Featured Linguistics and Bible Translation

I've mentioned a linguistic theory called transformational grammar, also called generative grammar. It is based on the idea of transformations. The main advocate of this theory has been the famous Noam Chomsky, but the pioneer was Zellig Harris back in the 1950's. I won't try to get into the technical aspects of it, which sometimes I don't understand, but just want to show how it has influenced Bible translation.

Simply put, a transformation occurs when you change one type of sentence for another. For example, a declarative statement, "You ate the cookie," can be transformed into an interrogative sentence, "Did you eat the cookie?" Transformational grammar develops rules for these transformations. The theory was not originally developed with translation in mind, but Eugene Nida and James Price have both used it in their theories. However, Nida's usage was much looser, so Price critiqued his method with this:

“It is quite clear that paraphrase is unavoidable with dynamic equivalence theory…. This is primarily true because of the subjectivity involved in the transfer step. The failure to employ transfer rules, but rather to depend on the translator’s subjective judgment, makes it almost certain that the information transferred to the receptor language will lack complete equivalence with the information of the source message. Thus the theory fails to accomplish equivalence; it is instead scientific paraphrase” (James Price, Complete Equivalence in Bible Translation. Nashville: Thomas Nelson Pub., 1987, 17).

Our Japanese Lifeline NT is at the printers as we speak, but I received a final request from our final editor. He asked about John 8:22 where the Greek has meti (μήτι), which is used in Greek in rhetorical questions. Our Japanese there tried to capture the idea of the rhetorical question, but that's rare in Japanese, so our rendering was awkward, kind of like, "He won't kill himself, will he?" We transformed it into a regular interrogative sentence, "Will he kill himself?" This was a transformation. It is my belief that a translator does this in his head between the two languages, and there is no need for understanding the theory for that purpose.

James Price went so far as to do a complete transformational grammar of Hebrew discourse in his 2007 book, A Theory for Bible Translation. I was actually consulted on this. Dr. Price asked me to look at the chapters pre-publication, but I got lost on about the fifth chapter, so you won't find me listed in the acknowledgements. Warning: do not buy this book unless you know Hebrew and have lots of cash. Anyway, it's out of print now.

 

In the 20th century, the major advance in linguistics in evangelical linguistics was in the area of semantics, the branch of linguistics that studies meaning. In 1961, a British scholar named James Barr wrote a bombshell book, The Semantics of Biblical Language. Now, Barr was essentially a jerk, writing a nasty book against all of American evangelicalism in 1977 with the title Fundamentalism, mistakenly equating broader evangelicalism with the term "fundamentalism."

Having said that, his book on semantics caused a stir, perhaps in a good way. It helped evangelicals think through the issues. His disciple, Moises Silva, wrote a better book in 1983, Biblical Words and Their Meaning. The subtitle is "An Introduction to Lexical Semantics." I have the revision of 1994, and it is thought provoking. Then, Eugene Nida and Johannes Louw got on the bandwagon in 1992 with their book, Lexical Semantics of the Greek New Testament.

These books did good, but they went "a bridge too far." They taught that "the context does not merely help us understand meaning--it virtually makes meaning" (Silva, p. 139). I'll try to stay away from technicalities here, but I disagree. Context does determine meaning, but it certainly does not manufacture meaning.

The example my son likes to give when debunking the idea that context determines meaning is embarrassing to me--must be why he likes it. (Sympathy, please?) In Yokohama one day I was right outside our bank one day, trying to get to know a young mother so I could tell her about Jesus. I noticed her toddler peering out from behind his mommy at the gaijin (foreigner), and I tried to say, "He doesn't want to talk to me," using a common adjective for "seems to" (rashii, らしい) with a word with a broad range of negative meaning (iya, いや). She got a horror struck look on her face, grabbed her little boy and stalked off. Shocked, I went home and checked my big Japanese-English dictionary, only to learn that those two words together mean something entirely different--"perverted"! So context had not helped her. She interpreted my meaning as "Your little boy is perverted!" The point is, the context had nothing to do with perversion, but she still took the meaning that way.

Consider the Chinese word 金, pronounced jin, meaning "gold." This word has been around for about 2800 years! It means the same thing in Japanese. Context does not matter. The word means the same thing in any context. Even in an idiom, the word would mean the same thing, though the connotation would be different. So, context does not create meaning, but it does determine meaning.

 

An example of how context helps understand meaning can be seen in the translation of the well-known Greek word ekklesia (ἐκκλησία), usually translated "church." It occurs 115 times in the NT, and usually "church" or "churches' is correct. However, there are several places where the word should not be translated "church."

In Acts 7:38, the KJV has "church in the wilderness," referring to the assembly of the Israelites. However, the meaning there is clearly not a local assembly of believers who evangelize, baptize, celebrate the Lord's Supper, etc. This was not the "Israelite Baptist Church." It should be translated "assembly" there.

In Acts 19:32 & 39, the KJV correctly has "assembly." In this case, ekklesia is referring to a city assembly of the voting citizens, which is the original meaning of the word in Greek society.

On the other hand, the KJV mysteriously has "robbers of churches" for a different Greek word in Acts 19:37--"For ye have brought hither these men, which are neither robbers of churches, nor yet blasphemers of your goddess." The Greek word there is hierosulos (ἱερόσυλος), with the definition in Abbot-Smith's lexicon of "robbing temples" (A Manual Greek Lexicon of the New Testament, 214). Who knows why the KJV translators decided to say "churches" (a Christian term) instead of "temples" (an idolatrous term). But it is wrong. I don't know how a KJVO person with the proper ecclesiology could agree with calling the temple of the immoral "god" Diana a "church."

