Words that Mean More than One Thing
I think it can helpful to look at familiar English words as a way of understanding ancient words and how best to translate them.
In this case, we’ll look at one way words can mean more than one thing.
“Cash” in English
One meaning of the English word “cash” is actual physical money — dollar bills, 5′s, 10′s, etc.
As credit cards became more widespread, “cash” was used in opposition to “credit.” Two ways to pay for something were by credit card or with actual bills. The second one was called “cash.”
Because there was something more immediate about “cash,” it came to represent anything that wasn’t credit. So paying by check was one way of paying cash (even though “cash” could also be the opposite of “check”). Paying with a debit card is also different than credit, so that’s also “cash.” In this sense, too, “cash” (debit card) is the opposite of “cash” (physical money).
“Cash on delivery” (“C.O.D.”) now just means payment on delivery, and is the opposite of pre-paid. You can sometimes use a credit card to pay for something C.O.D.
Most English speakers don’t have any difficulty understanding “cash” in these various contexts.
Sarx in Greek
The same sort of thing happened with the Greek word sarx, variously translated “flesh,” “human nature,” “sinful nature,” “humanity,” etc.
The trick is that the word means more than one thing.
In this regard, it’s like “cash” in English, because sarx does mean “flesh,” but also one particular aspect of “flesh,” and also “flesh” in contrast to various other things.
Even though the English word “flesh” also means more than one thing — think of “human flesh,” “the flesh trade,” “flesh and bones,” etc. — we don’t have anything that migrated in meaning the way sarx did. That’s why it’s difficult to translate.
I think that understanding this basic fact about words is essential to formulating a plan to translate them accurately.
What other polysemantic (“having more than one meaning”) words can you think of?
First Things First: Stress, Focus, and Biblical Hebrew Word Order
The importance of word order in Biblical Hebrew recently came up regarding Genesis 1:1, and in particular how we know that that verse answers the question “when?”
Here’s some more information and some additional examples.
An English Diversion
In English, stressing different words changes the implications of a sentence.
For example:
Example 1.
- This is my friend.
- This is my friend.
- This is my friend.
Sentence 1.1 is neutral, and might be used simply to introduce someone.
But 1.2 has addition implications, and it doesn’t make sense as a neutral introduction. But it does make sense in more narrow contexts. For example, it could answer the question, “whose friend is this?” And it makes sense if, because of context, there is already a sense that this is someone else’s friend. In both scenarios — specifically answering a question and clarifying an unasked question — it’s convenient to say that 1.2 “answers the question: whose friend this is?”
Example 1.3 cannot be used to answer the question “whose friend is this?” (Try it: -”Whose friend is this?” -”This is my friend.”) But it can be used if it’s already clear that this person has a relationship to me, but the nature of that relationship is not yet established. And, again, this could be in response to a specific question (e.g, “and how do you know each other?”), an implication, or some other context that causes the speaker to highlight the nature of the relationship.
One particularly interesting consequence of this is that stressing a word sets up alternative scenarios in the mind of the hearer. When I say, “this is my friend,” an English speaker automatically considers other possibilities: this is my enemy; this is my lover; etc.
| Example 2. | |
| 1. | We have landed in LGA. (This is the safe statement.) |
| 2. | We have landed in LGA. (This is risky.) |
This is why “airplanese” stresses the words that are normally unstressed in English. For example, “we have landed in LaGuardia airport.” This phrasing only sets up one other possibility in the mind of English speakers who hear the sentence: “we have not landed in LaGuardia airport.” But the more usual sentence, “we have landed in LaGuardia airport” makes people consider other undesirable possibilities, like “we have crashed into LaGuardia airport.”
| Example 3. | |
| 1. | I killed Mary with a knife. (This is the safe answer.) |
| 2. | I killed Mary with a knife. (This is incriminating.) |
Similarly, a witness at a murder trial might be asked, “how did you kill Mary?” The safe answer is “I killed Mary with a knife.” The dangerous answer is, “I killed Mary with a knife,” because that response assumes other pairs of people and weapons to which “I killed” might apply. Just changing the sentential stress is tantamount to admitting to additional murders.
Hebrew
Biblical Hebrew uses the pre-verbal sentence-initial position much the way we use sentential stress in English. This is how we know that Genesis 1:1 answers the question “when?” not “what?” or “who?” — the first word is breishit, “in the beginning.” A spoken-English translation of Genesis 1:1 might be “God created heaven and Earth in the beginning.”
