I enjoyed John McIntyre’s April 27 post:
My Facebook feed has been cluttered this week with people posting this remark attributed to the late Joseph Sobran: “In 100 years we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high schools to teaching Remedial English in college.”
Let’s unpack some of what is in this.
First, a century ago, many fewer young people went to college at all, and they usually came from schools with curriculum designed to prepare for a college education. And, mind you, even then, scholarship was not necessarily pronounced. In the Ivy League colleges, the “gentleman’s C” was entirely satisfactory, because valuable connections and networking easily compensated for a mediocre education.
It is a mistake to equate the students of that era with the great surge after the Second World War of students seeking college educations for the first time in their families, a much wider range of students coming from public schools generally rather than selective academies. So this “gone from teaching” oversimplification ignores complex social and educational developments of the past seventy years. It is less an analysis than a slogan, a sneer at current students that overlooks the possibility that they might be at school to learn something.*
But at bottom the Sobran complaint is the tired conservative trope, repeated generation from generation, that there was a time in the past when people were smarter and more capable, compared to the degenerate present. Cicero complained that people were no longer speaking good Latin. Egbert of Liege bemoaned that “scholarly effort is in decline everywhere as never before” in the eleventh century. Jonathan Swift wrote in 1712 that people had so corrupted the English language that the Crown should establish an academy to regulate it. It was always better in the past, for those of us who recall it.
Posting the Sobran sneer does not make one a brave voice crying in the wilderness. It is rather, and merely, a badge of smugness.
I’m surprised he doesn’t point out what a vile creature Sobran was; perhaps he subscribes to the nil nisi bonum doctrine, but I don’t, so I’ll leave you with the sample quote “I won’t be satisfied until the Church resumes burning for heresy” and send you to Wikipedia for furthers and betters, as they say in Endeavour.
This is of course one of those weird semi-random internet things. Sobran died in 2010 and I don’t know how long before that he uttered the quote (could have been several decades), so why would McIntyre’s facebook feed suddenly be overrun by people quoting it in 2024? If you go to Figure 11 on page 31 of this, you see an interesting graph of how the percentage of 17-year-olds in the U.S. who graduated from high school changed from 1869 to 1992. https://nces.ed.gov/pubs93/93442.pdf We are now (some years after Sobran’s remark) at the approximate one-century anniversary of the halfway point in the most dramatic surge – from approx 1910 to approx 1940 that stat went from 10% up to 50%, before dipping down temporarily as many young men did not bother to acquire a high school diploma before going off to fight in WW2. I don’t have time right now to google up data to see how that upward trend in high school completion (there are other graphs on trends in high school enrollment in the first place, including those who didn’t quite finish) correlates with the decline in the percentage of those in high school who studied Latin. (Once you got past the Civil War and away from moneyed parts of the East Coast and public high schools became a thing, Greek instruction was not necessarily anywhere near as ubiquitous.)
But of course in the days when a very small percentage of teenagers went to high school, it wasn’t like there was some meritocratic sorting that assured that those were the smartest 5-10% rather than simply the children of those families with enough wealth that the pressure to get the kid out working in the fields or the steel mill or what have you at 13 or 14 was not so strong. The implication that only smart kids can learn Latin and Greek is hooey.
But maybe even more importantly, at the same time in the early 20th-century that high school enrollment and completion were dramatically increasing, even the most high-prestige U.S. colleges were eliminating (often in stages) any requirement of knowledge of the classical languages before admission and then, ultimately, any requirement of such knowledge before graduation. This necessarily lowered the incentive for high schools to focus as heavily on those subjects and for students to focus on them if not compelled.
FWIW, in the bad old days of Jim Crow, there was for a time only a single public high school in my entire home state (admittedly a very small state) that black students were allowed to attend. And an even smaller percentage of the state’s black students stayed enrolled in school once they reached high school age than the modest percentage of white students. But until 1920 if you were a black student who went to that high school you had no option but to take Latin, because the school was run by the redoubtable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwina_Kruse, and Miss Kruse had high expectations for her students.
