On 05/09/2023 05:00, Quadibloc wrote:
On Monday, September 4, 2023 at 9:52:19 PM UTC-6, Quadibloc wrote:
On Monday, September 4, 2023 at 9:49:24 PM UTC-6, Quadibloc wrote:
On Monday, September 4, 2023 at 2:17:55 AM UTC-6, Gerald Kelleher wrote: >>>> "Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion?
Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season? or canst thou guide Arcturus
with his sons? Knowest thou the ordinances of heaven? canst thou set the >>>> dominion thereof in the earth?"
The term mazzal, literally meaning a constellation in the Zodiac,
I suppose, then, that Hebrew doesn't indicate the plural number in all
the places that English does, and so the passage should have been
translated as:
Can you bind the sweet influences of the Pleiades, or loose the bands
of Orion? Can you bring forth the constellations of the Zodiac in their
seasons, or can you guide Arcturus with his sons? Do you know the
ordinances of Heaven? Can you set their dominion on the Earth?
No doubt there are modern translations that have made such a
correction.
And, indeed, they have. For example, the NIV does it as:
Can you bring forth the constellations in their seasons or lead out
the Bear with its cubs?
On the page I looked at, I saw some modern versions doing what I
would consider a mistranslation. Some refer to "the Bear with its
train" rather than sons or cubs.
That may be perfectly fine, I am not knowledgeable about the
underlying Hebrew as far as that ambiguity is concerned.
But some _other_ translations, which I presume to share the same interpretation of the original text, refer to "the Bear with her
satellites"!
Stars don't orbit constellations, so the phrase looks bizarre.
But given "with her train" from other translations... that would
be the same as "with her fellow travellers". Which, *in Russian*,
translates to _sputniki_. *That* could then be translated into
English as "satellites".
I shouldn't think so. But satellites in the pre-space age had a meaning
of aligned states or individuals around some dominant leader as well as
objects in orbit around a larger gravitationally dominant body.
Were Red spies trying to corrupt modern Bible translations during
the Cold War? Or is it just that the word "satellite" has a more
general meaning in English than I'm giving it credit for?
The main problem is that American English is much more dogmatic about
meaning than original English or Japanese for example. If you are
monolingual it is very easy to assume that every word in your native
language maps onto just one word in another.
Japanese and English make much of the phonetic soundalikes with
different meanings.
"The sun rose as he rows past rose rows". for example.
(better ones available in Japanese along the lines of
裏庭には二羽, 庭には二羽鶏がいる
(uraniwa ni wa niwa, niwa ni wa niwa niwatori ga iru)
This means roughly, “There are two chickens in the backyard and two
chickens in the front yard”. Most "ni" and "wa" are different words!
Ambiguity is inherent in any translation - more so if it is across
millennia and ancient scripts. I pity realtime language interpreters
today in languages where you can negate the entire meaning of a sentence
by adding a postfix operator onto the end of it.
Even in US vs UK English there is ample scope for miscommunication.
Asking a female US secretary for a rubber would not go down well at all,
but in UK English that is a pencil eraser and not slang for a condom.
--
Martin Brown
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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