Featured The Harm of Dynamic Equivalence

In that case, I'm going to lengthen it just a tad, but perhaps I should address this, “To who it may concern.” If you think “whom” archaic rather than of a high English level, I must leave you be, or let it be.

 

I appreciate and find fascinating the information related to other languages and cultures. I can also understand your wanting an English translation to be such that missionaries could use it, and can see how there should be such a translation, yet not require every one to be such.

However, I would rather demand that missionaries be much more cognizant of the Bible than a single translation could hope to provide, and capable of impressing upon church leaders the pitfalls of relying on a translation for doctrine.

Regarding known problematic passages, missionaries, translators, translation aids, leaders, and interpreters should all beware. Still, this will not prevent creating new ones in the target language.

The next question is how many levels of language exist (or remain) in unwritten ones, for this is the work that seems most pressing now.

 

You are certainly welcome to your misguided opinion. I do miss my favorite computer dictionary, which showed results of polls of experts, wherein they always disagreed, sometimes sharply. But here is a quote from a popular online source.

whom or who?: Usage Guide

Observers of the language have been predicting the demise of whom from about 1870 down to the present day. // one of the pronoun cases is visibly disappearing—the objective case whom // — R. G. White (1870) // whom is dying out in England, where "Whom did you see?" sounds affected // — Anthony Burgess (1980) Our evidence shows that no one—English or not—should expect whom to disappear momentarily; it shows every indication of persisting quite a while yet. Actual usage of who and whom—accurately described at the entries in this dictionary—does not appear to be markedly different from the usage of Shakespeare's time. But the 18th century grammarians, propounding rules and analogies, rejecting other rules and analogies, and usually justifying both with appeals to Latin or Greek, have intervened between us and Shakespeare. It seems clear that the grammarians' rules have had little effect on the traditional uses. One thing they have accomplished is to encourage hypercorrect uses of whom. // whom shall I say is calling? // Another is that they have made some people unsure of themselves. // said he was asked to step down, although it is not known exactly who or whom asked him // — Redding (Conn.) Pilot

Definition of WHOM​

 

That's what I suspected--preserving stories would at least somewhat preserve a form of language not generally spoken.

 

It is also true of American Indian tribes as well. For instance the Navajo's have only had a written language for a little more than a 100 years. Most do not read and write their own language even though they would like to. While Christianity is not new to them there are quite a few traditionalists who still hold on to the NAC (Native American Church) and Navajo Tradition. It used to be that they believed in worshiping the Sun, Moon, stars, etc. in recent years they have begun to recognize there is a creator. This has opened the door for the gospel, however it cannot be delivered in what we would call the traditional sense. There has been recently an effort to prepare a gospel that begins with the creation story and it is delivered through a story telling method that is completed in a series of meetings. This is done in a setting that is traditional in nature to them i.e. a hogan (a traditional Navajo one room house). It takes time with them and the Americanized 5 minute presentation with the intention of getting them to prayer in one meeting will not work with them.

 

One benefit of the KJV over modern translation is the preservation of singular and plural variants of "you", which is also fond in the native languages of the Bible. When a modern Bible says "you", you have to look at the context, and maybe even that's not enough, to know if the speaker means just the person he's talking to or a whole group.

No one but a savage should a willful party to the loss of linguistic precision. One big reason English is lingua franca today is because it offers greater precision than other languages.

Is it your position that educated people should capitulate to the ignorant on any common grammatical error?

 

Maybe, I just know that after three years on the rez and seeing the change to believing in a creator it is what works. I know of new tribes but I never talked with them nor saw any materials by them. Myself and a few others just did what works.

 

So, can you speak again about the "harm" of using a dynamic equivalence Bible translation -- when a seeker begins reading the Bible with a dynamic equivalence translation before moving up to a formal equivalence translation?