We obviously don't have recordings of ancient language recitation. It seems likely, however, that such ancient texts were recited and a tone of voice was part of the recitation. My only clues are in the music of the accents. So here are the verses from yesterday's post - another translation challenge,
We should also observe several things about each verse. Who is speaking to whom, i.e. who is the subject of pls? What words are used in parallel that might give us an idea of sense. All this is of course outside the cultural and historical frame. We are in a puzzle frame and need a gloss in English that will agree with others for the same root and not mislead concerning others that are not the same root.
It will be clear that I do not translate for 'meaning'. The translation must be readable and make 'sense' in its context. 'Sense' is not identical to 'meaning'. Also clear is that I don't know the answer in advance. I must discover my best inferences or even guesses based on usage. There are only 9 instances to look at. In 300,000+ words.
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| Isaiah 26:7 aork lxdiq miwrim // iwr mygl xdiq tpls |
The tone of this verse is subdued. It is a matter of fact assertion about righteousness and uprightness, roots that are repeated in the verse. I do not use synonyms freely in translation since the one who originally recited this verse did not either. (I do allow myself synonyms - but with care so that the English sense is readable.) Who is the you in this verse? The You is Yahweh. The circular thought is clear from the recurrence in verses 7 and 8.
So far, the gloss
level makes perfect sense. There is no need to derive a shift in sense of this root. At Bible Gateway you can see
all their English translations at once. (Bravo BG!) There are lots of glosses for pls, weigh / direct / clear / smooth / make even / make equal / make safe / make level . Many of these translations fail to mimic the sound of iwr in words 3 and 4.
Several translations hear praise in word 4. There is a clue in the music that iwr is an invocation of Yahweh. The grammar does not preclude this as an interpretation. A performer could hear it that way with my simple rendering.
The path of a righteous one is uprightness. // Upright, the track of the righteous one, you level.
What about the next verse that uses pls in Isaiah?
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| Isaiah 40:12 |
Here the tone is different, a full braggadocio for Yahweh. You can explore the BG to see how many different ways this is translated. What is difficult though is seeing and hearing how many different roots have been used for the same gloss. One can only do this with a database where the overlap of glosses to multiple roots has been reduced to a minimum and is tightly controlled by the functions supporting translation. That has been my work these past 15 years. Was it a reasonable assumption to make about the language of the ancients which many call the word of God?
Who has measured his fistful of waters, or heaven in a span, stabilized, or nourished in three, the dust of the earth, // or weighed in a level the hills, and the hillocks in the balance?
When I translate, you can be sure that if I use the word
level pls or
weigh wql or
balance azn or any other specific and significant word, that I have never used it for more than one root without very good reason. And if you study the concordance - (and it is accurate, being simply a record of the data), my only contributions are layout, my glosses, and my semantic domains. These can be questioned. The bulk of it is raw data, a sequence of ancient words turned on its head and inside out. And on my page of reduced glosses you can check whether my claim is sound and where I have had to compromise. Check out come / came for example. You will still see how carefully I have added unique prepositions (come up / come down) to distinguish the overlaps. (Also note the Aramaic versus the Hebrew).
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