At the end of my discussion of anthropos, I concluded that one meaning of anthropos is “man,” and that we see that meaning in Matthew 12:10. Here I want to suggest that, even so, “man” may not be the best English translation for anthropos. Here’s why. One of my points before was that Greek makes…
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Matthew 12:9-14 The parable in Matthew 12:9-14 demonstrates so many key translation points (many of which have already come up recently, in posts too numerous to mention) that I think it’s worth taking a systematic look at that text and the issues it raises. The Plot As I understand it, the general plot of the…
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Anthropos More: My follow-up to this post The value of men, women and sheep Of sheep and men: overlooking wordplay in translation Aner: either male or female TNIV translators on the English language Following up on the brouhaha I seem to have started, here are some more thoughts on anthropos. Everyone agrees that, in various…
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I’m following up on my last post about gender and Modern Hebrew. And again, the point is not that ancient Hebrew and Greek are the same as Modern Hebrew (they’re not), but rather that we can learn about how gender works in human language by looking at examples. The Hebrew word ish is one word…
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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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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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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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Recents discussions (on Dr. Jim West’s blog, ScriptureZealot, etc.) have focused on what to do with Greek pronouns in English. But the discussion seem to gloss over the fact that subject pronouns are generally missing in Greek. So instead of “he said,” Greek offers us just eipen “said.” It can be “he said,” “she said,”…
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Grammatical and Real-World Gender It seems to me that a lot of the confusion about gender and translation stems from a misunderstanding of the two ways that gender works, as I’ll describe here. Two Kinds of Gender On one hand, men are different than women, and we can use the words “gender,” “masculine,” and “feminine”…
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Recent posts from my Ancient Wisdom, Modern Lives:
