified using left and right context regular expressions.
The rules are usually specified by the user graphically and may
be compiled as finite-state machines.
Figure 5. Kerning of Dolath and
Nun.
[33] The
only other sets of fonts I am aware of that were designed under
this methodology were the East Syriac fonts by Dr. Isho Marcus
and Rabi Daniel Benjamin. The former has been involved in font
design for decades and in fact was instrumental in the Assyrian
Church of the East system mentioned above. The latter comes
from a family of printing tradition in Iraq.
Standards
[34]
Since the inception of computer science, standards have emerged
to ensure compatibility in platforms and applications. This
became more important with the ubiquitous usage of computers
world wide. One such standard is Unicode, replacing the old
ASCII standard for storing texts in computers.
[35]
Windows 2000 dictated that any supported script must be part of
the Unicode standard. This led Paul Nelson, Sargon Hasso and I
to embark on writing a detailed proposal for the Unicode
Consortium.
Paul Nelson, George Kiraz and Sargon Hasso,
Proposal to encode Syriac in ISO/IEC 10646 (February
20, 1998), 46 pages. Independently, an earlier proposal was
filed by Sargon Hasso and Peter Jasim in 1997.
The proposal was sent to a number of scholars,
who also wrote recommendation letters to the Unicode
Consortium.
These were Sebastian P. Brock, Mor Julius Y.
Çiçek, J. F. Coakley, E. J. Wilson, Luk Van
Rompay, Konrad Jenner, and Heleen Murre-van den Berg.
The proposal was submitted to the Unicode
Consortium on February 27, 1998 and a unanimous resolution was
passed on that day to accept it. Syriac became officially part
of Unicode 3.0 in 2000
The Unicode Consortium, The Unicode
Standard, Version 3.0 (2000).
and occupied the 0700-074F slots.
The standard defined 14 punctuation marks, 29 letters (the 22
letters, Garshuni letters, CPA Pe, a dotless Dalath/Rish, and a
Yudh-He Yahweh ligature), and numerous diacritical marks and
points. A new addition was the Syriac Abbreviation mark, a
control letter that marks the beginning of an overstrike
abbreviation mark.
[36] In
2002, Nicholas Sims-Williams and Michael Everson proposed the
addition of six additional Syriac letters for use in Sogdian
and Persian,
Nicholas Sims-Williams and Michael Everson,
Proposal to add six Syriac letters for Sogdian and Persian
to the UCS (March 30, 2002).
which were incorporated into Unicode 5.0 in
2007.
Julie D. Allen et al. (eds), The Unicode
Standard, Version 5.0 (2007).
Syriac letters used for Malayalam Garshuni
have not yet been proposed.
For a description, see Koonammakkal Thoma
Kathanar, ‘Malayalam Karshon’ in The Harp
10 (1997):59-64.
[37]
There are other standards in which Syriac appears. For
instance, the language name is now part of ISO 639 which
provides codes for all languages. Syriac is assigned to
“Sy” in the two-letter codes and “Syr”
in the three-letter codes.
The Internet
[38] In
1992, the World Wide Web was charted, and only a year later,
individuals from the Aramaic-speaking world began creating web
sites.
[39]
Giving a detailed history of web sites or listing known ones in
chronological order—despite the short history—is
not an easy task. Electronic archives of early versions of
sites, even those that are still active, no longer exist, and
their creators in most cases did not have a reason to keep a
record. While this is somewhat harmless, it should alert us to
the fact that today’s web site may not be there tomorrow.
This becomes a serious problem in the case of content-based
sites such as the soon-to-become-available eBethArké
library. How do we guarantee that digitized forms of unique
material (such as manuscripts and archives, as opposed to
printed books) will be kept safe for generations to come?
[40] The
following is an attempt to list in chronological order the
creative web sites that appeared between 1993 and 1996 based
primarily on information received from the web site creators
themselves.
[41]
Firas Jatou, then an electromagnetics undergraduate student at
the University of Toronto, is credited with being the first to
publish a community web site. He named it Assyria Online and it
was hosted at the university server under the URL
http://waves.toronto.edu/~jatou (no longer valid) until 1995.
It was then moved to http://aina.org/aol where it currently resides.
Very soon after, Nineveh Online by Albert Gabriel appeared
which was converted from an earlier dialup Bulletin Board
System called eBabylon.
Firas Jatou, e-mail personal communication
dated Apri 2, 2005.
[42] In
late 1993 or early 1994 (I don't even know now!), The Syriac
Computing Institute (the former name of Beth Mardutho)
published the first academic site dedicated to Syriac studies
on the Web server of the Computer Laboratory of the University
of Cambridge. The SyrCOM site, as it was then known, gave
information about the Institute and its activities. In 1997,
the site was moved to the web server of The Catholic University
of America, where later the Institute hosted its
Hugoye journal. In 2002, the Institute obtained its
own domain name, bethmardutho.org and the site was moved
there.
[43] The
year 1995 witnessed more intense activities. On Feb 6, 1995,
Wilfred Alkhas published the first issue of his Zenda
Magazine in the form of an email message, which went out
to 12 people in Chicago, San Jose and Sidney. On November 3,
1997, it was hosted on a web site, but continued to be sent as
an email until the end of 1999. Zenda Magazine was
renamed to Zinda on November 9, 1999 due to a conflict
with a Silicon Valley computer game company named Zenda Games.
Zinda’s readership grew from the initial 12
recipients to 28,000 readers from 64 countries with nearly a
million hits per month.
Wilfred Alkhas, e-mail personal
communication dated April 5, 2005.
