Small Open Source projects attn: Gordon Marx

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

Gordon Marx wrote:
| On Sat, 19 Mar 2005 08:50:09 -0500 (EST), David Kramer
| <david at thekramers.net> wrote:
| > Nope.  Aramaic.  hebrew didn't exist yet.
|
| Not only did it, the Torah isn't in Aramaic. If you're really
| interested, you can note that the plurals in the Torah end in "-im" or
| "-ot", whereas most plurals in Aramaic end in "-in". Hebrew was the
| liturgical language, where Aramaic was the language of the people.

Actually, it's more like they were very closely-related languages,
sorta like English and Dutch, or C++ and java.

| Also, whether the Torah has vowels or not has nothing to do with
| humans. The newspaper Yediot Acharonot (and all the other ones) don't
| have vowels, either. :--)

Yeah, and the original Hebrew didn't much use  punctuation  or  white
space.  This causes no end of fun for the people trying to make valid
religious statements about the original.  It was also part of Jerry's
humor.   Imagine  that  God  (or  the advanced aliens of your choice)
handing the original emacs to RMS, but written  in  the  same  style.
Take  the  LISP  code, strip out all punctuation (parens), vowels and
white space.  Now try to write an interpreter for that language  that
gives correct results.

OTOH, if you attempt this exercise, you'll reach a good understanding
of a lot of theological disputes ...