Further Examples
Another example comes from Genesis 3:16-17. The first words of Genesis 3:16 are el ha-isha amar, “to the-woman [God] said.” This deviation from normal word order, like Example 3, has the effect of focusing “the woman,” as if to say, “this is what God told the woman.” The Hebrew reader naturally wonders, “okay. And what did God tell the man?” Genesis 3:17 answers that question, using the word order ul’adam amar…, “and-to-Adam [God] said…” — that is, “and God told Adam…”
We see the same thing in Genesis 45:22. The verse has two parts. The first begins, “to all [of the brothers] [Joseph] gave….” and the second one, “to Benjamin [Joseph] gave…” The point is to contrast Benjamin with the other brothers.
Hosea 5:7 reads badonai bagadu ki vanim zarim yaldu, “God they-betrayed when/for children alien they-bore.” Again, the point is expressed in English with stress: “they betrayed God by fathering illegitimate children.” Hosea is emphasizing the connection between human action and the divine.
All of these nuances come to light when we take Hebrew word order into account.
Q&A: How do you work, O vocative?
From the About page:
As a grammar lesson, I tried parsing Psalm 117. There is a possible usage of a ‘he’ marking the use of the vocative (BDB 1.i) but the article is missing on the first colon kol goyim and present on the second shavxuhu col ha’umim. It seems to me that ‘praise the Lord all ye nations’ is different from ‘praise the Lord, all nations’. While both may be vocative, English vocative would be ‘praise the Lord O nations all’, and English suggests preaching rather than invitation if the you or ye is added. What do you think about the use of ‘he’ as signaling the vocative and then the problem of expressing this in English?
As you identify with your two-part question at the end, there are two parts to translating the vocative (as there are with most matters of translation): (1) understanding how it works in Hebrew; and (2) figuring out how to do the same thing in English.
Part 1 is comparatively easy. Part 2 is harder.
First, for those who don’t know, “vocative” technically refers to a specific noun form that is used in addressing someone (or something). For example, in Russian, bog means “God,” but if you’re talking to God, you use the word boge instead. That’s the vocative. We don’t have a true vocative in English, but when we really need it, we can use the prefix “O,” as in, “O God….” (The Russian case is complicated. Poke around in various grammars and you’ll learn two things: Russian has a vocative case and Russian doesn’t have a vocative case. But it does. Really.)
To the best of my knowlege, Hebrew also doesn’t have a vocative. And the heh does not serve this fucntion.
Rather, nominative nouns in Hebrew are used for address. So elohim is “God” both as a form of reference and as a form of address. Conveniently, the verb form in Hebrew (usually) makes it clear when someone is being addressed rather than talked about. In Psalm 117, the verbs hal’lu and shabchuhu are both plural imperative, indicating that a group is being addressed. In other languages, the addressees might be in the vocative case.
In addition, both definite and indefinite nouns can be addressed. We see both in Psalm 117. First “all nations” are addressed, then “all the peoples.” It’s not clear why one should be definite and the other not, but this doesn’t affect the vocative nature of the phrases. (As a guess, the heh was omitted from the first half of the line to make it sound better in ways that we no longer understand.)
Expressing the vocative is tricky in English. Sometimes we can make do without any marking. For example, “God, save me!” is clear and grammatical in English.
Other times — for reasons that are not clear — the vocative interpretation is unavailable in English. For example, Psalm 103 begins with a command to “my soul” to praise the Lord. But “Praise the Lord, my soul” doesn’t quite sound right. It’s unclear. (Also, nefesh doesn’t mean “soul,” but that’s for another time.)
Two partial solutions present themselves in English.
The first is the archaic “O.” For example, “Praise the Lord, O my soul” for Psalm 103 is clearer. But it sounds archaic, because we don’t use “O” in normal speech in English. (“O police officer, please don’t give me a ticket…”)
The other solution in English is to use the pronoun “you.” This, too, is stilted, and only works sometimes. “Praise the Lord, you my soul” sounds ridiculous in English.
On the other hand, this second solution works marginally well in Psalm 117. “Praise the Lord, all you nations” is a little bit clearer (to my ear) than “Praise the Lord, all nations.”
Still, both “O” and “you” turn what should be a simple sentence into an overly formal or archaic one. But to leave them both out sometimes leaves an unclear sentence.
The problem isn’t just the lack of a vocative in English, by the way. It’s the combined lack of a vocative and clear imperative.
So Psalm 103, Psalm 117, and many of the other imperatives cause problems for the translator.
