Peter Kirk drew my attention to a post by Bill Heroman about I Timothy 2: If anyone wants us to be perfectly literal about 1 Tim 2:12, we should note, at least as a beginning, that Paul is primarily speaking against one-on-one mentoring, female to male. “I do not allow a woman to teach or…
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The issue of contractions in English translations has come up again recently, so I thought a look at how contractions work in English might be a good idea. Spoken English Spoken languages tend to obey a general rule that less is more, or, more specifically, the shortest form possible is generally the only grammatical form.…
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Again from the about page: What’s going on with the pronominal suffixes in Psalm 103 3-8? I can’t find -ki as a pronominal suffix in any of my grammar books — neither singular nor plural! Good question. The suffix -ki (also spelled -chi) is a variant form of -k, and it means “your (sng, f).”…
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Still following up on what Pete Enns said: Second, I would be prepared at how Hebrew does not “behave itself,” i.e., how grammars necessarily abstract the language almost to the point where a fair amount of what you’ve been learning doesn’t correspond to the actual biblical text. More than once I have encountered this sort…
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In an interview with Karyn Traphagen, Pete Enns says: Second, I would be prepared at how Hebrew does not “behave itself,” i.e., how grammars necessarily abstract the language almost to the point where a fair amount of what you’ve been learning doesn’t correspond to the actual biblical text. While a printed grammar of a language…
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“Luck” is an interesting word in English, because people can have “good luck” or “bad luck,” but if they are “lucky” it only means “good luck.” That is, the word “luck” can refer to positive or negative things, but in order to mean something negative, it has to be qualified, either explicitly or by context.…
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Bob MacDonald asks on the About page: Here’s a question — what about that word et? Here it is as preposition (Genesis 4:1): kaniti ish et YHWH, (“I acquired a man with the LORD”). While I would not normally translate it when it is an object marker (it seems unnecessary most of the time it…
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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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