Category: Linguistics

Suzanne McCarthy writes about squeamishness in Bible Translation:

I have been reading through Ann Nyland’s New Testament “The Source” since I now have my own copy complete with notes. There have often been times when I have thought of a way to translate a phrase but it is not found in any translation but hers. She has moments of extreme clarity and closeness to the meaning of the Greek. This is one of them. Sometimes her translation is more faithful than almost any other translation I am familiar with. Other times, not so much. That puts it on par with every other translation I read.

What I am really trying to say is that I feel that most of her translation is more or less as good or bad as any other, but sometimes it is significantly better. Tonight I read Mark 7:19 in her translation and wondered immediately what every other major translation had done with the toilet.

Because it doesn’t go into the mind but into the stomach, and then it goes into the toilet. Nyland

…

Now let’s look at the Greek.

ὅτι οὐκ εἰσπορεύεται αὐτοῦ εἰς τὴν καρδίαν ἀλλ’ εἰς τὴν κοιλίαν καὶ εἰς τὸν ἀφεδρῶνα ἐκπορεύεται

Okay, Liddell Scott calls ἀφεδρῶν the “privy.” I believe that means the toilet. So how did so many versions come to leave it out?

I’ve read somewhere (can’t remember the source offhand) that ἀφεδρῶν is stronger than just “privy” — a better translation would be “shithole”.

When I was taking classes in Hellenistic Greek lo these many years ago, I strongly suspected that the whole notion of “deponency” was bogus. The traditional way of teaching Greek voice has active, middle and passive voices. Unfortunately, not only are the “middle” and “passive” paradigms identical for some tenses, there are some verbs that have gaps in the active part of the paradigm, and yet are used in ways that in English would require active voice (the King James preserves this in constructions like “he was come”) — these verbs are called “deponent”, meaning “these verbs don’t fit our native habits and so we will invent an entirely imaginary category for them”.

I just stumbled on a paper by Carl Conrad laying out the difficulties with this idea and proposing a different way of thinking, that the distinction should be between active and “subject-focused”, and that verbs in the traditional “middle/passive” paradigms should be considered middles unless it is clear — usually from the presence of an explicit instrument or agent — that the sense is passive.

Ironically, many European languages work this way — consider the French reflexive forms, which are more often middle in meaning than passive.

Forpasis lunde William AULD, unu el la plej bonfamaj Esperantistoj en la tuta mondo. Lia poezio kaj prozo estas brilaj ekzemploj de Esperanto kiel vivanta, kreskanta lingvo.