The 22lookup program began as an experiment I crafted to see if I could use a computer to help me learn Talmud. I often found myself doing look-ups up in various dictionaries and being frustrated at not being able to find the words. I didn't remove the prefix. The infix letter was not added. The suffix was not right. I was looking for Aramaic words in a Hebrew dictionary. The list goes on. And verbs…
My programming efforts then moved on to searches. Searching for a particular string in Shas and being told the search string may be found in Sanhedrin Daf 39b is helpful but once one opens the Masechta to that Blatt (which is quite lengthy), it may take quite a while to find the search string. To avoid this issue, I instructed the computer program to return not only the the daf, but to return the location of the target string as a percentage of the way down the page. Additionally.
Because there are so many options and capabilities of 22lookup, it was decided to go "old school" as far as the man-machine interface. Thus, the user is presented with a command line and there he/she will enter a command such as "blatt chullin 59a" to obtain a word-by-word print out of that amud. If the user types "BLATT chullin 59a", then the user will see an elucidated daf explained in a similar fashion to the ArtScroll Schottenstein gemaras. Naturally, there are no elucidated versions of the Rif
Part 1: The Insight and Initial Development
The 22lookup program began as an experiment I crafted to see if I could use a computer to help me learn Talmud. I often found myself doing look-ups up in various dictionaries and being frustrated at not being able to find the words. I didn't remove the prefix. The infix letter was not added. The suffix was not right. I was looking for Aramaic words in a Hebrew dictionary. The list goes on. And verbs… forget about it!! I tried typing a few pages from a dictionary into a specialized program that I designed and very quickly it was apparent to me that my program could do more than provide single definitions… it could provide multiple definitions for every word on a page.
I found that given a large database in the computer, any source text would work with this system. Therefore, whatever source texts I was able to obtain could be passed through the section of the program that matched the dictionary database meanings and the result would be a word-by-word listing of the source text word, its location on the source page, its meaning, and the location of the definition in the relevant dictionary. This capability has been implemented for Shas Bavli, Rashi on Shas Bavli, Tosfos on Shas Bavli, Tanach, Chumash Rashi, the Rosh, The Rif, the Maharsha, the Netziv, and more with definitions from Jastrow, Frank and other dictinaries. Because the 22lookup program is very modular, additional source texts will be added over time in response to user's requests. While this is not a translation (i.e., a targeted phrase describing a source word designed to convey the meaning of the word in its current usage), the definitions provided may be found to be very helpful when trying to ascertain an understanding of the text.