Does one need to know the original language?

[gnostic]

Kejos.

There are many people who read the original Arabic, and have read the Qur'an all their lives, but I would say that the majority of those wouldn't understand every contexts of every passages in their scripture. Knowing the language don't make them expert. Otherwise they wouldn't need Islamic scholars or imams to help them understand the scripture. And even the scholars would not agree with the interpretations.

 

[angellous_evangellous]

I would agree with this. I see how knowing the language can be of a benefit. That is why I'm learning Greek, as I'm more interested in the New Testament and early Christian history.

I'm aware that Ancient Hebrew is a difficult language to learn. Add that to the difficulty of putting it in historic context, do you think it is realistic to become an expert in both the OT/Ancient Hebrew and the NT/Greek?

I know people that can sight read Hebrew and Greek. If one is dedicated, one can master several other related languages. But I suspect that these folks are rare.

You should learn Hebrew well enough to translate about a page every 30 minutes. That would be an accomplishment.

If you learn Greek so well that you can sightread the NT (which takes a good amount of study, but it's not impossible), you need to move on to the finesse of interpretation, addressing the grammar and syntax of the NT.

It would be very tough to fully master Greek - to the extent that you can flawlessly parse and insightfully interpret passages. And then to master Hebrew on that same level would require a genius.

 

[angellous_evangellous]

Depends on how much time you are willing to spend on it, and how much of an expert you want to be.

Yeah, exactly.

An expert to me is someone who can pick up a tiny Greek fragment and tell you where it is from (author, text, and chapter) - they can parse stuff with missing letters, and reconstruct inscriptions and edit manuscripts.

I hope to be that good at Greek, but I don't have the time or energy to divide my attention.

 

[Oberon]

An expert to me is someone who can pick up a tiny Greek fragment and tell you where it is from (author, text, and chapter) - they can parse stuff with missing letters, and reconstruct inscriptions and edit manuscripts.

That's interesting, as I was talking about this issue (sort of) with a recent ex-student of mine. His grandfather was Gordon Messing. Apparently he was pretty brilliant (he edited the current edition of Smyth) and was a professor of classics and linguistics at Cornell. Anyway, apparently he was with his children at a museum looking at the (actual) Rosetta stone, and started translating. I commented that I found that interesting, because there is a difference between an expert in the greek language, and someone who can read actual ancient texts or inscriptions. I said that someone could understand an ancient language better than anyone, and not be able to read an actual ancient text/inscription, as these were different skills.


At least, that was my take. To me, "expert" when it comes to language means not only well-versed in reading/writing/etc, but with a deep linguistic knowledge of the subject. I have always seperated this from being able to read ancient texts as they were written, because that to me is a different field.

Now that I think about it, I can see how one would take "expert" to mean more than just deep, intimate knowledge of the language.

 

[Oberon]

Oberon, is right. Hebrew is a very interesting case, because the circumstances were right for it to be resurrected as a modern language. Those circumstances were the creation of a community of people with very different "living language" backgrounds. Yiddish was common to many Jews from eastern and central Europe, but not to the Jewish community as a whole. So the rise of Hebrew as a national tongue has hastened its demise, not to mention that of Ladino.

Liturgical languages such as Latin and Sanskrit are widely studied and spoken, but they no longer evolve or change the way all living languages do. There is no native speaker community to drive the evolution. Hebrew, on the other hand, has now developed such a community of speakers. It will now continue to evolve in much the same way that all other living languages do.

I thought you were agreeing with me here, but then I re-read this and I am not sure (the comma confused me; maybe you meant to say "oberon, X is right"). You are the expert here. Would you say ancient hebrew is a dead language?

 

[Copernicus]

I thought you were agreeing with me here, but then I re-read this and I am not sure (the comma confused me; maybe you meant to say "oberon, X is right"). You are the expert here. Would you say ancient hebrew is a dead language?

The comma was a typo (which I can no longer edit out of the original). I was agreeing with you. Ancient Hebrew is a dead language. My only cautionary note here is that people do not generally understand the extent to which linguistic interpretation relies on the knowledge that the translator has of the culture and history of the author of the original text. Scholars who read ancient languages have no way to check their translations against those of the native speaker. This is especially a problem when storytellers use idiomatic or metaphorical language, because the translator may have no way to know what the author was really trying to convey. Quite often, metaphors can change the interpretation of the text substantially. (I refer you to George Lakoff's brilliant Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, which goes into great detail on the relationship between meaning and metaphor.)

 

[Oberon]

Quite often, metaphors can change the interpretation of the text substantially. (I refer you to George Lakoff's brilliant Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, which goes into great detail on the relationship between meaning and metaphor.)

I've been meaning to read that classic work, but I am fairly familiar with metaphor in cognitive linguistics. The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics has a section on metaphor, as does Croft and Cruse's text on the subject. It is also part of Langacker's model of grammar. I don't know why I've never gotten around to reading Lakoff's book.