[B-Greek] (B-Greek) Two in one bed
frjsilver at optonline.net
frjsilver at optonline.net
Mon Jul 24 21:03:20 EDT 2006
Dear Friends --
Here's another quote from my old paper.
I realize that it has theological resonances, but I ask that you just work around them as you navigate among the socio-linguistic principles I adduce.
And I sincerely hope that this helps (at least a little) to advance the question.
Peace and blessings to all.
Father James Silver
Monk James
Orthodox Church in America
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
BEGIN QUOTE:
VOCABULARY, DICTION, INCLUSIVE LANGUAGE
The written or literary form of any spoken language is almost always a more formal vehicle of expression than common speech. As such, except as a deliberate exercise in dialect or colloquialism, the written language will avoid ‘low' speech: contractions, slang, vulgarities, and so forth. Some of these distinctions are really obvious, while others demand much more sensitive attention. The written language, for example, will almost certainly prefer to say ‘excrement' or ‘dung' where the spoken language will use another biological term or one of several colloquialisms with varying degress of acceptability in polite discourse.
Other distinctions are less obvious. There is a subtle sense of elevated style in the use of ‘no one' rather than ‘nobody'; ‘can't' and ‘don't' are more informal and less elevated than ‘cannot' and ‘do not'; but, except in a really well-turned phrase, the latter forms are likely to sound heavy and wooden. This is the province of diction: to allow words to interact with each other to convey not only meaning, but style and sonority. This is especially important in the Psalms, since they will be sung.
Although some translations of the Psalms, both from Hebrew and from Greek, are
undeniably at fault for failing to reflect it in English, the Greek 70's Psalter and its accurate
translations make full use of inclusive language. Terms which mean ‘human being' are intended to include both male and female human beings. Terms which mean ‘male human being' are not intended to include female human beings, and vice versa. Personal and political agenda which require the degenderizing or (especially) the ‘demasculinizing' of all pronouns and concepts are on a collision course with reality and ethical integrity.
Contrary to the erroneous but ‘politically correct' theories promoted by misguided feminists, there truly does exist, in English, a generic ‘he' which is inclusive, as mandated by an Act of the British Parliament in 1850, but its use is clearly defined and appropriately restricted: it works only for those who are sufficiently educated in the language to be able to use its grammar and syntax successfully.
In translating the Scriptures, there are situations where the masculine form must be used, not only because it is grammatically and syntactically correct, but required by an authentically Christian and Christological understanding of the text. For example, Psalm 1:1 says ‘Happy is the man'; in modern English, this is accurate. From a purely linguistic standpoint, it cannot correctly be made to say say ‘Happy is the person', ‘Happy is one', ‘Happy are they', ‘Happy are we', etc. The underlying Hebrew word is _'iysh_, unquestionably meaning ‘male human being'. The Greek renders this as ANHR and the Latin says _vir_ while the Slavonic uses _mouzh"_; all these words have exactly the same meaning. The sense of the Slavonic is so inevitably male that this very word has come into modern Russian with the meaning ‘husband'.
It would have been possible to translate this as ‘person' or ‘someone' or with another generically human, inclusive term only if the Hebrew had started out with _'adám_, and if this had been rendered ANQWPOS, _hómo_ and _cheloväk"_ in the respective languages just cited. But this is not the case, and this translation of the Psalms has no personal or political agenda which would skew the rendering to satisfy such agenda.
A further complication arises from the ‘demasculinization' of pronouns in translations of the Scriptures: Christ becomes invisible. Much of the Old Testament must be read with a recognition of its Christological subtext if it is to mean anything to us at all. The Christians are guided in this by the Tradition, and the Jews would understand it much better if they adopted the Christological point of view, since the Gospel was proclaimed primarily for the Jews (MT 10:5-6; ACTS 11:19-20; ROM 1:16); if the Old Testament's predictions concerning Christ were not fulfilled, then there really is no point to our faith.
Eradicating the masculine pronoun from our translations of the Scriptures is like depriving a ship of its rudder. There is no possibility of finding our way to Christ in a translation which speaks only in vague generalities about ‘them', but never about ‘Him'. Other comments about the implications of the translator's need to be faithful to the Tradition will be found in this paper's section titled ‘Christianisms'.
