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…
Read more
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…
Read more
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…
Read more
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…
Read more
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…
Read more
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…
Read more
A pizzeria in Eilat, Israel, offers plain pizza and “pizza with fungus,” according to the large English menu at the restaurant. Of course they meant not “fungus” but “mushrooms.” Unfortunately, the modern Hebrew for both English words are the same. What went wrong here is mostly a matter of connotation. While mushrooms are indeed a…
Read more
Scot McKnight suggests that, “The sweeping conclusion is this: unless you can read the original languages, you should avoid making public pronouncements about which translation is best.” (emphasis his). This is yet another example of a fundamental dilemma in translation: the only people capable of doing translation don’t need it. More importantly, the only people…
Read more
A post by Polycarp on his blog calls into question John Piper’s demand for a translation “that has all the words.” I frequently find it useful to look at modern languages to see how valid a particular approach to translation is. For example, if I’m translating from French into English, which would I prefer? How…
Read more
On Thursday, I posted about the English translations of near-parellel passages in Mark and Matthew. It got me thinking about Chronicles, which frequently quotes other books such as Kings. II Chronicles 6:1-5, for example, seems to be an update (grammatically and in terms of spelling) of I Kings 8:12-16. In particular, I Kings 8:15 and…
Read more
Recent posts from my Ancient Wisdom, Modern Lives:
