Last week I suggested that imagery can be subjective, varying from culture to culture. Here’s another example. In antiquity, for a person to be “fat” was a good thing, the word essentially representing the opposite of “scrawny.” Every day, modern America produces something like twice the calories that its population needs to thrive, so many…
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Last week, I presented some theory about gender (first here and then here). Recent posts (from Damian Caruana on the lack of feminine language for Jesus, for example) show the issue is still on people’s minds. To complement my theory-oriented introduction last week, here are three examples to think about: Lord. Most modern English speakers…
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In response to my recent post about idioms, and, in particular, the translation “lifted up his eyes,” Bob MacDonald suggests that “Eyes lifted up or eyes downcast are both indicative of the mood of the subject. They seem to me to be inherently material and literal in a good way.” Whether or not that makes…
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A recent post by Nick Norelli cites Cicero, who translated not “word for word, but [by preserving] the character and energy of the language throughout.” A response by John C. Poirier suggests that the NIV’s “dynamic translation” (his scare quotes) of 1 Cor 12:28 misses the point when it translates dunamis as “those who do…
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In French, they say “to burn a red light” (bruler un feu rouge), which is “to run a red light” in English. Both phrases are idioms. One way to look at idioms is as a multi-word words. Unlike imagery, idioms don’t get their meanings from their parts. Other examples in English include, “play it by…
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I think it might be informative to look at how av (usually translated “father”) and its plural, avot, work in Modern Hebrew. Even though we can’t directly conclude anything about ancient Hebrew or Greek from Modern Hebrew, we can learn more about how gender — at least potentially — works in human language. In no…
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There seem to be times when the translation of a text becomes the text, at least emotionally, if not rationally. This creates a translation dilemma, because it’s hard to fix a bad translation that everyone thinks is the original text. Here are three examples: The “jubilee year,” the 50th year that commemorates the end of…
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A quick note about “they” in colloquial English. It’s used for two purposes: (1) when the speaker doesn’t know the gender of the referent; and (2) when the speaker doesn’t care about the gender of the referent. For example, if I see a cell phone in the aisle of a plane as I’m exiting, I…
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Grammatical and Real-World Gender, Part II Earlier, I wrote about the difference between grammatical gender and real-world (or semantic) gender. I noted that the former doesn’t always indicate the latter. For example, personne in French is grammatically feminine but semantically inclusive. As promised, here’s a little bit about how to tease the two kinds of…
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Thanks to Dr. Jim West for bringing an essay by Professor Philip Davies to my attention. In it, Davies claims: Ethics develop in a society where individuals have to make their own moral judgments about intrinsic goodness. […] [T]he Bible cannot serve a modern democracy as a moral guide — unless of course we decide…
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Recent posts from my Ancient Wisdom, Modern Lives:
