A reader sent me a quote from a post at the blog Doomsday Machines investigating the origin of the phrase “will the survivors [of nuclear war] envy the dead?” It comes from a speech Khrushchev gave at a Soviet-Hungarian Friendship Meeting that was reprinted the next day in Pravda; the relevant bit goes:
I wonder if the authors of these assertions know that if all the nuclear warheads are detonated the earth’s atmosphere will be so contaminated that nobody can tell in what condition the survivors will be and whether they will not envy the dead. Yes, yes, comrades, that is how the question stands.
The blog post continues:
The exact, original Russian from the speech seems to be: “в каком состоянии будут оставшиеся в живых люди — не будут ли они завидовать мёртвым?” — literally, “of the conditions of the surviving people — won’t they envy the dead?” […]
Did Khrushchev get the phrase from [Herman Kahn’s 1960 book On Thermonuclear War]? I have no idea. I have seen it speculated that the Russian version of the phrase is more directly traced to a particular translation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, but tracing Russian origins of a phrase go beyond my ken.
My correspondent said “Naturally the last sentence triggered the thought, this is a perfect question for Language Hat.” He came to the right place, because although there are a number of Russian translations of Treasure Island, which was wildly popular in Europe as soon as it appeared (the first Russian version came out in 1886), I figured the place to look would be in the most popular Soviet translation, the 1935 one by Nikolai Chukovsky, Kornei’s son (he appears as a five-year-old in this LH post about his dad’s diary), and sure enough, I hit pay dirt — at the end of chapter 20 we find (bold added):
— Вы для меня вот как этот плевок! — крикнул он. — Через час я подогрею ваш старый блокгауз, как бочку рома. Смейтесь, разрази вас гром, смейтесь! Через час вы будете смеяться по-иному. А те из вас, кто останется в живых, позавидуют мертвым!
Stevenson’s original:
“There!” he cried. “That’s what I think of ye. Before an hour’s out, I’ll stove in your old block house like a rum puncheon. Laugh, by thunder, laugh! Before an hour’s out, ye’ll laugh upon the other side. Them that die’ll be the lucky ones.”
A very satisfying rummage through literary-quote history; thanks, Duncan!
Now I’m idly curious about one feature of Stevenson’s original, viz., using “stove in” as I guess the infinitive (following auxiliary verb) as opposed to the standard “stave in,” of which “stove in” is standardly the simple past and one candidate for past participle.* Is that an authentic/attested archaism or dialect variation that might have come out of the mouth of an 18th-century piratical type, or is this Stevenson the late 19th-century author just manufacturing fake-rusticisms by muddling up principal parts in a way that actual rustics would not have done?
*”I’ve been kicked by the wind, robbed by the sleet / Had my head stove in, but I’m still on my feet.”
Good question. The OED has only “Past tense and participle staved; also (chiefly Nautical), 1700s–1800s stove,” but it’s basically unchanged from 1915, so there’s probably more variation out there for them as knows how to find it.
Actually, the OED lists a separate sense equal to stave. There are four cites, although two are actually from Treasure Island, including the one above. The earliest cite is from 1820, so after the book takes place; however, the entry is old, and a form primarily used in sailors’ argot could be in use for quite a while before being written down.
Ah, I missed that — thanks for turning it up.
The 1820 citation might be interesting, but dialogue by fictional characters in books set in times and places remote from where they were written seems hazardous as a source of lexicographic data.
The 1820 source uses that sense of stove twice and was written by a Royal Navy officer. It presumably represents real nautical usage. However, the OED entry is actually a bit more confused than I first noted. It says that stove is equivalent to a sense of stave that is specific to boats. The two cites that aren’t from Treasure Island (and the other appearance in that 1820 journal) are all about boats, while the two from Treasure Island are not. So, as J.W. Brewer says, Barbecue’s threats may not reflect actual period diction.
Treasure Island isn’t evidence that the word existed in the 18th century, but it’s presumably evidence that it existed in 1883.
I think the OED just is confused – their Treasure Island quotations under ‘stove’ are their transferred ‘stave’ sense 3.
It would be an easy mistake for anyone – journal-writer, author or pirate – to make, because it’s so irregular. If you wave you haven’t wove, and if you save you haven’t sove (and if you stave your finger in the Scots sense it’s staved, not stove). On the other hand the past tense of ‘hove to’ appears to be ‘hove to’, so there’s a nautical parallel out there for the ‘stove’ version.
One of those 1820 uses is equally consistent with “stove” as past participle of “to stave.”
Obviously the word existed in 1883 in the sense that Stevenson did indeed use it, but my question is whether anyone non-fictional in 1883 uttered it themselves if left to their own devices, and Stevenson’s usage doesn’t seem to do much toward establishing that.
Heave was a class VI strong verb, but the hove form seems to be obsolete except in certain nautical senses, replaced by the weak heaved. Presumably the existence of an alternative past tense contributed to formation of hove to as a present form. (Does this make it one of those verbs with complete levelling of its principal parts? I honestly don’t know. To me, “had hove to” and “had hoven to” sound equally reasonable. Presumably AntC knows the answer.)
On the other hand, stave was formed as a singular form corresponding to staves. Although the latter is a regular plural of staff, the vowel change presumably threw some people. When it was used as verb, meaning to break one or more barrel staves (subsequently extended to hull strakes,* then to other things) it got the strong past stove, as if it too were an inherited class VI verb.
* Apparently, strake is cognate to stretch but not to streak. The OED says:
The oldest sense of strake, prior to coalescence and which I was not previously aware of is: “a section of the iron rim of a cartwheel.”
To me, “had hove to” and “had hoven to” sound equally reasonable.
Yikes I’m not sure I’m authoritative for that. Here’s wikip. Neither ‘had hove’ nor ‘hoven’ appears. Witkionary’s sense 1 for ‘heave to’ I’d say is just plain wrong, and contradicts sense 2[**].
My first reaction is I wouldn’t say either, but ‘was hove to’. ‘Was heaving to’ suggests in the process of getting to a state of hove-to, by hauling on the sails, setting the rudder, etc.
NGrams agrees with my intuition, indeed can’t find ‘had hoven to’. ‘was hove to’ peaks throughout second half of C19th.
etymonline for ‘hove’ has “mid-13c., of birds, “remain suspended in air;” … Common 13c.-16c., then superseded by its derivative, hover (v.)).”
[**] If you just come to a halt head to wind, you won’t be stationary, you’ll get pushed backwards by the wind/sideways by the current/etc. This is known as being ‘in chains’, not to be confused with ‘in stays’. Being hove to means deliberately maintaining some headway/steerage against the current so as to stay in a fixed place relative to a point on land (typically the harbour you’re waiting to get in to).
Thompson suffered cuts around his left eye and was treated in hospital. He said Devine told him: You are lucky I didn’t stove your head in.
Published: Saturday 01 May 1993
Newspaper: Liverpool Echo
County: Lancashire
https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0000271/19930501/018/0004
Maybe Devine had been recently reading Stevenson and the phrase stuck (not stoved) in his head. It could have even been a literary dispute that just got out of hand.
“Lift” remains heben – hob – gehoben in German*, but how the drunk ~ drunken phenomenon shook out in English is not predictable.
* hieven in nautical contexts, regular.
How did “stove in” become “warm up” (подогрею)? Did the translator misunderstand “stove” to mean a device to warm up a room?
Excellent catch, and I’ll bet you’re right.
Wiktionary traces the quote to much older Russian sources, and, ultimately, to the Biblical ones
https://ru.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%B6%D0%B8%D0%B2%D1%8B%D0%B5_%D0%BF%D0%BE%D0%B7%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D1%83%D1%8E%D1%82_%D0%BC%D1%91%D1%80%D1%82%D0%B2%D1%8B%D0%BC
How would the кг in блокгауз be pronounced? /k/? Geminate /k/? /kx/?
geminate g
i’m only a nautical dabbler*, but i agree with AntC that “hove” takes “to be”, not “to have”.
.
* not a duffer; not drowned.
The phrase strikes me as a rather straightforward formation for any tragic situation where it’d be applicable (e.g., natural disaster, war, pandemic, famine), or of course something for gothic fiction in general. You can also envy the dead for something more mundane like their peace and quiet or their nice burial tombs. But as per the Russian Wiktionary link above it seems to have a much more idiomatic status there.
A quick peek at Google n-grams shows that “jealous of the dead” (the other obvious one) and “envy the dead” aren’t too different in frequency until “envy the dead suddenly spikes in the late ’50s.
As an aside, here’s a sentence I didn’t expect to read while doing skimming a few occurrences:
F. C. Green (2013), A Detailed Interpretation of ‘A la Recherche Du Temps Perdu’, p. 383.
PS I was quite surprised that the linked post only looked back to 1900. According to Google N-Grams the phrase (both with envy and jealousy) was twice as common in the nineteenth century as it was in the early twentieth century.
There are also obvious reversals of the same sentiment like “envy not the dead” (random example) or “do not envy the dead.”
PS I was quite surprised that the linked post only looked back to 1900. According to Google N-Grams the phrase (both with envy and jealousy) was twice as common in the nineteenth century as it was in the early twentieth century.
Since the poster was primarily interested in the nuclear-war context, it doesn’t seem particularly surprising to me. And I would bet cash money Khrushchev was referencing Stevenson, not the Bible.
Stevenson Shmevenson. The quote investigators are perhaps overlooking the occult-conspiracy background of Bolshevism. Consider the following from Arthur Edward Waite’s 1911 _The Secret Tradition in Freemasonry_: “The time is at hand when the living will envy the state of the dead.” This is #2 on a list of twelve prophecies which I think Waite is attributing (via some indirect source) to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoine-Joseph_Pernety. Waite goes on to note that all dozen (including the one I quoted) are merely “the ordinary forecasts and reveries concerning the Second Advent in their crude and concrete forms,” as if it they were all already cliches.
> On the other hand the past tense of ‘hove to’ appears to be ‘hove to’,
Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t think hove to is a present form, so this doesn’t to me seem consistent with a present form “stove”. And while with boat as subject, hove to may take “to be”, that’s only because the boat isn’t doing the heaving, the sailors are. You can certainly find “heave the boat” in the wild.
If hove as a verb form outside that nautical idiom is archaic today, there are living citations in the 20th century, which get nearly but not entirely swamped in google by typos for have. The New Yorker offered up “any creature at which he ever hove a stone” in 1952. The intent may be to characterize the subject as a primitif, but the usage is consistent with newspaper citations earlier in the century. The Georgia Game Board quotes someone saying “I’d a hove a rock”, possibly as recent as the 70’s (web-crawled but paywalled), so we can show hove, separate from hove to, taking “to have”.
Would it be fair to say the previous discussion in this thread was lacking heft or would I be coming down too heavy?
Is the historical/prescriptive distinction between envy and jealousy better maintained in other languages, and if so do any of them talk of being jealous of the dead? Being jealous of death makes sense, but jealous of the dead? I can concoct hypothetical scenarios in which one might be jealous of a dead person (eg if one’s spouse was in love with a ghost), but is any such scenario trope material?
Maybe irrelevant. Whether or not any said “we who are about to die salute you” addressed to such a pissant as Claudius, I wonder whether anyone eventually took that saying to be a welcome to the departed.
1807, Saturday 22 August
The act of getting into or out of a boat, when alongside of the floating-light, was at all times attended with more or less difficulty; her rolling motion was so great, that the gunwale, though about five feet above the surface of the water, she dipped nearly into it, upon the one side, while her keel could not be far from the surface on the other. This was her state, even in moderate weather, in certain directions of the wind, especially for the period of about an hour, when she was thwarting to the tide, or rode in what sailors call the trough of the sea. The act of getting on board was then attended with great difficulty, even to seamen, and was particularly so to landmen, requiring all the attention which the landing-master could bestow, in getting the artificers safely transferred from the boats to the ship, and vice versa. […]
It also formed a critical operation with the sailors to keep the boats at a convenient distance from the vessel, to guard against being too far off; as, in that case, the man, in the act of stepping off the ship’s side, might have been in danger of falling into the sea. If, on the other hand, the boat was allowed to come in contact with the vessel, she would have been in danger of being staved or damaged.
1809, Thursday, 1 June
At 7 p.m., one of the boats, as he feared, was unluckily filled with sea from a wave breaking into her, and it was with great difficulty that she could be baled out and got on board, with the loss of her oars, rudder, and loose thwarts. Such was the motion of the ship, that in taking this boat on board, her gunwale was stove in, and she otherwise received considerable damage.
Two extracts from Robert Stevenson’s 1824 Account of building the Bell Rock Light-House:
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/48414/pg48414-images.html#PLATE_XI
R L Stevenson, intended as a third generation of Lighthouse Engineers, will doubtless have read his grandfather’s Account, perhaps before direct experience of this sort of thing confirmed his preference for a career in literature.
By the way, do Brits say “Robert Louie”? We always pronounce the -s on this side of the pond, but it occurred to me to wonder.
Is the historical/prescriptive distinction between envy and jealousy better maintained in other languages
Ger. Neid and Eifersucht are such fundamentally different things that it doesn’t make any sense to ask about a “distinction” between them.
“Denn du sollst keinen andern Gott anbeten. Denn der HERR heißt ein Eiferer; ein eifriger Gott ist er” . Nothing about envy in there. Envy of what, after all?
and if so do any of them talk of being jealous of the dead?
Would make no sense. “Neidisch auf die Toten” makes sense.
I think at some point Anglophones got zealous and jealous confused because they sound similar, it’s been downhill ever since.
Eifrig and Eifer have completely divorced from Eifersucht since Luther; Wiktionary doesn’t even know the meaning he used. And an Eiferer is definitely a zealot, not jealous.
By the way, do Brits say “Robert Louie”
Well, I do.
Yes, “Robert Louie” from me. With -s I’d have to stop and think who you’re talking about. (Robert Lewis who?)
Yes, but the usual wording uses the transitive verb: Die Lebenden werden die Toten beneiden.
Well, I do.
Yes, “Robert Louie” from me.
Thanks. When I thought about it I realized that must be the case, but it sounds so weird when you’ve heard and said “Robert Lewis Stevenson” all your life…
Must it be the case? Oxford Learners’ Dictionaries says RLS’s middle name is /ˌluːɪs/ in both BrE and NAmE. (Youglish UK results are mixed, and hard to distinguish since there’s a following s.) And shouldn’t we use Stevenson’s own pronunciation? This source says he was originally named Lewis (after a grandfather), and later changed the spelling but not the pronunciation; sounds legit, and I didn’t find anything to contradict it. Biographies also say the middle name was the one he went by, so anyone who knew him in person would have known how it was pronounced.
(My grandfather was a Lewis, named after the Lewis of Lewis and Clark — according to family lore his father insisted that “we have nothing to do with those decadent French kings”. But he was *nicknamed* “Louie”!)
Another fun pronunciation fact: the surname Jekyll was pronounced to rhyme with “treacle” by the family of Gertrude Jekyll, famous garden designer, whose brother was a friend of Stevenson, and Stevenson endorsed that pronunciation for his character.
And I know someone who spells it ‘Jeacle’ and pronounces it ‘jekkil’, just to add to the confusion
LPD and CEPD list both pronunciations for Jekyll.
Oxford Learners’ Dictionaries says RLS’s middle name is /ˌluːɪs/ in both BrE and NAmE. (Youglish UK results are mixed, and hard to distinguish since there’s a following s.) And shouldn’t we use Stevenson’s own pronunciation? This source says he was originally named Lewis (after a grandfather), and later changed the spelling but not the pronunciation; sounds legit, and I didn’t find anything to contradict it.
Oy. Now my brain is further twisted. OK, I’ll keep saying “Lewis” both because it sounds utterly natural to me and because that was his own pronunciation, but apparently a lot of Brits now say “Louie” because that is their usual pronunciation of “Louis.” What a world!
Again, the pronunciation dictionaries simply list both pronunciations for Louis.
Joel at Far Outliers is continuing to post excerpts from Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Leo Damrosch, and in the latest I found this bit of interest:
And DE will enjoy this:
“The world wants ‘bigly’“
Due to the vicissitudes of history, Anglican missionary efforts reached the South Pacific fairly late, after various Dissenters already had an insurmountable head start in most of Polynesia.* The Solomon Islands is currently where the Anglicans have the largest market share, having bounced back nicely from that unfortunate 19th century incident in which the Rt Rev J. C. Patteson was martyred by the locals. A fun fact about the Samoan religious lexicon is that the Methodists (second-largest fraction of Protestants) are reportedly referred to as practicing the “Tongan religion” (Lotu Tonga), because Methodism did not arrive directly from England, but indirectly via Tonga.
*They did do well for a while in Hawaii despite late arrival because of the patronage of the local royal family, who thought they seemed more monarchy-supportive than the Calvinist/post-Calvinist missionaries from New England who had gotten there first.
As Louis had discovered in Tahiti, islanders might embrace conversion but continue to hold on quietly to their old beliefs.
Some missionaries have been remarkably effective at getting their targets to adopt the outward trappings and characteristic locutions of (modern Western-style) Christianity while pretty much entirely missing its substance. I suspect that the missionaries themselves were often unaware that there might be more to Christianity than what they had so successfully conveyed to the locals.
This culpable blindness is not showing any signs of going away any time soon.
There was a distressing article in the Economist lately about US “evangelicals” pushing the large-scale use of “AI” to “translate” the Bible into all languages in order to bring about the Second Coming (or whatever such people imagine themselves to be doing.)
It’s paywalled, but this is a snippet:
Roger Blench was complaining about something very similar not long ago: this sort of thing is worse than useless, because it sucks funding and support away from genuine Bible translation (and general literacy and language development/preservation work, which was what Blench was concerned about.)
One notes also the essentially magical view of the Bible implicit in this project.
We had a secular example of this sort of noosphere fungus here before, with RobotsMali.
The electricity to run Artificial Idiocy for six years may simply not exist.
Isn’t there an Arthur C. Clarke story about what happens when the last extant human language without its own methodologically-dubious complete Bible translation gets one?
Indeed there is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Billion_Names_of_God
Classic story. I hope you’re both joking.
Surely there have been some really bad human-made Bible translations somewhere, and surely there are fun anecdotes about what happened with them.
Eugene Nida
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Nida
(a proper linguist) had a number of anecdotes about, if not dreadful Bible translations as such, at least about seriously misleading translations of individual words or concepts. (Behold the Seal Pup of God!)
Not about Bible translation, but one of his more memorable tales about cultural misunderstanding, was about two single female missionaries in some very remote part of Central America (IIRC.) They spent many years in the field, and got on reasonably well with the local people, but made no headway in converting people whatsoever.
Eventually, it was (somehow) discovered that the problem was that they took breakfast together on the verandah every morning, drinking orange juice.
It was already a matter of some perplexity to the locals that here were two young women with no acknowledged regular sexual partners. It was assumed that they were simply keeping their various liaisons private very successfully. However, the local term for “orange juice” literally translates as “baby-killer”: it is thought to be an abortifacient. The spectacle of the two of them brazenly drinking it in public every single morning was just too much. It tended to undermine their evangelical efforts.
According to another biographer, Claire Harman, “Around this time (1868-69) Stevenson changed his name from Lewis to the Frenchified ‘Louis’. It is said that the impetus behind the change was Thomas Stevenson’s sudden and overpowering dislike of an Edinburgh radical and dissenter called David Lewis, who embodied, in the engineer’s view, ‘everything dangerous in Church and State’. But as the pronunciation remained identical, Lewis – or Louis as we must now call him – may have intended it more as a joke than as a gesture of political solidarity, and it took a while to stick.”
Harman doesn’t say why she assumes the pronunciation ‘remained identical’. My mother always said Louie, and would have got this from her mother, whose father was a friend of Stevenson – though they probably called each other by their last names.
Perhaps he wasn’t consistent. But the French pronunciation goes with the velvet smoking jacket and sounds more bohemian. (As does Charles Rennie Mackintosh.)
(Behold the Seal Pup of God!)
I’ve seen that cited as an example of the right way to translate the Bible. Also “white as egret’s feathers” for people who never see snow.
In connected speech, is there even any difference between “Lewis Stevenson” and “Louie Stevenson”?
For me, definitely; in the first, the vowel is /ɪ/ (and if I’m not speaking too quickly there’s a perceptibly long /s/), while in the second it’s /iː/.
Leaving the /s/ out of it, “Louie” has the FLEECE vowel in its second syllable where “Lewis” has the KIT vowel. At least for me. But maybe not for everyone?
I guess for me as well, after all.
I’ve seen that cited as an example of the right way to translate the Bible
Yes, I was being too compressed. I think that Nida himself actually presented it as a positive example.
The Kusaal Bible, even the 1976 New Testament, seems always to have been regarded as pretty good by the actual speakers, and (FWIW) I myself have often been impressed by the skill of those responsible for the 2016 complete Bible, which is often quite strikingly idiomatic. They’re also pretty good at paraphrasing away expressions in the originals that would baffle by cultural inappropriateness if translated at all literally (like kissing or embracing people as a greeting, for example.)
The surviving misleading translations I’ve often moaned about (like using siig “life force” for “spirit”, or kikirig “fairy” for “demon”), I think got sanctified by tradition so early that translators are now just stuck with them, however inappropriate they may feel them to be (or to once have been: I suppose siig just does mean “spirit, soul” in Christian usage nowadays.)
The linguistic evidence suggests that some such Christian jargon actually predates even the use of Agolle Kusaal itself by missionaries to the Kusaasi: faangid “saviour”, for example, is basically an impossible* form in the Agolle dialect, and is obviously borrowed from Toende Kusaal fãagɩt, itself probably borrowed from (or calqued on) Mooré fã́agdá.
* Well, obviously it’s possible, or people couldn’t even say it. But this, and faangir /fã:gɪɾ/ “salvation”, are the only words in the language where g is preserved after /a:/: it’s regularly lost in this position. As in faand “robber”, which is etymologically the exact same word …
Still Heiland m. in German, strikingly unchanged in a thousand years. The ordinary participle “healing” has had its unstressed vowel weakened as expected, heilend.
Phonologically that would require reinterpretation as a compound, but even by such stretches as Ahorn m. ‘maple’, which “contains” Horn n. ‘horn’ and a cran “morpheme” A- and has thereby kept its /h/ and its unreduced second vowel, that is too much: *Hailand n. “shark country”.
There are plenty of unexplained passages in the OT where none of the forced interpretations make sense, even in the best of translations. I was thinking there must be some truly and thoroughly bad, ungrammatical or incomprehensible translations out there, which would utterly fail their mission but would provide us with something to laugh about. I suppose AI will come up with something soon enough, but laughing at a machine is not as satisfying.
reinterpretation as a compound
That would actually work (more or less) for Agolle Kusaal faangid too. Noun combining forms can end in /a:/, as with yaa- “grandparent” (which is from *yaag-, in fact), and the lenition of g is a stem-internal thing, so it wouldn’t apply to the initial consonant of the second element of a compound. And gid is a possible shape for a noun of that class (cf sid “husband.”)
“More or less” because the stress would be on the second syllable if faangid were really a compound, but stress sandhi rules would actually neutralise the difference in most contexts. Theoretically, stress is potentially contrastive in Kusaal, despite regularly falling on word roots, partly because of compounding, and partly because some words have unstressed prefixes; but I’ve never been able to contrive an actual minimal pair.
But it’s being too clever by half, really, to summon up such an elaborate explanation: quite a few loans break normal phonotactic constraints to some extent. Rather like ideophones.
I suppose “constraint” is not really the mot juste in such cases: you’re talking about patterns reflecting the outcomes of rules which were previously exceptionless in native vocabulary, rather than synchronic impossibilities in the language as it is now.
There’s the further point that the Kusaal words recorded by Haaf in 1967 suggest that the loss of g after long open vowels may still have been a change in progress at that point, though it’s not always clear whether he’s transcribing Agolle or Toende dialect. But it is possible that faang
Cut off in me prime …
… possible that faangid is actually a preserved archaism, like Heiland. But that would require some implausible subsequent changes (Haaf’s g is probably meant to represent [ɣ] in these cases, and a later shift to [g] seems odd in this phonetic context.)
Moreover, it’s actually known that the first Christian missionaries to the Kusaasi used Mooré and Toende Kusaal, so I think inter-dialectal borrowing is more plausible. There are other instances of loans of Bible-related terms from Toende into Agolle Kusaal, like malek “angel” in the 1976 New Testament, later replaced by the expected Agolle form maliak.
Not to talk about the loss of everything after a .
Perhaps these LLM-spawned Bible translations will lead to excitingly novel heresies …
Given that some of the very most problematic words to translate are exactly those like “God”, “spirit”, “soul”, “sin”, “demon”, I think one can be quietly confident about the heresiogenic potential.
Further bit from the Econ article:
“That holy grail of what is the minimum amount of parallel texts that we can feed into the model to fine-tune it …”
It seems fair to say that this person has a fundamentally mistaken view of how natural languages actually work. And about how Biblical exegesis works.
“Louie” has the FLEECE vowel in its second syllable where “Lewis” has the KIT vowel. At least for me. But maybe not for everyone? — I guess “Louie” has the FLEECE vowel in happY-tensing accents, which is most of them, but the KIT vowel in most of the rest, including conservative RP. WP says of Scottish English “The happY vowel is most commonly /e/ (as in face), but may also be /ɪ/ (as in kit) or /i/ (as in fleece)”
Suppose persons A and B both pronounce phrase X differently from phrase Y. It is nevertheless possible that when A says X where B expects to hear Y, then B will in fact hear Y rather than X. This is more likely if A and B have different accents, and/or when the phonetic difference between X and Y is small. In other words, people don’t always listen carefully enough.