I think that these vocatives/imperatives — so simple in Hebrew and so convoluted in English — also serve to remind us how complex translation can be.
Allah and the Type-Token Distinction
As has been widely reported recently, Malaysians are grappling with how to say “god.”
The issue is that the word most Malay speakers use, allah, refers not only to “god” in general but in particular to what we call “Allah” in English, that is, the Muslim god of that name. (For the blow-by-blow, start here for background, then see here for a recent court ruling reversing an original decision and allowing anyone to use the word allah. And see here for a report of massive violence against churches for using the word allah in Christian contexts. See also here for the court’s suspension of its reversal of its original ban.)
The problem essentially stems from type-token conflation, and not for the first time.
Essentially, there is a category (“type”) that in English we usually spell with the lower-case-g word “god,” and for which we can equally use the word “deity.”
In addition to the category, there is what the category contains (“tokens”). One example of such a token is what we usually write with the upper-case-G word “God” in English.
The distinction is usually pretty clear. For example, the type “Greek god” contains the tokens “Zeus” and “Athena,” among others.
But monotheism involves a type that has exactly one token, so it’s pretty easy to use the type and token interchangeably. We do this in English when we talk about “praying to God.” Translations even stumble sometimes, prefering the upper-case-G “God” where the lower-case version makes more sense, as in “our God” for “our god.”
We see the same interchangeability in the Hebrew of the Old Testament. The word elohim is used both for the God of the Hebrews and for any other god. And the Greek theos, represents variously “God” or “god” (or “goddess”).
Similarly, the word allah (before Islam merely one Arabian god of many) is now the Muslim name for “God” as well as the type “god.”
If nothing else, I think we see here that a solid theoretical framework, while essential for translation, is only part of the story. (I don’t think the end to the crisis in Malaysia is a campaign explaining the nature of type-token conflation.)
And I wonder if the authors of the Bible similarly debated the words elohim and theos.
Too Much Emphasis
It seems that the default explanation for an unknown grammatical feature is to assume, often wrongly, that it is “emphatic.” Here are four examples, three from Hebrew (skip to them: one, two, three) and one from Greek (skip to it here).
The Examples
The Infix Nun
From time to time, a nun will appear between a verb and its pronominal objective ending. For example, in Psalm 72:15, we find y’varachenhu. Breaking down the verb form, we find the prefix y’- representing third-person singular future; the verb varach, “bless”; and the suffix -hu for “him.” So far, the verb means “he will bless him.” But there’s also an added -en- in the middle. That’s the infixed nun, commonly called the “nun emphatic.”
Because nuns are frequently replaced by a dagesh in Biblical Hebrew, it is more common to find the “nun emphatic” represented by nothing more than a dagesh. Probably the best known example is in the Priestly Benediction from Numbers 6:24-26. The last verb of Numbers 6:25 is vichuneka, with a dagesh in the final kaf representing the “nun empahtic” that dropped out.
But there is no evidence anywhere to suggest that this nun has emphatic force.
The Infinitive Absolute
A much more common Hebrew construction is the “infinitive absolute” in conjunction with a conjugated verb form. For example, in Genesis 2:17 we find mot tamut, which the KJV notes in a footnote is literally “dying thou shalt die.” Based on the (wrong) assumption that this doubling of verb forms is emphatic, the KJV translates “thou shalt surely die” here. (As it happens, this Hebraism is preserved in the LXX thanatu apothaneisthe, “by death die.”)
But not only is there no evidence that this construction is emphatic, there is evidence that it is not. In Genesis 3:4 the snake tries to convince the women to eat from the forbidden tree; he (it?) reassures her that lo mot t’mutun. Obviously this doesn’t mean “you will not surely die.” It just means “you will not die.”
The Lengthened Imperative
Frequently a verb form will have two imperatives: a shorter one, essentially the future without the prefix, and a longer one with an additional heh at the end. For example, from titen (“you will give”) we have both ten in Genesis 14:21 and t’nah in Genesis 30:26. Some grammars, such a Gesenius (wrongly, in my opinion), suggest that the latter is “give!” Again, there’s no evidence for an emphatic reading in these verb forms. (The forms are also not limited to the imperative, as we see in the continuation of Genesis 30:26, with elecha for elech.)
The Greek Emphatic Pronouns
The forth example comes from Greek, which has two sets of 1st- and 2nd-person pronouns. For example, “my” is either mou or emou. The latter form is called “emphatic” because it is widely assumed to convey particular emphasis. Once again, though, there is nothing to suggest that the longer forms are necessarily more emphatic than the shorter ones. (Bill Mounce has a post — also available here — where he similarly notes that sometimes the “emphatic forms [...] are significant, but when they are objects of prepositions, evidently not.” In other words, he notes a case where the “emphatic” forms are not emphatic.)
