Sunday 10 July 2022

How should we translate "man"?

I have a new blue-ray player. It is connected to my TV by a directional HDMI cable. The input has an arrowhead pointing out and the output an arrowhead pointing in (if that's clear). The cable will work in both directions, but the intelligence of the input may not be fully used if the cable is hooked up backwards. 

The title of a recent post on How should we translate "man" by Ian Paul seems to get the arrows backwards. Are we translating the English gloss "man" into our own thoughts? Or are we translating from another language using the English gloss "man"? Both were in view. This one grunt in our tongue underlines the translation problem with some significance. I made a few comments on the question which stimulated me to look closer at what I had done.

There are a lot of issues: the gender connotations, the singular-plural axis, what gloss to use, word-play, metaphor and theology - particularly Christology, and the structural significance of the source word and its parallel in the verse. [Here the direction of my cable is from Hebrew (input) to English (output).]

This word (man and its plural men) occurs in the King James translation over 4,000 times. When I see this, I ask what Hebrew roots are these glosses rendering? There is no easy way to determine this without a database of the KJV. Maybe I should load it into my data - a thought that I quickly dismissed for the moment. With a little (a little more than a little) work, the Blue Letter Bible site allows a query or two to identify the unique lexical items that use this English word or its plural as all or part of a gloss. These are (in SimHebrew)

adm, anow, aiw, byl, glgl, dl, gbr, kll,

sometimes with a qualifier (child, old, young, dead, poor, ...) as in zcr (at times not even using the natural homonym male), zqn, ild, nyr, mvt, dl.

Also to be noted are the uses of the modifier cl (all / every) - sometimes with aiw and sometimes without it, and zh (this / that) and other particles  in order to clarify their generic scope, and as a default generic subject of a verb (e.g. Ex 21:13).

This is just one admittedly difficult gloss that is rendered in the KJV by 7 or more different Hebrew roots, and with another uncountable set of roots as a generic qualifier. I have looked at the KJV and the lack of concordance is mind-boggling. This became a primary focus for me in my translation effort.

So - the backward use of the cable is complex - how did KJV English gloss for 'man/men' get to where it got? This particular translation, like my old DVD and CD player, is broken.

In my own work, the forward connection of the cable reveals the mapping of Hebrew stem to English gloss. You can find it in the concordance. In particular, look at (use you find feature on the browser) the domain human so you can more easily separate the significant from the accidental uses of the string 'man'. The best search with ctrl-f is for 'man,' - that will identify all the significant roots (only two - aiw and mt) and the roots (a few others) where man/men is qualified by an adjective as part of the gloss.

Concordance and the support of the musical line were my two guiding principles. They were in part supported by database rules and exceptions. You can find my translation here



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