Featured Linguistics and Bible Translation

This thread is about linguistics and Bible translation. I will answer this post, but after this please stick to the subject.

Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth" (2 Tim. 2:15 ). This was written in Greek about the Hebrew and Greek Bibles.

Language study is never, ever a waste of time. God invented languages. Studying what God invented increases character. And it is not nearly as diffiucult as many think. Since God invented language, and we have the God-given capability to learn a language, God will help us when we strive to do so.

In Milwaukee, there are many Spanish speaking immigrants and immigrants from unreached people groups: the Rohingya, the Hmong, and others. On Monday out on soul-winning I met an Indian and a Sikh. These people deserve to hear the Word in their own language. Our Bible translation department has undertaken a Rohingya NT translation.

The Japanese version printed by the Gideons is the Shinkaiyaku, done with the source texts and translation method of the NASB. You don't like the NASB in English. Why would you be satisfied with it in Japanese? We would love to give the Gideons the option of a TR based NT.

There are many, many places in the Bible where the original language (Hebrew or Aramaic or Greek) is emphasized over the target language. If God emphasizes the original over the target language, then we should. The original language always takes precedence in authority over the target language in translation work.

1. "Emmanuel" means "God with us" (Matt. 1:23).
2. "Golgotha" means "a place of a skull" (Matt. 27:33, Mark 15:22, John 19:17).
3. "Corban" means "a gift" (Mark 7:11).
4. "Ephphatha" means "be opened" (Mark 7:34).
5. "Abba" means "father" (Mark 14:36, Rom. 8:15, Gal. 4:6).
6. "Rabbi" (“Rabboni”) means "Master" (John 1:38, 20:16). While the original meaning of the word was “great one,” it came to mean “master” by common usage.
7. "The Messias" means "the Christ" ("anointed one", John 1:41, 4:25).
8. "Cephas" means "a stone." (John 1:42).
9. "Siloam," translated as "sent" (John 9:7), means "outflow" in the original Hebrew. (Word Studies in the New Testament, by Marvin R. Vincent, vol. 3, p. 183) John was no doubt going by the common usage of the day here rather than paraphrasing.
10. "Aceldama" means "the field of blood" (Acts 1:19).
11. "Barnabas" means "the son of consolation" (Acts 4:36).
12. "Tabitha" in Aramaic means "Dorcas" in Greek (Acts 9:36), and they both mean "gazelle" in English.
13. "Elymas" means "the sorcerer." (See Acts 13:8 and the entry in A Greek-English Lexicon of the N. T, by Walter A. Bauer, 2nd edition translated by Arndt and Gingrich.)
14. "Melchisedec" means "king of righteousness" (Heb. 7:1-2).
15. "Salem" means "peace" (Heb. 7:1-2).
16. "Abaddon" ("destruction") in Hebrew means "Appolyon" ("destroyer") in Greek (Rev. 9:11).
17. “Boanerges” (“sons of thunder”) (Mark 3:17).
18. "Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin" (Dan. 5:25-28, probably in Hebrew) literally means "Numbered, numbered, weighed, divisions." Note however that the king wanted not only a translation but an interpretation (v. 7), and that is what Daniel gave.
19. "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani" (Matt. 27:46, Mark 15:34) is translated as "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

Since God loves translation, we should also.

 

I will start the nine week block class of Greek 101 in two weeks. Four or five of the 20 students signed up have already indicated their eagerness to learn the original language of the NT. Now, judging by the majors being taken in our college, four or five of these will become missionaries, and probably one or more will become a missionary Bible translator.

Do you have the mind of God to know which of these 20 students God will choose?

And all--that is ALL--of my Greek students love learning what the NT says in the original when we form translation teams in the 2nd semester.

To say "It is a waste of time" is to glorify ignorance, IMO.

Now, the topic is "Linguistics and Bible Translation." Please stick to the topic. What can you tell us about linguistics?

 

There was a lot more Bible translation in the early centuries of the Church Age than many people realize. Who translated the Peshitta? We don't really know, but it was well done.

Many of the written languages of ancient times had an alphabet invented by a missionary Bible translator. One we know about is Ulphilas (Ulifilas, Wulfila) who lived c. AD 311-382. He invented the Gothic alphabet and translated almost all of the Bible into the language.

This man fascinates me. According to Philstorgius, one of his contemporaries, he “translated all the books of the Scripture with the exception of the books of the Kings, which he omitted because they are a mere narrative of military exploits, and the Gothic tribes were especially fond of war.” (The Ancestry of our English Bible, by Ira Maurice Price, 103.)

Now, in order to reduce the language of the Goths to writing, he had to use two linguistic disciplines that had not yet been named: phonology and morphology. A phoneme is a sound without meaning in a language, and phonology studies these. For example, the "r" sound all by itself has no meaning in English. A morpheme is the smallest sound in a language that does have meaning, and an example in English is "-ed," indicating a past tense.

