Leaderboard

The camel/rope thing. Lamsa had it as "rope" in his Bible. The Aramaic Interlinear twi put out had it as "rope." Naturally, one can show suspicion on both sources, as it's possible both were, ah, compromised. But I compared the words side by side in my college library. They had a copy of the book "The Aramaic Origin of the Four Gospels." I eyeballed both words carefully and could not find a difference between the two. Most people can simply conclude that it was hyperbole and get the meaning, and, either way, it is still hyperbole. Neither a rope nor a camel can fit in the eye of a needle, and with man, this is impossible. That was the point regardless, although I prefer having a correct translation either way.

[WordWolf in boldface and brackets] "Concerning your reference to wolves above, you did not suggest in this case that the word should go untranslated but that it should just be translated “jackal.” For example: Genesis 49:27, ““Benjamin shall ravin as a wolf jackal: in the morning he shall devour the prey, and at night he shall divide the spoil.” " [The point I was making there is that MIStranslating something is serious business. So, putting a word there because we absolutely have to put a word there can cause a big problem for someone. So, when choosing what to do when translating, it's a lot harder than it looks.] "Concerning “anothen,” leaving it out would make the verse read as follows: John 3:3 Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born, he cannot see the kingdom of God. Two problems with this is that it’s stating the obvious and also Jesus does go on to describe being born two ways – born of the flesh and born of the spirit. I don't see the big problem with this Greek word. Any disagreement with “anothen” seems to be whether it means anew or again. “Anew” implies something made new usually as an improvement over the old while “again” implies something happening a second (or more) time. Nicodemus obviously took “anothen” to mean born “again” as shown in his reply about entering the womb a “second time.” Since this was not what Jesus meant, he explains to Nicodemus the two kinds of births – to be born of the flesh and born of the spirit. The spirit would fit with “anothen” meaning “anew” as it is an improvement over being born of the flesh. " [A) You missed the previous discussion, sorry. What I proved was translating it with a placeholder word that meant nothing didn't change the verse itself because Nicodemus was responding to a man being born when he was old- a MAN being born, not a baby. BTW, the discussion of the Greek word was not with "anew" vs "again", which are largely synonymous in this context. A quick check with a concordance would show that the word "anothen" in all its usages/consistently supports rendering the word "FROM ABOVE" and not "again". So, did Nicodemus understand the word "anothen" or its Aramaic equivalent to be "again/anew" or "from above"? For the sake of that account, it actually didn't matter which he was told because he jumped on the meaning of the rest of the sentence, and he could have been told either or neither and he wasn't listening. In that instance, I didn't leave the word out- I left it untranslated or even unintelligible, and the meaning was retained. Humans often pick and choose what they hear in a sentence, skip something else, and react. Often, that means they skipped the important part, and often will later say they were never told the rest of the sentence. Looking at the account, it seems to me Nicodemus did exactly that. Humans are largely the same here and now and in Nicodemus' time. If you want to get into this account more, we probably should open another thread.] -------------------------------------------- "Am I missing something here? What "original" do you and Hampson think exists? The Greek word “kunarion,” meaning “a small dog,” is used only 4 times in the NT, and they are all found in the account of the Canaanite woman in Matthew and Mark. Now the other Greek word for dog, kuon, meaning a dog that is universally despised in the East, is clearly used that way 5 times in the NT. One of those usages is in Matthew 7:6 which is something like what Jesus said to the woman. It is, “Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you.” Similar ideas but 2 different Greek word used for “dogs.” I'm interested in why this is. " [I've been spending the last decade or so with the subject "translating between 2 languages" being something I can't avoid. (I don't live in an English-speaking country, which means I'm either studying the other language, dealing with things not from here, or dealing with translations, in nearly every case.) I've seen a number of people work hard to translate between 2 modern languages with some common roots, and sometimes they conclude that something can't be translated across to English or from English! Some things are idiosyncratic to a language, to a culture, to a dialect of a language. For those who doubt this, there's a song that runs almost 9 minutes long, in Spanish. Sometimes subtitles are available in English. "Que dificil es hablar en Español", or "Oh, how hard it is to speak Spanish!" The song is written by native Spanish speakers. The song is written from the perspective of a US citizen who tries to study Spanish, who studies one dialect of Spanish from one country, then discovers he has to learn Spanish all over again if he visits a different Spanish-speaking country. Expressions that are clear and innocent in one dialect become insults in another, and he's chased out of a greengrocer when he tries to ask about the fruit they carry. Some words are innocent in