In a striking example of the so-called Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, I just saw Sobran’s name again after not having seen it (that I remember) for quite some time before this post. I saw a headline about which wacky third-party with ballot access in California had chosen R.F. Kennedy, Jr. as their presidential contender this year and was looking up their previous offerings, and it turns out they almost ran Sobran as their vice-presidential candidate in 2000 but then he backed out and the top of the ticket had to find another running mate (a fellow so obscure he lacks a wikipedia article devoted to him).
“Sobran was named the Constitution Party’s vice presidential nominee in 2000, but withdrew later that year due to scheduling conflicts.”
Sobran was such a rightwing shitbag that he was fired by William Buckley.
I mean …
I’m quite sure that a lot of the people who complain about the level of current education and how it was better a century ago wouldn’t mind at all if the system went back to one where only children from a small elite would attend university. From what I’ve seen, those people think that they would be part of that elite, so that’s fine for them.
I have to admit to having read Sobran occasionally as a teenager, and finding him occasionally entertaining with quotable quotes such as the above. That quote could serve as a gateway/incentive to a discussion on the nature of mass education, and indeed it seems to be doing so now.
He lost me with his views on Shakespeare though.
https://www.writersreps.com/Alias-Shakespeare
In which he seriously suggests that the man who ran away from England for 7 years after farting in front of the queen was the same man who wrote Hamlet.
> withdrew later that year due to scheduling conflicts.
He had something more important to do than the vice presidency?
I know, I know, he had not a bat in hell’s chance. But whether you’re deluded and think maybe, or you think you’re “moving the two parties on policy”, it’s a pretty big thing to suddenly say “Whoops, sorry, something came up” to.
Since the teaching of Latin is being discussed, it is appropriate that we not fall into the “ad hominem” fallacy: whatever one may think of the messenger the question ought to be whether the message has any merit. And I think -I fear- it does. Because part of it is true: Latin and Greek are indeed no longer taught in High School, and are typically unavailable even as options. And while I remain agnostic on the benefits of adding Greek, I believe Latin should be available to all high schoolers and possibly made obligatory.
My pro-Latin teaching comments (especially my first one, third comment from the top) at this thread-
https://languagehat.com/cultural-heritage-in-school/
-were made just over a decade ago (Tempus fugit indeed…), and since then my experience as a teacher has done nothing but strengthen that belief. I wrote then of the experience of having had to help students -native speakers of English, wholly schooled in English- make sense of complex English prose. I have had to continue to do so a number of times over the last ten years, and I don’t think I can adequately express the pity I felt -and still feel-for those poor students who, as far as I am concerned, have been betrayed by the authorities in charge of education. For most I suspect the damage will never be undone.
I especially remember (this was a few years before the pandemic) an American literature student whose roommate was taking a French course with me and who put the two of us in contact, knowing that as a linguist I might be able to help her (The fact that I, a native speaker of French mostly schooled in French, all too often became an unofficial resource for native anglophone students struggling with written English, is an irony that is not lost on me).
This student’s problem was simple: despite having been sent to a (fairly expensive) private high school in Western Canada, (L1 English speaker, upper middle class family, wholly schooled in English) she quite literally could not read an American classic -Moby Dick, in case you were wondering- that had been assigned in one of her classes. Despite her looking up every new word in a dictionary.
She could not read it because the prose was too complex: navigating through all the long sentences where you had to keep track of the main clause in order to make sense of what the many subordinate clauses referred to was as alien to her as reading Sumerian. She was frustrated, practically in tears, deeply ashamed of herself, utterly convinced that the fault was hers.
I actually went over several pages of Melville with her, breaking down the sentences with her, and I was pleased to see that she grasped and took to grammatical analysis very quickly. She was definitely of above-average intelligence, and I am convinced that if she had had just a couple of years of Latin in High School she would never have needed my help, and indeed would have found reading -and thus, her University studies more generally-much easier.