 

For anyone now interested in the subject of this thread, David Black's book, Linguistics for Students of New Testament Greek, 2nd ed. (Baker, 1995) is the best choice. The subtitle is, "A Survey of Basic Concepts and Applications." Chapters are: Introducing Linguistics, Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, Semantics, Historical and Comparative Linguistics, and Discourse Analysis.

The book is for those learning Greek, but is useful to a certain extent to someone with no knowledge of Greek. Also, one does not have to be a linguist to appreciate this book. It's a basic approach, giving definitions and explanations for the concepts given.

Black's basic textbook, which I use, Learn to Read New Testament Greek, 3rd ed., also takes a linguistic approach. The students learn basic phonology (sounds in a language with no meaning), morphology (sounds with meaning that are not words, such as "-ed" or "-ing" in English), verbal aspect ("the view of the action that the speaker chooses to present to the hearer," p. 14), etc.

 

Maybe I can find a quote on Monday, but Robert Young opposed the use of modern linguistics in translation or interpretation. Young is a good scholar, retired (I think) from teaching at MacArthur's schools, but he's wrong here.

Linguistics is simply the study of language. Modern linguistics is simply updated linguistics. Much of the foundation of modern linguistics has been laid by Bible translators such as Kenneth Pike (1912-2000, who was the founder of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), which trains many of the Wycliffe translators nowadays, and is strongly connected with Wycliffe. Our linguistics prof has her M. A. under the auspices of SIL, and they gave her a very good education. So all in all, modern linguistics is a help to Bible translators. Maybe on Monday I can also talk about discourse analysis, a modern linguistic tool.

 

By the way, contrary to a previous poster, the grammar of the source language is not "changed" when transformational grammar is used. You can't actually change the grammar of a language. You can only observe it and catalog it. Transformational grammar is one way to do that.

 

Robert Young's book on hermeneutics is Evangelical Hermeneutics (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2002), with the subtitle, "The New Versus the Old." This was required for a course in hermeneutics I took in seminary.

All in all, it is a good book, but Ch. 8, "Modern Linguistics and Hermeneutics" shows what I think is ignorance of modern linguistics. For example, on pp. 196-197 he lists a number of terms that are common in linguistics: descriptive linguistics, historical linguistics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics. synchronic, diachronic. Most of these words have been around a long, long time, and are very helpful to know for a translator.

Adoniram Judson had to learn the phonemes (sounds without meaning), morphemes (sounds with meaning), syntax (sentence order), and semantics (the study of meaning) of the Burmese language before writing his dictionary and grammar, and translating the Bible. He would not have used these terms, but he would certainly know what they were. Unfortunately, Young misses this point and dumps all of the terms together as "modern linguistics." He also lumps all literature about modern linguistics in interpretation together, Black along with Barr, though Black is a conservative and Barr was a liberal.

I'll stop here for now. But hopefully you can start to see the problem. I believe modern linguistics is generally a help rather than a hindrance in hermeneutics and translation.

 

For those who want to study further, here is a good book: Peter Cotterell & Max Turner, Linguistics and Biblical Interpretation. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academics, 1989.

This book has a good chapter on discourse analysis. According to the authors, "The term 'discourse ' is used generally for any coherent sequence of strings, any coherent stretch of language" (p. 230).

Now, discourse analysis means many things to many people, and there are various definitions and various methods. The book does a good job, but note:

"The term ‘discourse analysis’ has come to be used with a wide range of meanings which cover a wide range of activities. It is used to describe activities at the intersection of disciplines as diverse as sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, philosophical linguistics and computational linguistics. Scholars working centrally in these different disciplines tend to concentrate on different aspects of discourse" (Gillian Brown and George Yule, Discourse Analysis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), viii.)

So my take on discourse analysis is: take a discourse, do an interpretation of it, and learn. How this applies to Bible translation is, for example, that you can look at the discourse by Paul called "Philippians" and make translation decisions based on how the discourse uses "joy" and its cognates.

At any rate, this is a good book, and if you are interested in the subject of this thread, linguistics and Bible translation, it will be helpful. The fact that it is still in print after 33 years proves its value. Here it is on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Linguistics-Biblical-Interpretation-Peter-Cotterell/dp/0830817514/ref=sr_1_1?crid=RKAHJ6LOYRF3&keywords=linguistics+and+bible+interpretation&qid=1665062658&qu=eyJxc2MiOiIwLjAwIiwicXNhIjoiMC4wMCIsInFzcCI6IjAuMDAifQ==&s=books&sprefix=linguistics+and+bible+interpretation,stripbooks,71&sr=1-1

 

Point taken.

Based on the previous part of your post, is this a a rhetorical question? In case it is not, nowadays technology has made it possible to print a book one at a time rather than having to have a print run of 100s or 1000s. So a print on demand book publication only prints as many books as have been ordered

My brother wrote a book and was able to print up individual copies with a publicly accessed printing press in Seattle--might have been in a bookstore, I don't remember. Anyway, you put your money in, upload the PDF, and bingo, you have your book!

 

Thank you. I didn't know that. Anyway, it's still a good book on the subject--which has few books about it.

 

Insulting people is an artform in Japanese. I did not know for over 20 years that you can insult people by being overly polite!

She might have been afraid that I kill babies! When we first went to Japan in 1981, foreigners were comparatively rare. We got stared at a lot, and when I went to a park kids would gather around just to talk to a foreigner.

 

The exceptions in the English language are murder! Then there are the spelling differences.

Japanese grammar and spelling are very regular, with few exceptions. The difficulties come with the honorific language, avoiding Buddhist language, choosing the right kanji (Chinese character), when to just use one of the two Japanese alphabets instead of kanji, classical versus colloquial semantics, etc.