Modern missionary Bible translators must study both of these linguistic branches in order to reach a people group which has no written language. Therefore, these are valuable studies. A modern pioneer in this area was Kenneth Pike, a missionary Bible translator and linguist, influential in the Summer Institute of Linguistics.

My parents studied linguistics at Wheaton College in the 1940's while preparing to be missionaries to Tibet. (They were not able to go, or I would have been born there! ) I have two of Dad's textbooks:

Phonetics, by Clauge Kantner and Robert West (1941). I look at phonetics as the practical side of phonology.

A Technic for the Description of Sounds, Part II, Phonetic Theory: A Constructive System, by Kenneth Pike.

 

The translators of the KJV were actually quite good philologists, what we call now linguists. KJVO folks like to say that modern scholars cannot match them, and from one viewpoint that is true. In those days, scholars learned the ancient languages at a very young age, often spending hours daily not watching TV or online, but studying Greek, Hebrew and Latin. There are been advances since then in ways the KJV translators cannot match, such as the discovery of many papyri in the first part of the 20th century, but the KJV translators were certainly remarkable philologists--meaning linguists!

 

Henry Martyn? Awesome missionary translator and mighty linguist.

If this is the man you mean, here is my brief bio of him on the BB: Unsung Missionaries

 

There may be someone reading this who thinks, "I could never learn a language." As I've already said, every human being has the God-given ability to learn a language. Or if you say, "Greek and Hebrew are too hard," that's a copout. Both OT Hebrew and NT Greek are ancient languages, written but not spoken. So they are easier to learn.

Here is how God helped one missionary to learn Chinese, one of the hardest languages in the world to learn. I share this story with my beginning Greek students on the very first day.

Jonathan Goforth and the Chinese Language

“One day as Jonathan was about to leave for the chapel, he said to his wife, ‘If the Lord does not work a miracle for me with this language, I fear I will be an utter failure as a missionary!’

“For a moment only he looked the heartbreak that that would mean. Then picking up his Chinese Bible, he started off. Two hours later he returned.

“’Oh, Rose!’ he cried. ‘It was just wonderful! When I began to speak, those phrases and idioms that would always elude me came readily and I could make myself understood so well that the men actually asked me to go on though Donald had risen to speak. I know the backbone of the language is broken. Praise the Lord!’ Mr. Goforth then made a full note of this in his diary. About two months later, a letter came from Mr. Talling…saying that on a certain evening after supper, a number of students decided to meet in one of the class-rooms for prayer, ‘just for Goforth.’ The letter stated that the presence and power of God was so manifestly felt by all at that meeting, they were convinced Goforth must surely have been helped in some way. On looking up his diary, Mr. Goforth found the meeting for prayer by the students in Knox coincided with the experience recorded above” (Goforth of China, by Rosalind Goforth, pp. 87-88).

 

Here is a quick linguistic comparison of Greek and Japanese grammar so you can understand a little better the difficulties of translation between the two languages. (English is not much easier.)

Verbs: Greek has a ton of participles and infinitives. Japanese has neither. When the Japanese needs something like a participle (a verbal adjective), it uses the present tense verb. Greek has many tenses, but Japanese only has two, present and past (no future tense). The Greek infinitive (a verbal noun) can be translated in Greek with a particle added to the regular verb. The Greek imperfective aspect ("He is running," not "He runs.") can be duplicated in Japanese with what is called the -te form. (ーて). Some grammars call this the Japanese participle, but it isn't.

Nouns: Greek is an inflected language, meaning that words (nouns, adjectives, verbs, articles) have various endings that change. Japanese has two kinds of nouns: native Japanese, and compound Chinese. For example, a Japanese noun is followed by a particle to indicate possession, while a Greek noun has a certain ending to show possession.

Pronouns: Greek has an important set of various pronouns, sometimes two for just one in English. Japanese has pronouns but eschews using them for various reasons, such as clarity of expression. Also, the Japanese pronouns can be euphemisms. So, often Japanese has the name instead of the pronoun (i.e., "Peter" instead of "he").

The article: Greek has a definite article while Japanese has no articles.

Adverbs: Greek adverbs are not inflected (yeah!). However, Japanese articles are formed from the adjective, which is somewhat inflected.

Sentence order: Greek sentence order is fairly free, while Japanese sentence order is strict, with the verb always coming last, followed by a particle (interrogative, emphatic, etc.)

Linguistic training such as I had helps with all of this. It is a lot of work to learn a foreign language, but every bit worth it! It builds character, promotes mental development (crucial when you get old like me), aids in missions, prevents laziness, etc.