a dearth of arabic?

[MEJ Buijs]

Having just ordered my copy of BibleWorks 7, I have with an appropriate
amount of watering at the mouth been gawking at the plethora of new
content the program promises. I fear it will be a long hard wait for me, no
matter how swift the postman may turn out to be...

One thing I hoped to find, however, seems not yet to be included - an
Arabic version or two. I'm thinking particularly of Saadia Gaon's tafsir on
the Pentateuch and on Job; but surely a Christian version would not be
out of place, either.

Might I have overlooked them? Or will the glorious task of providing such
modules fall to me, once the postman does knock? It would certainly be
an... interesting challenge, computing-wise!

Yours truly,

- MEJ Buijs

[Robert Miner]

Dear Friends,

I've talked to BibleWorks about this in the past, but without the desired outcome! :(

I would love to see the fully vowelled text of the most popular Arabic Bible, the Smith/Van Dyke translation, included in BibleWorks.

This would be particularly interesting to have the morphological analysis of the entire Bible available. It would help many Arabic and "not quite yet" Arabic speakers in their study of the Arabic Bible.

I wish someone would back me up on this and make a case to BibleWorks to include this.

Here in Amman, Jordan, some initial work has been started on the morphological analysis, however without integration into BibleWorks.

I would be willing to assist in such an undertaking.

Please voice your support and let's request this from BibleWorks. ;)

Dr. Robert Miner
miner@cheerful.com

[Dale A. Brueggemann]

If a public domain Arabic Bible is available, it's likely that BW would be glad to include it; and if someone has done a reliable morphological analysis of it and makes it available, it would also be welcomed I'm sure. But BW hasn't generally been into providing the data itself. For example, the morphological analysis of the LXX came from the University of Pennsylvania Center for Computer Analysis of Texts, and the work was done under a combination of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Packard Foundation. The Hebrew was done at various places from a monastary in Belgium to University of Michigan to Westminster Seminary in the USA. Both were huge tasks, and when the results was made generallly available commercial programs like BW were able to incorporate the results. Is there a similar effort underway to produce that level of work in the Arabic Bible?