A.3. The Sample of Word Pairs

The reader is referred to Section 2, task (iii), for a general description of the two samples. As mentioned there, the significance test was carried out only for the second list, set forth in Table 2. Note that the personalities each may have several appellations (names), and there are different ways of designating dates. The sample of word pairs (w, w') was constructed by taking each name of each personality and pairing it with each designation of that personality's date. Thus when the dates are permuted, the total number of word pairs in the sample may (and usually will) vary. 

We have used the following rules with regard to Hebrew spelling: 

  1. For words in Hebrew, we always chose what is called the grammatical orthography--"ktiv dikduki." See the entry "ktiv" in Even-Shoshan's dictionary. (EVEN-SHOSHAN, A. (1989). A New Dictionary of the Hebrew Language. Kiriath Sefer, Jerusalem). 
  2. Names and designations taken from the Pentateuch are spelled as in the original. 
  3. Yiddish is written using Hebrew letters; thus, there was no need to transliterate Yiddish names. 
  4. In transliterating foreign names into Hebrew, the letter "alef-à" is often used as a mater lectionis; for example, "Luzzatto" may be written "åèöåì" or "åèàöåì." In such cases we used both forms.

In designating dates, we used three fixed variations of the format of the Hebrew date. For example, for the 19th of Tishri, we used éøùú è'é, éøùú è'éá and éøùúá è'é. The 15th and 16th of any Hebrew month can be denoted as ä'é or å'è and å'é or æ'è, respectively. We used both alternatives.

The list of appellations for each personality was provided by Professor S. Z. Havlin, of the Department of Bibliography and Librarianship at Bar Ilan University, on the basis of a computer search of the "Responsa" database at that university.

Our method of rank ordering of ELS's based on (x, y, z)-perturbations requires that words have at least five letters to apply the perturbations. In addition, we found that for words with more than eight letters, the number of (x, y, z)-perturbed ELS's which actually exist for such words was too small to satisfy our criteria for applying the corrected distance. Thus the words in our list are restricted in length to the range 5-8. The resulting sample consists of 298 word pairs (see Table 2).

A.4 The Text

We used the standard, generally accepted text of Genesis known as the Textus Receptus. One widely available edition is that of the Koren Publishing Company in Jerusalem. The Koren text is precisely the same as that used by us.

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