I am just as convinced that the educational system has utterly failed her, not only in not teaching her adequate reading skills in her L1, but also -and this is to mind unforgivable-making her believe that her inability to do at University was wholly her fault.
(Sorry if this comes off as a bit of a rant, but this is a bit of a sore spot for me, as I imagine most Hatters must have guessed).
“deeply ashamed of herself, utterly convinced that the fault was hers.”
Unsurprisingly. You can’t read this text because what? Because it is complex. Because you’re what?
I can’t ahve any opinion on how to deal with it in English and don’t know how to deal with it in Russian, but it is very difficult to defeat this component of arrogance (or self-denigration in this case) of readers.
@Etienne. “She was definitely of above-average intelligence, and I am convinced that if she had had just a couple of years of Latin in High School she would never have needed my help, and indeed would have found reading -and thus, her University studies more generally-much easier.”
Instruction in English morphology, syntax, and style would have been the shortest and easiest route to understanding English morphology, syntax, and style.
Etienne: I don’t understand the connection to Latin at all. What if your student had taken another second language — doesn’t everyone take French and English in school in Canada? Or what if high school English were taught in the way that you had taught her to read Moby Dick? There are people who are gifted readers and writers in English, who barely know what Latin is.
Is it that when teaching an entirely foreign language, the teachers and their students don’t take anything for granted, and don’t skim over syntactic difficulties without explanation?
Also, how much hard syntax do students get to experience by the end of second-year Latin?
how much hard syntax do students get to experience by the end of second-year Latin
I did two years of school Latin, and have the ‘O’ Level to prove it [**]. Beyond vocab and conjugations, we learnt a few of its weird sentence-structures. (I remember ut+inifinitive, ablative absolute, deponents) The Latin master would occasionally point out the parallels to English. I’d say those were abstruse academic English structures almost certainly calqued from Latin. I’d be astonished if any of them turned up in Melville. The challenge in Melville for those who’ve learnt only contemporary English is the large amounts of abstruse sailing/whaling vocab and imagery, and C19th English long sentences.
_If_ there’s merit in teaching Latin, it’s all the vocabulary you learn, that you then come across in scientific terminology. But in Melville not so much.
So what @M said: Instruction in English morphology, syntax, and style is what readers of English literature need.
I’m most surprised this isn’t blindingly obvious to @Etienne as a teacher.
navigating through all the long sentences where you had to keep track of the main clause in order to make sense of what the many subordinate clauses referred to was as alien to her as reading Sumerian.
Then teaching her Sumerian would be about as useful as teaching Latin. And neither as useful as teaching English. Or perhaps general Linguistic analysis, including notions like topic-comment, focus, dependent clauses.
The Latin master did inter alia rail against how poorly English grammar was taught ‘these days’/that he had to teach English grammar first before he could teach Latin. (This is of course the sort of antediluvianism that’s been going on from before Plato’s time: Caesar was an illiterate yob, etc.) What he meant by English grammar was bizarre: no sort of English I’d ever heard before. In fact exactly calqued Latin (as I now realise).
[**] This was at one of the last Grammar schools left in London; and which boasted a high rate of its alumni getting into Oxford/Cambridge. (High for a school in the public system, that is.) So exactly what Sobran would be lauding.
“It is a mistake to equate the students of that era with the great surge after the Second World War of students seeking college educations for the first time in their families, a much wider range of students coming from public schools…”
And why Latin can’t be taught in public schools? Because Latin in public schools is “unimaginable” or a more realistic argument is implied but not named?
___
If the argument is that Latin is seen as a part of elite culture (without any other value) and not a part of working class culture and when we extend education to this second ethnicity we maybe should not assimilate them (impose elite culture on them) just as a Russian teacher in Africa won’t teach Pushkin to Hausa speakers – perhaps it is even correct.
