About Beth Karmo

The name

ܒܝܬ ܟܪܡܐ, Beth Karmo, is the house of the vineyard. Karmo is a vineyard; in Arabic the same root gives karam, generosity. A house of the vineyard is a place where things are given away.

The aim

Syriac carried the hymns of Ephrem and the homilies of Isaac out of Edessa and across Asia. Fewer people read it each year, and the books that hold it survive as scans that few can open. Beth Karmo exists to preserve those texts and to make them open to everyone, with the tools of our own time: the Syriac in the script you know, the sounds beside it, and the meaning in English, French and Arabic. It is not a journal. It is a shelf.

How a text is made

A printed edition is photographed, usually by Archive.org. The pages are read by machine, with models trained on Syriac print by Beth Mardutho. Where the edition points every vowel, the transliteration is derived from those points by rule, and it follows the pronunciation of the edition: Eastern for Isaac, so Alāhā rather than Aloho. Translations are drafted from the Syriac and go up as they are written, one section at a time, before anyone has checked them line by line. A text with no translation yet is not broken; it shows the layers it has.

Everything here is a work in progress. The reading, the transliteration and the translations are all being corrected as people read them, and the site says so rather than waiting until they are finished. If a line reads wrongly, it probably is wrong: use the correct mark.

Machine reading is not perfect. Expect a stray mark here and there, and never trust a Western numeral in the text; page numbers come from the scans, not from the reading.

Your script

Syriac is one alphabet written in three hands. The books here are set in the hand of their edition, but you can read any of them in East Syriac, Serto or Estrangela from the bar above the text. The letters change; the text does not.

Corrections

Readers are the proofreaders of this shelf. The correct mark beside any line opens a form with that line filled in; a plain form covers everything else. Each correction is checked against the printed page before it is applied, and the machine reading is kept beside the corrected text, so every change can be traced.

Requests

The shelf grows by request. If there is an edition you want to read here, ask for it, with a link to a scan if you have one. Public domain editions come first, because they can be published in full.

Reuse

The texts are public domain. The reading models are CC BY 4.0. The scans come from Archive.org. The faces are Beth Mardutho’s Meltho family, free to use. The transliterations and translations on this site are new work and free to reuse with credit.