Translating rare words

Claude Mariottini has another post on translating, this time of rare words.

He deals with various renditions of xnk. You can see the 70 words beginning with xn here.  

The three occurrences of tsade-nun-chet can be seen as variations in putting something down. In each case, the figurative nature of language is evident and sometimes there is an apt word in the host language that expresses it. So - 'dismount' perhaps rather than 'putting herself down' from the donkey, or 'pierce' rather than 'putting the tent peg down' into the earth. The troubles with the apt word are twofold: 

1. that it will it may be a gloss for some other Hebrew root, or
2. it will create an artificial hapax in the English text itself.

It makes the puzzle tougher if we translate for real concordance.

An interesting example is another one beginning with the same two letters, tsade-nun-mem - unique indeed in Gen 41:23. A real hapax in English for this uniquely used stem xnm would be 'frazzled'. And behold, seven stalks of grain, frazzled, flimsy, blighted by the east wind, sprouted after them. Other translations use 'withered' and use the same gloss for other stems like yod-beth-shin (ibw). So the uniqueness is lost in translation. 

It is interesting that xn (tsade-nun) is a rare letter combination for the first two letters of a root - there are only 70 words in the Hebrew canon (WLC) that begin with xn.

Disclaimer. I am self-trained. I learn by doing. I began learning Hebrew at age 60, 17 years ago. My work has been aided by algorithms that I wrote to stop me from using similar sounding glosses in English for two different Hebrew stems. I have sometimes deliberately allowed artificial hapaxes and I have allowed some overlap between English glosses and multiple Hebrew stems -- for some common words like walk, come, go, it is absolutely awkward to force concordance. For prepositions also, it is impossible for a large number of reasons related to the variety of ways that prepositions are used or implied or avoided for verbs.

You don't need to believe me, but you do have to do the work of learning the Scripture well, and you have to leave behind those assumptions that are related to the desire to be right or to have power over others.