Summary
What all four of these cases have in common is that the supposedly emphatic forms are longer than the ordinary ones. I think there has been a general if misguided assumption that longer words are more emphatic that shorter ones. At one level, it seems reasonable. And there are even times when it’s true (I give some examples here). But it’s not a general principal.
I think we have to rethink all of these “emphatic” forms with an eye toward figuring out what they really represent.
Do All Men Experience Pain in Childbirth?
If we’re not careful, our Bible translations will wrongly alienate 51% of the English-speaking population, and perhaps offend even more. The issue (which has been addressed frequently — recently by me here and here, by Clayboy, Bill Mounce, and many others) is whether (orwhen) the English word “men” includes both men and women.
In my dialect, the answer is almost never. When I read or hear “men,” the word excludes women.
I’m told by people like Bill Mounce that in other dialects “men” is perfectly inclusive. So I have a question to the speakers of these dialects. Does “men” include the “women” here:
All men experience pain in childbirth.
More specifically, which (if any) of these make sense and mean what they clearly should?
1. All men experience pain in childbirth — women directly and their husbands vicariously.
2. Unlike the animals, all men experience pain in childbirth.
3. Unlike the gods, all men experience pain in childbirth.
4. Because they ate from the wrong tree, God punished men with pain in childbirth.
5a. In a rare alliance in the battle between man and machine, machines help men endure the pain of childbirth.
5b. In a rare alliance in the battle between man and machine, machine helps man endure the pain of childbirth.
6. Man experiences pain in childbirth both vicariously and directly.
7a. Unlike the animals, man experiences pain in childbirth.
7b. Unlike the gods, man experiences pain in childbirth.
What do you think?
Behold! Little words mean a lot more than you might think.
It turns out that “um” means something in English, and we can learn about translation by looking at that short word.
The following hypothetical conversation between a shopper and a sales associate at a book store demonstrates:
Shopper: “Where can I find a complete bilingual text of Aristotle?”
Clerk: “Aristotle who?”
Shopper: “Um, the Greek philosopher?”
The last line, in colloquial American English, does two things. The last three words answer the question. But the first word, “um,” demonstrates disdain. The shopper is mocking the sales associate for his or her ignorance. (Incidentally, this happened to me at Barnes and Noble a couple of years ago. The staffer at the customer service desk didn’t know who Aristotle was. I did my best to hide my disappointment in our school system.)
This short word “um” demonstrates an important way words can work in language: they can add a flavor or nuance to a conversation. And as a guess, most English speakers are unable to articulate how “um” works in their native language, so we also see how complex and subtle these nuance-words can be.
I’m almost sure that na in Hebrew was such a word, and that “please” or “pray” don’t convey the same thing in English.
I think hinei in Hebrew and idou in Greek also contributed primariliy to the tone of a sentence, in a way that is not captured by “behold,” “see,” “see here,” and so forth.
So here’s a challenge: What do you think hinei and/or idou contributed?
Q&A: Is Greek Different Than All Other Languages?
Also from the about page:
Is it true that in Greek they didn’t have multiple words that meant the same thing or one word that meant multiple things? More clearly — that every word had only one meaning and each thing/idea had only one word for it. Thanks!
Thanks for the question, which I think is important for two reasons, not just because of the details of the question but also for the more general implication.
The short answer is no. There is no truth to the idea that there was a one-to-one match between Greek words and meanings/things/ideas.
More generally, I think it’s a common error to view Greek as fundamentally different than other languages. Ancient Greek is a human language like any other, and what’s true of languages in general is also true of Greek in particular. This is one reason that the linguistics revolution of the last century is so exciting for Bible scholarship and translation in particular. Even without looking at Greek, we know a lot about the language. Of course, this is not to say that Greek doesn’t have to be studied in detail, but linguistics guides what we look for, because we already have a sense of what’s possible and what’s not.
In this case, no language has the one-to-one mapping you mention, so in particular Greek does not.
Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?
Clayboy has a short post in which he describes an experiment he ran. He told an audience, “I like to ask my fellow men to stand.” Only the men stood.
This is pretty convincing evidence that, at least where he was, “men” doesn’t mean “men and women.”
I wonder if there is any context in which the women would have stood, too.
From AGS-
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