With the completion of the Westminster Hebrew Morphology, the next logical step in linguistic analysis of the Hebrew Bible is syntax. Each separate sentence in the Hebrew Bible is identified and separated into its component parts (constituent analysis). In order to maximize consistency and objectivity of analysis, the computer is taught to do the analysis by giving it a complex set of grammar rules to use. The resulting database can be used for many different purposes, including Bible translation.
For this reason, the Groves Center is partnering with the Asia Bible Society to build a new generation of translator tool, where the computer actually proposes translations to the translator. An essential element of this tool is a “map” between biblical Hebrew syntactic structures and the syntactic structures of the target language – in this case, Mandarin Chinese.
The relationships between the parts of a clause can be represented by a “tree diagram,” where the “root” of the tree is at the top and the “leaves” are at the bottom. The tree of a clause is the “interpretation” of that sentence by the analyst. Differences between interpretations can often be seen by the differences in how the interpreter “connects the dots.”