[44] In
mid 1995, the first Church-based web site appeared as a family
effort by the Issas of Australia. Corepiscopos Boutros Touma,
his son Touma Issa and daughter Theodora Issa put together a
web site on the Syrian Orthodox Church. Due to a lack of a
proper web server, Touma Issa hosted the site on his personal
Windows 3.1 desktop using special software called Windows httpd
that allowed the computer to serve web pages. He had to keep
the desktop turned on 24/7. The URL was on the Murdock
University network (http://chempc25.murdoch.edu), then moved
after two years to a proper web server on the University
network (wwwstaff.murdoch.edu.au/~t-issa/syr/syr.htm). In 2005,
the site was moved out of the university to a free geocities
web server (http://soca.cjb.net and http://syriac.cjb.net).
[45] On
September 5, 1995, Thomas Joseph became the first Indian Syriac
Christian to produce a church web site. The site initially
located at http://www.netadventure.com/~soc (now defunct)
started as a web site for his parish, St. Mary's at Los
Angeles. On May 16, 1996, it was expanded and named the Syrian
Orthodox Resources (SOR) and went live at a web server at UCLA
where Thomas was a graduate student. On May 1, 2000, the site
was renamed 'Syriac Orthodox Resources' and moved to The
Catholic University of America (http://sor.cua.edu) where it is currently
hosted. SOR remains today one of the richest sites on the
spiritual heritage of the Syriac Orthodox Church.
[46] Also
in 1995, a newsgroup called soc.culture.assyrian was proposed
by Peter Jasim and became the first community discussion
forum.
[47]
After 1996 the number of scholarly and community based sites
exploded so that it became impossible to track them down.
Whereas a web search for Syriac studies yielded only a few
results back in 1994, today a Google search on the word
“Syriac” yields 1.7 million pages (compare with a
search done in 2005 which resulted in 300,000 pages). Google
now gives suggestions based on what users search. The top
search strings that users utilize which begin with Syriac are:
Syriac Orthodox Church, Syriac Orthodox, Syriac Church, Syriac
alphabet, Syriac Christianity, Syriac Bible, Syriac fonts, and
Syriacus.
[48] I
shall conclude this section with two contributions by Beth
Mardutho. In 1998, Beth Mardutho began publishing Hugoye:
Journal of Syriac Studies. In addition to being the first
and only peer-reviewed journal dedicated entirely to the Syriac
heritage, the journal was totally electronic with free access
online. Thomas Joseph assumed the position of Technical Editor
and devised the templates necessary to publish the journal.
Hugoye followed a tradition established by TC: A
Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism, available at
http://rosetta.reltech.org/TC/TC.html numbering
logical paragraphs to be used as references instead of page
numbers. Beth Mardutho planned from the outset to publish
Hugoye in print as well, and while there have been
delays, plans are now underway to accomplish this. Beth
Mardutho also plans in the near future to add to its web site a
collection of over 1,000 books, manuscripts and archival
material in digital form. This will hopefully become an
indispensable tool in our field.
Future Considerations
[49]
Syriac computing has gone a long way especially in the past two
decades; however, there is a need for much more to be done.
[50] An
optical character recognition (OCR) system that can cope with
the various Syriac scripts is a desideratum. It will help us
scan hundreds of texts not as images, but as searchable texts.
This will also open the way for text-tagging projects along the
lines of similar projects for Greek and Latin. The field is
lucky to have William Clocksin
For an earlier report, see William Clocksin
and Prem Fernando, ‘Towards automatic transcription of
Estrangelo script’ in Hugoye 6 (2003) [].
who has been working in the
past few years on such a system. It is hoped that soon a
user-friendly application can be hosted online that will allow
users to upload images of texts and download them in Unicode
searchable and editable form.
[51]
Another desideratum is a general knowledge-base that embodies
an encyclopedia in the traditional sense, but also would link
to bibliographical and manuscript-catalog databases. To these
one can add a book review database, and a colophon database.
Imagine if in a simple search, one could find everything that
was published on a Syriac author, a list of the author’s
works, the manuscripts containing those works and their
colophons! The design of such a system is not too difficult and
can be achieved in a very short period of time. What is
time-consuming is populating the database. In the absence of
funding, one may have to resort to a Wikipedia type
encyclopedia where the users populate the data themselves.
[52] If
one is allowed to dream, one can add another desideratum: a
linguistic database of the language that would include a
computational lexicon and a natural language engine. The data
model behind the computational lexicon needs to cover not only
typical fields that are found in paper-lexica (variant
orthographies, dialectical variants, historical spellings,
collocations, idiomatic phrases, etc.), but also grammatical,
morphological and phonological data that give flexibility for
future applications. For instance, there has been hardly any
system in previous lexical projects that encodes phonological
information, and while most would cater to morphological
paradigms, probably none marks things like transitiveness. Of
equal importance are semantic and thesaurus-type information.
These would not only allow the user to search the lexicon based
on concepts (rather than mere roots, lexemes or word forms),
but also would allow the building of semantic relations and
hierarchies.
D. A. Cruse, Lexical Semantics
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Such a system would allow for writing
applications to assist in the grammatical tagging of texts, and
we might as well drop a spelling checker there.
[53]
Multi-media can also play a role in projects. One project that
comes to mind is a comprehensive recording of the Beth Gazo
melodies according to various traditions. Syriac Orthodox
Resources and Beth Mardutho have already digitized the
recordings of Patriarch Jacob III and a few others, but a
larger enterprise is needed to create a comprehensive
searchable database that makes use of audio and texts.
[54] Each
person probably has his or her own wish list. Would you like
your iPod to display Syriac?
[55]
ܫܠܡ
ܘܠܐܠܗܐ
ܫܘܒ܆
ܘܠܕܘܝܐ
ܕܣܡ ܗܠܝܢ
ܫܘܒܩܢܐ܀
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