15 March 2024
I've taught for years that biblical languages aren't like English, and that translation is more art than science. R/OB mention that we don't really know whether our language affects our thinking or whether our thinking affects our language. What we do know is that the two come in a package. Even within a given society, the different economic classes speak different languages, because they view the world quite differently.
The first topic under the heading of language is sufficiency: Does our language adequately describe realty? The answer depends on what you consider real, or at least important. What do you experience in daily life? What looms largest? Americans have multiple words for automobiles, types, sizes, etc. We have only one word for rice. Indonesians have multiple words for rice to distinguish things we never think about. Swap it around; Islamic Indonesians have one word for pig, but Americans have several, because we eat them. More words in a language for the same thing means it's pretty important in that culture.
The authors note that Greek has four words translated "love". There's a lot of confusion in English without qualifiers to distinguish different kinds of love. How about dancing? We have one word. When previous generations of church folk decided that romantic dancing was a sin, we ended up forbidding biblical worship dance.
And for words in the Bible that we simply don't have in English? We end up pretty confused by how the Hebrew word chesed is translated by many different English words, none of which captures the meaning it had for Hebrew people -- loyalty, lovingkindness, mercy, faithfulness. And Paul gave us a whole list of words to talk about the Fruit of the Spirit in Greek, but it's only one fruit. There was no Greek equivalent to the Hebrew concept.
Even for those who grow up speaking English, there are times we use figures of speech because there simply is no word for something. Our ancestors left us high and dry on certain emotional experiences, and we end up talking all day about some experiences without ever finding the right words; they don't exist.
Side note: One English language historian once said that English doesn't just borrow words from other languages. It chases other languages down and robs them. We have one of the largest vocabularies in the world, but we still don't have the words we need to express some ideas.
We have a very bad translation of the Beatitudes, because the word "blessed" doesn't reflect the Greek word makarios very well. (And we can only guess what Aramaic word Jesus used.) Whatever Jesus is saying here, "blessed" is not the same idea as the verb form, "bless". We just don't have a word for the kind of contentment and sense of fulfillment that Jesus refers to in that passage.
I'm disappointed that the authors never mentioned two rather well known examples. English has a large collection of words referring to water: bath, puddle, pond, sea, lake, etc. Germans refer to them all with one word. Various Eskimo languages have a large collection of words about snow, or sea ice. (Keep in mind that their languages were formed differently, with highly modified root words.)
And in several ancient languages, including Greek, there is no word for "blue". They don't have a concept for it. It's not that they didn't see it, but they didn't distinguish it. They had no means for reproducing it in decorations, for example. Egyptians had "blue" because they had the means to manufacture the color dye. Greeks didn't even have blue flowers.
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