"In the beginning was the word" (Jn 1:1a)

Steven Craig Miller scmiller at www.plantnet.com
Tue Feb 15 17:10:19 EST 2000


To: the participants of B-Greek,

Myron C. Tuman, in his "A Preface to Literacy: An Inquiry into Pedagogy, 
Practice, and Progress" (The University of Alabama Press, 1987), writes:

<< Few languages of the world without a written form have a word for 
'word,' that is, have a word by which to refer to the concept of discrete, 
meaningful verbal units that are combined to form utterances >> (95).

Tuman continues:

<< Scribner and Cole, for example, discuss the difficulty they had asking 
native Vai speakers to name the longest word they knew, since the Vai 
language has no word for "word" and since the subjects themselves were 
often unaware of the underlying concept. The closest Vai equivalent, 
Scribner and Cole note, literally meant "a piece of speech" or "utterance," 
and they discovered when they asked an expert in Vai script to divide a 
piece of writing into such "pieces" what we might expect--that he grouped 
units together on the basis of the way in which they were used in a 
specific context. The minimal unit of speech for this expert was not 
individual words as we know them but clusters of meaning. In studying 
another West African language, Jack Goody notes that the native term for 
"word" was best translated as "'bit' of speech" (1977:115), leading him to 
conclude that "in the beginning was not the word but speech"  >> (95).

One common definition of the term "word," for example, as given by John 
Lyons in his "Semantics" (2 volumes; Cambridge University Press, 1977), is 
as follows:

<< ... a word is any sequence of letters which, in normal typographical 
practice, is bounded on either side by a space >> (1:18).

Of course, such "normal typographical practice" simply did not exist for 
our earliest Greek MSS.

Under the entry on LOGOS in LSJM, they note the following:

<< VI. 'verbal expression' or 'utterance' ..., rarely a single 'word,' v. 
infr. b, never in Gramm. signf. of vocable (EPOS, LEXIS, ONOMA, RHMA), usu. 
of a 'phrase' ... >>

And it is interesting to note that although Louw & Nida [1988] give "Word" 
as one of a number of possible meanings for LOGOS, they don't give "word" 
as one of them.

Although "Word" as a translation of LOGOS is enshrined in tradition, I 
wonder if perhaps "utterance" (or even "Utterance" -- I'm not trying to 
raise any Christological issues here) might be a better translation of 
LOGOS at John 1:1a. Similarly, I wonder if Psalms 33:6a might be better 
translated as: "by the utterance of Yahweh the heavens were made." (BDB 
gives "utterance" as a meaning for the Hebrew word DBR.)

I'll note that Tyndale [1534] translated LOGOS at John 1:1 as "word." Does 
anyone have any idea why Tyndale made such a choice? And is it possible 
that for Tyndale, the term "word" might have meant "utterance"? OED1 seems 
to suggest that the notion of "word" referring to "a combination of vocal 
sounds, or one such sound, used in a language to express an idea (e.g. to 
denote a thing, attribute, or relation), and constituting an ultimate 
minimal element of speech having a meaning as such; a vocable" dates back 
to 1000 CE (I have the small print edition of OED1 and I hope my eyes 
aren't playing tricks on me).

What do you think?

-Steven Craig Miller
Alton, Illinois (USA)
scmiller at www.plantnet.com
FWIW: I'm neither a clergy-person, nor an academic (and I have no post-grad 
degrees).




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