I am new to diff. I have used it in the past. But I want to know, can one use diff to track differences between two files in Hebrew? I am wanting to compare Biblical Hebrew files that have vowel points and accents.
1 Answers
I am not aware of any "diff" (file comparison) tool that is capable of producing reasonable output when run on Biblical Hebrew.
What I would advise is to first transform the Biblical Hebrew into a representation that can be "diffed" and then run a "diff" program on it. This is what I have done when I have needed to do such a "diff."
For instance I transform the 1st 3 words of Genesis,
בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית בָּרָ֣א אֱלֹהִ֑ים
Into the following (one word per bulleted list item)
- v,·,:,r,‥,α,$,·sh,i,[ti],y,τ
- v,·,a,r,a,⅃,α
- α,:∵,l,o,h,i,⅄,y,m.
My diffable-pointed-hebrew GitHub repo contains a Python program that performs such a transformation. It outputs a JSON file containing:
- first, a table of metadata describing the transformation
- then, a list of lines, where lines are lists of words, where words are strings that were separated by spaces in the input file.
See sample-input.txt & sample-output.json in that repo.
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