I was thinking there must be some truly and thoroughly bad, ungrammatical or incomprehensible translations out there, …
The Septuagint would surely count amongst them. (Arguably some of its ‘misunderstandings’ are for political reasons rather than incompetence.) And then the Gospel writers (also in Greek) spin a fantastical confabulation [**] on the incomprehensibility of (say) the παρθένος birth in Isaiah 7:14.
[**] Despite the wonder-child having no earthly male parent, still he manages to be of the House of David, a lineage supposedly traced for a thousand years.
The LXX was written by people fluent in Greek, and extremely competent if not fluent in Hebrew. That they didn’t understand every bit of the very literary Hebrew of 200 or 600 years previous does not suffice to condemn them.
I’m talking about people who have no business writing in a language they know very poorly, but do it anyway.
Defending the honour of the LXX translators: παρθένος changed its meaning in Greek after their time: it was a reasonable translation, at least, for עַלְמָ֗ה at the time they chose it.
https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0057:entry=parqe/nos
The following is the passage in Josephus, De bello Judaico, that was mentioned beside Ecclesiastes 4:2 in the Russian Wiktionary entry that Dmitry Pruss linked to (from the old Loeb edition available here):
It doesn’t seemed to have been mentioned in this thread that Euripides has a very straightforward ζηλῶ φθιμένους ‘I envy the dead’ in the Alcestis:
Great find!
The expression has a somewhat different valance in the play though. Usually, it means, I wish I were dead. However, in Alcestis, Admetus seems to mean more, I wish my queen had not died in my place, so she would still be alive.
I don’t know how you get that from “I wish I could die! It was to an ill fate that my mother bore me. I envy the dead, I long for their state, I yearn to dwell in those halls below.”
The LXX translators were perfectly fluent in Greek but sometimes (certainly not always) produced Greek that seemed odd or stilted or clumsy to the ears of later generations of scholars. Bracketing the question of how they dealt with specific Hebrew lexemes or phrases of opaque-to-their-generation meaning, I think the most parsimonious overall explanation is that at least at times they were pursuing a theory/methodology (about how translation should work and what the intended use of this particular translation was) that was significantly different from the theories/methodologies that have prevailed more recently in Bible-translation circles.* This has sometimes led to a deprecating tone in LXX scholarship written by modern scholars who are convinced that they themselves, with their fancy degrees from German universities etc., are much cleverer than the seemingly incompetent dolts who produced the LXX text. I think the attitude this reflects is hubristic and unfortunate.
I was just this morning amusing myself as the snow fell outside my window by reviewing various English translations of Baruch 4:36, which may** not have been based on a Hebrew-or-otherwise-Semitic original. The KJV has (before its spelling was updated) “O Ierusalem, looke about thee toward the East, and behold the ioy that commeth vnto thee from God.” Which is nice enough, but one 21st-century alternative has “Look around toward the east, O Ierousalem, and see the merriment that is coming to you from God.” And it’s not that using “merriment” instead of “joy” to render εὐφροσύνην is either righter or wronger,*** but it’s rather lovely.
*Many of which are of course wrongheaded and stem from what David E. disapprovingly called a “magical” view of the Bible.
**Some scholars hypothesize that the earlier parts of Baruch were translated from a lost Semitic original while the latter parts were first composed in Greek. Not impossible, but not proven and probably neither provable nor disprovable.
***Standard references offer other possibilities such as mirth, gladness, or good cheer.
@languagehat: That particular passage doesn’t indicate that, but my memory of the play, taken as a whole, certainly seems to. While I can’t comment on any specific subtleties of the Greek textual choices, in
it seems that the king is using “OMHPON” to personify Alcestis as the very earthly joy he will no longer have. He has several speeches where he states that there is nothing to please him in life, now that Thanatos has guided her away—although everyone, including Alcestis, council him that he should not enforce such an extended lifetime of misery upon himself. Wishing that he had died instead also emphasizes his hypocrisy, since he complains about the direness of the situation beforehand but doesn’t voice a wish that he had died instead until it is too late to do anything about it.