🚀 go-pugleaf

On Fri, 19 Nov 2004 20:07:15 GMT, Norman Miller <spamthis@die.invalid>
spake thusly:

>In article <aa4rp0pjpl5q7ttqs20n7sdebr7c77n0na@4ax.com>, Opus- says...
>
>> On Thu, 18 Nov 2004 19:45:05 GMT, Norman Miller <spamthis@die.invalid>
>> spake thusly:
<snip only for brevity>

This all illustrates inherent problems with translations. 

How can bible translators be sure of what they are translating? Do
they know the colloquialisms of the period?

 To illustrate the difficulty, take a look at Shakespears Hamlet. In
the third act of Hamlet, just after the famous "To be, or not to be"
soliloquy, Hamlet says to Ophelia, "Get thee to a nunnery." 
In Elizabethan England, nunnery was common slang for a brothel.
Does Hamlet want Ophelia to go to a convent or to a bordello? Either
meaning fits the context. Hamlet could be worried that Ophelia was
likely to become "a breeder of sinners" and should remove herself from
the temptations of the world by withdrawing into religion. Or �
considering the presence of words such as harlot, and bawd in the
immediate context, and considering that Hamlet decries Ophelia's
"wantonness" � it is plausible that Hamlet, in disgust, was telling
Ophelia to join the world's oldest profession. 

See how the meaning can be muddied by time, and this is WITHOUT
translating from a long lost language
Now try translating from an ancient language and with no knowledge of
colloquial terms of the time.

 Part of the problem derives from the fact that Hebrew and Aramaic are
written with a defective alphabet, i.e., an alphabet in which most
vowels are not written. It was only very late in the history of Hebrew
Bible-making (late fifth to ninth centuries) that vowel points (the
so-called "jots and tittles") came to be added to the consonantal
texts. Unfortunately, there is no way to know that the correct vowels
were supplied. As a matter of fact, during the ninth and tenth
centuries, there was a long-lived feud between two families of Jewish
scholars, the ben Ashers and the ben Naphtalis, over the vocalization
of the scriptures. Unfortunately, the ben Ashers beat out the ben
Naphtalis so completely that almost all history of them has been
expunged, and we are left with a false sense of security concerning
the apparent uniformity of vowel points in the Hebrew text today. 

It is easy to see what a mess we would have in English if we did not
indicate vowels in writing. If we came across the two-letter word by,
for example, how would we know if the word intended was "by," "bay,"
"boy," "buoy," "buy," or "obey"? Of course the context � if there were
one � would help in figuring out vocalizations and meanings. But what
if in the case of by, the real word intended were a rare word such as
"bey"? 

The difficulties caused by the lack of vowel letters in Hebrew are
compounded by the unbelievable number of hapax legomena, words that
occur only once in the entire Bible. A quick sampling of the Hebrew
and Aramaic vocabulary of the Old Testament reveals that there are
more than 1,500 words (approximately twenty percent of the entire Old
Testament vocabulary!) used only once. These include the word
dibyonim, rendered as "dove's dung" in the King James, but that
Young's Analytical Concordance to the Bible assures us means "roasted
chick pea" � even though the New English Bible translates it as
"locust-beans," and the New International Version renders it "seed
pods"! 

Imagine the perplexity of a Bible scholar � to say nothing of a true
believer � coming across a sentence such as "Unless thou puttest the
shnurq upon the altar before thou givest up the shew-bread, thou shalt
surely die." Assuming that the word shnurq appears in no other
context, we can conclude only that a shnurq is probably something
smaller than a hippopotamus. The frightful uncertainty resulting from
not knowing what to put on the altar could force a true believer to
give up giving up shew-bread altogether! 

In other words, do you really know what you believe in?

-- 
jbuchy@hotmail.com 
(Jim, single dad to Lesleigh [Autistic] 04/20/94)

"What, Me Worry?" A. E. Newman

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