At the same time, not every pronominal referent needs to be cast in the masculine gender. Where the Tradition does not assert a clearly Christological meaning, there is no reason why generic terms for human beings cannot be employed. Psalm 103, discussing daily human life is a good example of the possible use of ‘people' to translate ANQRWPOS. The pronoun, by grammatical logic, then becomes ‘they' instead of ‘he'. But this will not be true in Psalm 1, or in any other Christological context where the Tradition tells us, unequivocally, that this ‘man' is Christ. This is not the same thing as skewing the translation toward a theological assumption, but rather recognizing the Tradition's reading of the text. This is so ancient as to have been codified in first-century documents, including the gospels.
Although it has many other good points to recommend it, the failure of the New Revised Standard Version to acknowledge these distinctions has earned it, alone among all other English-language translations of the Bible, the condemnation of the bishops of the Orthodox Church in America, who will not permit it to be read in the services. For the same reason, the Roman Catholic bishops of the United States took similar action against 'The Grail Psalms: An Inclusive Language Version'.
That there is some male/female imbalance in human thought is undeniable; what its causes are and what its cure might be are beyond the scope of this paper, and are not the subjects of this translation. Perhaps language, in general, ought to be kept from the fray.
If there is indeed oppression of the female half of the human race by the male half, I suggest that this problem will not be solved by spurious translations or by doing violence to standard English usage. People who propose aberrant forms ‘womyn', ‘herstory') are clearly misguided in their zeal, as are those who would ‘demasculinize' all pronominal referents. I would like to call to their attention the fact that there are languages (Chinese and Turkish come to mind) which employ genderless pronouns in common speech.
This is not as odd as it might at first sound; we do it all the time in English, but in the plural, when we say things like ‘They're in the house'. ‘They' conveys nothing about gender; ‘they' could be men, women, children, dogs, plants, bugs or books. The larger context in English, as well as in Turkish or Chinese, would tell us all we needed to know, but the pronoun itself would not. Yet even the most casual observation of Turkish and Chinese societies will reveal that women in those cultures, genderless pronouns notwithstanding, are far more repressed than are English-speaking women who balk at being included within ‘mankind'. Language cannot be legislated, not by the civil government and not by the pressure of groups who claim that their ox has been gored. There are notorious failures of fascism on record to demonstrate this truth. The status of women in any society is probably not indexed by ‘inclusivity' in language; I submit that language is not the problem, nor is it the solution.
END QUOTE
----- Original Message -----
From: Daniel L Christiansen
Date: Monday, July 24, 2006 2:27 pm
Subject: Re: [B-Greek] (B-Greek) Two in one bed
To: b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org
> In response specifically to Cindy Westfall and George Somsel,
> regardingdefault gender grammatical expectations:
>
> Agreed... My statement was about the ³grammatical
> identification² of the
> persons; perhaps it would have been more clear for me to term
> this as a
> ³referential limitation.² The fulfilment of the prediction
> could involve
> dozens, hundreds, thousands of generically unspecified persons
> in situations
> not related to beds or grain-grinding; such an application does
> not deal
> with, and is not limited by or to, the referent of the passage.
> The reason I
> say two women cannot be the referent of the passage, is that a
> Greek speaker
> (and or a Hebrew/Aramaic speaker, for that matter) would use the
> feminineforms to indicate such a referent.
>
> For a translation into the hypothetical ³feminine-default²
> language, I think
> we are in agreement that we could not automatically use
> feminine, here. As
> you infer, the question to ask the passage, is whether the
> masculine is here
> used as default, or as a specific indicator of male referents.
> If we
> understand it as default, then the target language should also
> use default
> forms; if it is determined that the masculine is used to
> indicate male
> subjects, then the target language should also do so. I don¹t
> think we can
> determine which is the case, here; however, neither of the
> options seem to
> allow for specified female subjects.
>
> On a side note, are you aware of any feminine-default languages?
> I have
> looked for one over the years, with no success; while I don¹t
> expect to ever
> find one, given the universally oppresive social dominance of
> the male, it
> would be great to see what kind of circumstances follow with
> such a language
> structure.
>
>
> Daniel
> _________________
> Daniel L Christiansen
> Professor, Bible/Theology, Biblical Languages
> Multnomah Bible College & Biblical Seminary
> 8435 NE Glisan Street
> Portland, OR 97220
> (503) 251-6436
>
> ---
> B-Greek home page: http://metalab.unc.edu/bgreek
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