one dialect, and in another, will get you in trouble. Some words mean different things in different countries, sometimes MANY of them. (The word "chucho" has so many different localized meanings that he was able to construct a sentence using all of them, and the sentence was impenetrable without a word-for-word breakdown.) All of that is about differences between dialects of CONTEMPORARY SPANISH, spoken right now in different countries, often neighboring countries. Why did I bring this up? For the benefit of anyone who missed the point, I'll spell it out. Translation work can be very difficult. Even simple prepositions can be a problem, and radically change a sentence with one wrong preposition. Going from one dialect used RIGHT NOW in a language to the same language used RIGHT NOW in a neighboring country with a different dialect can be very difficult. Going back and forth between English and Spanish can be very tricky. I've heard of one tourist who tried to ask directions and offended the local because they missed a connotation that was missing from their language. (In English, "you" is one word, singular or plural, regardless of who "you" is/are. In Spanish, there are at least THREE words for "you" that are used. One is for the plural of either singular. The other 2 usages are singular, referring to one person. But be careful which one you use. If you use "usted", you're being formal. It's good for business meetings and for strangers. If you use "tú", you´re being casual. It's good for friends and people you're trying to consider friends (i.e. in a bar, meeting someone.) There's a word in Spanish that doesn't have ANY direct English translation that relates to this- "tutear". That means to use the informal "tú" with someone when you should have used "usted." People can easily be offended if they hear you do that- although most will cut a tourist slack if they realize the tourist just has trouble trying to use the language. I made a joke once, here. I asked someone if I could greet their dog. They agreed. I squatted down, petted the dog, and talked softly to the dog- to indicate by tone how I was friendly. I referred to the dog using "tú". When I stood up, somewhat tongue in cheek and smirking, I apologized to the dog owner for "tuteando" the dog. After all, I'd just met his dog, and there I was, using the familiar when addressing him. He (the dog owner) accepted my apology, also smirking. The dog didn't care either way. Still, being polite rarely hurts, and it was funny at the time. It appears to me that Hampson has actually put in the work. You know, like vpw claimed to have done sometimes, but in Hampson's case, for real. So, the man spent some time formally studying Koine Greek. I'm fairly confident neither you or I formally studied Koine Greek. I know enough to get by if I use a concordance, interlinear and lexicon, but that's not the same as formal study. He seems to be making a point that, in Koine Greek, there's a big difference between using "kuon" and "kunarion" in a sentence. I've seen enough MIStranslating between English and Spanish to believe it's true. He said the difference is in the CONNOTATION of "kunarion." It doesn't have the same connotations as "dogs" would in modern English. I'm well aware that translating between modern English and modern Spanish has problems of exactly that type, where nearly synonymous words mean different things. I got into a whole discussion years ago discussing the differences between the words for "grandmother" in English and in Spanish. They may not matter at all to you, but if you were being referred to as "grandmother" in both languages, you'd want to know that the "correct" word was used in each language. (A native Spanish speaker settled on "Abuelita" for Spanish, and "Grandma" in English. "Abuelita" literally is a diminutive of "abuela", grandmother, but has a CONNOTATION of more familiarity than "abuela." I also had to try to articulate the difference between "grandma" and "granny" to a non-English speaker, which took 2 people to explain, since the denotation is the same but the connotations are not, not exactly.) So, in Spanish, making a diminutive of a word doesn't always connote a diminutive of something, a different meaning can be conveyed. Hampson said the same thing happens when switching from "kuon" (an insult) to "kunarion." Based on my misadventures in Spanish, I'm ready to believe that. (In one localization, a singular word that's a strong insult stops becoming an insult when used in a plural diminutive and applied to a swarm of children fleeing school at the end of the school day.) I'm aware that, in Japanese, there's a word that normally translates to "idiot" and doesn't mean that when, say, a girl uses it when addressing a boy she's dating- the context making it clear she doesn't mean the same thing. If I knew all sorts of languages, I'm sure I could cite many more examples across the spectrum. So, if a word, translated directly, denotes the same thing literally but the CONNOTATION is completely different, what do you do? From what I've seen, experts don't translate it directly. In some cases, they go around translating it quite a distance. That's just Spanish to English. Hampson was saying that the same thing can happen in Koine Greek, and I'm prepared to believe him. Then the question becomes, what DO we do in this instance? Facing several options, none of which are optimal, he picked the one that was least problematic. I followed him through his steps, and I think he was reasonable. It might have been done in exactly the same way if it was a problematic words in Spanish being translated to English- or vice versa. ]