Wednesday, March 15, 2006

Hebrew Searches

My garden has gone untended too long. The box of chocolates sits by my computer and has not been passed around. The embroidery threads lie unsewn and the yarn is not knit.

My most sincere apologies. It is not for lack of material that I have been away. Many of the more curious items still await assembly. But an old problem reemerges tonight.

I was working on Hebrew vowels, which are happily keyed in on this online keyboard, second interface here. I have just conducted a google search of אֶרֶץ country, and then of ארץ. Now, no one has told me that they should be the same and maybe it doesn't matter. Nonetheless, I do like to know these things.

For אֶרֶץ there were 45,200 results in Google Israel, and for ארץ there were 3,800,000 results. (I am having some interesting problems here with the right-to-left business, because I really wanted to write the number '3,740,000' to the left of the Hebrew word but I was not able to. The numerics were attached to the Hebrew in a right-to-left sequence. I have to wonder if there is an override that can be used for the right-to-left algorithm. )

Well, this was not what I would call a delectable post. Maybe next time.

Hebrew Dictonary is here.

4 Comments:

Blogger Harley said...

Great to hear from you again! :D

I figured there'd be some difference, but I didn't realise it'd be that extreme. Then again, written hebrew is very infrequently written with nikudot.

Nice to know that Google offers that kind of specificity for Hebrew searches...

11:42 PM  
Blogger Simon said...

Welcome back, this blog has been much missed.

Do you mean that you wanted to write something like
"I found אֶרֶץ ‎45,200 times and ארץ ‎3,800,000 times"
but it came out as
"I found אֶרֶץ 45,200 times and ארץ 3,800,000 times"?

If so, you should insert a left-to-right mark before the number. The keyboard interface you link to doesn't seem to include this as a possibility, but it's possible in the standard Hebrew keyboards on Windows and Linux.

2:04 AM  
Blogger Sublunari said...

I daresay I know next to nothing about most of what is on this blog, but I enjoy it quite a bit nonetheless. Nice to see you up and running again. I was afraid you had died.

1:24 PM  
Blogger Suzanne McCarthy said...

No, I haven't died. Hmm. That has given me an idea. Maybe I should put in a draft post to uploaded on my demise. :-)

11:03 PM  

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