What happened to this majority of the Jewish population at the time? Did they simply disappear, or have they left some tracks waiting to be uncovered after more than two millennia? Seven hundred years after that exile, Josephus wrote, “The Ten Tribes are beyond the Euphrates until now and are an immense multitude and not to be estimated in numbers.” The search for them has fascinated scholars and laypeople alike, and when we heard rumors of a people with Jewish customs who have never been studied living in distant Kyrgyzstan, we felt compelled to investigate. ![]() The Ten Tribes, exiled from the Northern Kingdom of Eretz Yisrael close to 2,700 years ago, about 150 years before the destruction of the First Beis Hamikdash, are one of the world’s greatest bafflements. Maybe this time, Kyrgyzstan - a mountainous, landlocked former Soviet republic, bordered by Uzbekistan on the west, Tajikistan on the south, and China on the east - would give a clue to solve the Jewish world’s greatest mystery. Could this information help us in our own long-standing quest into the fate of the Ten Tribes, an enigma that has enchanted so many Jewish merchant adventurers and explorers over the centuries? True, so many have gone before us and come away disappointed but still, we never like to pass up a lead. ![]() I plan to update it to a newer version soon and that update should bring in a bunch of new word senses for many words (or more accurately, lemma).E’d heard about an old local shofar-maker in the remote Central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan - a talk-show host who was killed by Muslims for expressing his belief in his Jewish roots - and how some ancient Jewish customs are still practiced by the nomads of the region. Special thanks to the contributors of the open-source code that was used in this project: the UBY project (mentioned above), and express.js.Ĭurrently, this is based on a version of wiktionary which is a few years old. I simply extracted the Wiktionary entries and threw them into this interface! So it took a little more work than expected, but I'm happy I kept at it after the first couple of blunders. The researchers have parsed the whole of Wiktionary and other sources, and compiled everything into a single unified resource. That's when I stumbled across the UBY project - an amazing project which needs more recognition. However, after a day's work wrangling it into a database I realised that there were far too many errors (especially with the part-of-speech tagging) for it to be viable for Word Type.įinally, I went back to Wiktionary - which I already knew about, but had been avoiding because it's not properly structured for parsing. This caused me to investigate the 1913 edition of Websters Dictionary - which is now in the public domain. ![]() I initially started with WordNet, but then realised that it was missing many types of words/lemma (determiners, pronouns, abbreviations, and many more). The dictionary is based on the amazing Wiktionary project by wikimedia. And since I already had a lot of the infrastructure in place from the other two sites, I figured it wouldn't be too much more work to get this up and running. I had an idea for a website that simply explains the word types of the words that you search for - just like a dictionary, but focussed on the part of speech of the words. Both of those projects are based around words, but have much grander goals. ![]() For those interested in a little info about this site: it's a side project that I developed while working on Describing Words and Related Words.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |