A Probabilistic Approach to Syntactic Variation in Biblical Hebrew

What it is about

The authors test whether syntax alone separates Standard (early) from Late Biblical Hebrew books. From the ETCBC BHSA data (Text-Fabric) they take, per clause, the sequence of word parts of speech, phrase types and phrase functions, separately for narrative and quotation, after removing clauses that are near-copies (>75%) of clauses in other books (e.g. Chronicles from Kings). Each book becomes a first-order Markov chain of transitions; books are compared by the mean Hellinger distance between rows of their transition matrices, then clustered (Ward hierarchical, k-medoids). Single features give mixed clusters (Joshua with Daniel); only when distances are averaged over all features and both domains do the groups resemble the classic division: Ezra–Nehemiah, Esther, Daniel, Song of Songs on one side, Genesis–Kings on the other, with Exodus, Deuteronomy, Ecclesiastes and Chronicles in between.

Ideas

• I1. A book-distance measure for Mova's trees: per book and domain (narrative vs speech, which prag already separates by voice), transition matrices of UPOS and of dependency relations along the clause, compared by mean Hellinger distance. Deterministic and cheap; a sanity check that the five Torah books cluster and that Deuteronomy's speech stands apart.
• I2. Use dependency paths instead of linear bigrams (the authors' own suggestion): head–dependent relation pairs per book, which the trees give directly.
• I3. Method rule for dating claims in chapter 12: remove parallel passages first, split narrative from speech, and report only features that survive across several feature sets.

For Mova

I1 and I2 are a small measure over torah-wlc-macula (now Torah only; the rest of the Bible when converted) for 12. Biblical, Mishnaic and Modern Hebrew compared (the dating debate). The narrative/speech split comes from tools/macula/src/prag.rs. I3 is text for chapter 12.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5281/zenodo.2546801

@inproceedings{bijl2019probabilistic,
  title = {{A Probabilistic Approach to Syntactic Variation in Biblical Hebrew}},
  author = {Bijl, Etienne P. van de and Kingham, Cody and Peursen, Wido van and Bhulai, Sandjai},
  booktitle = {Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)},
  year = {2019},
  doi = {10.5281/zenodo.2546801},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2546801}
}

References

18 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

1. Al-Anzi, F.S. and D. M. AbuZeina (2016). “A Survey of Markov Chain Models in Linguistics Applications”. In: Computer Science and Information Technology, pp. 53–62. find
2. Anderson, T.W. and L.A. Goodman (1956). Statistical Inference About Markov Chains, p. 92. find
3. Bijl, Etienne Pieter van de and Cody Kingham (2018). Analysis Notebook: A Probabilistic Approach to Linguistic Variation and Change in Biblical Hebrew. https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/ETCBC/ Probabilistic_Language_Change/blob/master/ analysis.ipynb. ↗
4. Boxma, O.J. (2002). Stochastic Performance Modelling. *Table 1: Book Clusters By Feature and Domain* *Table 2: Book Clusters with Averaged Distances* Chambers, J.K. and Natalie Schilling, eds. (2013). The handbook of language variation and change. eng. Second Edition. isbn: 9780470659946. find
5. Davismoon, S. and J. Eccles (2010). “Combining Musical Constraints with Markov Transition Probabilities to Improve the Generation of Creative Musical Structures”. In: Applications of Evolutionary Computation, pp. 361–370. find
6. Dyer, M. et al. (2006). “Markov Chain comparison”. In: Probability Surveys 3, pp. 89–111. find
7. Ehrensvärd, Ian (1997). “Once again: The problem of dating biblical Hebrew”. In: Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament: An International Journal of Nordic Theology 11, pp. 29–40. find
8. Eskhult, Mats (2005). “Traces of Linguistic Development in Biblical Hebrew”. In: Hebrew Studies 46, pp. 353–370. find
9. Hornkohl, Aaron (2013). “Biblical Hewbrew: Periodization”. In: Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics 1, pp. 315–325. – (2017). “All Is Not Lost: Linguistic Periodization in the Face of Textual and Literary Pluriformity”. In: Advances in Biblical Hebrew Linguistics, p. 53. find
10. Hurvitz, Avi (1998). “Can Biblical texts be dated linguistically? Chronological perspectives in the historical study of Biblical Hebrew”. In: Congress Volume Oslo 1998 80, pp. 143–160. find
11. Leon-Garcia, A. (2008). Probability, Statistics, and Random Processes for Electrical Engineering. 3rd ed. Pearson, p. 700. find
12. Niccacci, Alviero (1994). “On the Hebrew Verbal System”. In: ed. by Robert D. Bergen, pp. 117–137. find
13. Pollard, D. (2015). “Total variation distance between measures”. In: url: http://www.stat.yale.edu/ ~pollard / Courses / 607 . spring05 / handouts / Totalvar.pdf. ↗
14. Roorda, Dirk (2018). “Coding the Hebrew Bible”. In: Research Data Journal for the Humanities and Social Sciences July. find
15. Roorda, Dirk and Martijn Naaijer (2018). Parallels. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1305272. ↗
16. Sáenz-Badillos, Angel (1993). A History of the Hebrew Language. Cambridge University. find
17. Young, Ian (2005). “Biblical Texts Cannot Be Dated Linguistically”. In: Hebrew Studies 46, pp. 341–351. find
18. Young, Ian and Robert Rezetko (2008). Linguistic Dating of Biblical Texts. Vol. 1. Equinox. find

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/hbo-2019-bijl-probabilistic-approach-syntactic-variation-biblical/