Re: b-greek-digest V1 #67

From: D. Peterson (harpbard@ccnet.com)
Date: Fri Jan 05 1996 - 04:29:11 EST


>> In many ways Islam is right to say, "If it is not in Arabic it is
>>not the Koran."
>
>I would suggest that this reflects an inaccurate view of language in
>general. There is no concept that cannot be expresed in any other language.
>Some may do a particular job more concisely, etc., and technical terms may
>need to be created to deal with some things, but if it can be expressed in
>words, any language can do the job. (The Islamic claim is linguistic
>nonsense.)

Only true with respect to the referent. Not true with respect to the
semantics. I mean that the emotional loading of a word, its ambiguities,
its cultural referents, and so on are all part of the communication value
of that word. One can explain these in another language; one can attempt to
unpack them, but the total compact communication cannot occur in an equal
fashion. In the same way, a score of a Bach fugue and a CD of a performance
of that fugue are "the same" in one sense, but only one carries the
experience of the music (for the average person).

So, the islamic claim is not "linguistic nonsense" but the very real
experience that translation removes some of the "poetic" dimension from the
language. Don't you experience a NT text differently in Greek than in 16th
century English and differently again in modern English (not to mention
other languages)? If not, why read in the original at all?



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