Then teaching her Sumerian would be about as useful as teaching Latin.
If only ə de vivre would show up and give us a lecture about the necessity of everyone getting a good basic grasp of Sumerian in elementary school.
I’ll use this occasion to note that I passionatly object to forcing everyone to study mathematics.
Because I love mathematics.
And why Latin can’t be taught in public schools?
It can and has been. (I’m an example.) The question is whether it’s good use of a student’s limited time and attention. (I think of all the other stuff I didn’t learn/or only by my own study years later. Because for example I had to give up Geography [**] — which I loved — to make time for Latin. Timetabling i’nnit.)
[**] The learning there was the utter unconcern of bureaucracy for the individual. I’d been ‘sold’ Latin on the basis I could give up History — which I hated. But then if it’d been Social History rather than Kings and Queens and battles and dates, I might have given up neither and never learned Latin. I think I’d have been more rounded as a citizen. Of course a topic like ‘General Linguistics’ would have been wholly unavailable at the time.
forcing everyone to study mathematics
My experience of Grammar school has left me deeply hostile to the carving up of subjects like that. (Of course what’s replaced it in Britain is not the ideals of ‘Comprehensive’ education, but cost-cutting education.)
It’s not the elitism (bad as that is) so much as that there’s plenty of bright kids who are just not ever going to make use of that subject matter. They rapidly get bored then truculent/disruptive then hooligans then drop out. I remember a maths/physics class on fluid dynamics where one such kid suddenly realised you could use these equations to calculate the bore of a car exhaust pipe to cause maximum noisy annoyance in the neighbourhood. Lightbulb moment.
I’m with AntC on this.
I did Latin and Greek at school (Greek to A Level, in fact), and I am perfectly certain that my ability to read Moby Dick with enjoyment has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with it; rather, it is due to having read a great deal of literary English.
We were also taught English grammar formally. Even at that tender age, I could tell that the theory behind the teaching was crap (the teachers sportingly admitted as much, when cornered), and it never helped me at all (except as illuminating where some of the stupid pseudorules that people like Lynn Truss promulgate came from. What is it with Trusses?)
Nobody ever taught me how to parse complex sentences in English. I learnt how to do it myself, by getting lots of practice reading complex sentences in English, like every other L1 English speaker who has managed to acquire the skill. It is possible that those who missed out on the relevant experience in childhood might benefit from EFL-style help as adults, I suppose, which is what Etienne seems to have been doing. But I don’t think this has any real bearing on how to educate children.
Latin grammar is intellectually interesting to those school-age children capable of taking a linguistic interest in anything, precisely because it is the least like English syntactically of all the languages that were then commonly taught in school. It is notoriously a terrible template to base an English grammar on.
I should say that I also greatly dislike this instrumental approach to the classics. The value of Latin as a language is not that it helps you to write “better” English*: it is that it gives you unmediated access to some great poetry and prose; vehicles, moreover, of some extremely exotic thinking.
Again, Roman civilisation is of interest not because it is the “root” of “Western Civilisation” and underlies all our modern thinking but because it is so unlike our modern civilisation which (partly) evolved from it.
* This is not only factually incorrect, but anyone who thinks that this is the reason for teaching the classics has betrayed a total lack of understanding of their real value, and is probably merely play-acting a love of the languages and literature (like the ineffable de Pfeffel.)
DE, it’s a matter of cultural continuity for English speakers. Else why not Kusaal indeed.
(and no, I don’t mean that Kusaal should not be offered – together with all sorts of “exotic” languages:) Just that if you offer one foreign language, then the argument for Latin would likely be “cultural continuity” rather than relative beauty of the poetry. There must be poetry in Kusaal and there is definitely poetry in Russian and Arabic)
American schools used to teach children how to diagram sentences. We did that in 7th grade if I recall. If Facebook rants are to be believed, diagramming sentences fell out of favor about 20 years ago for being not touchy-feely enough and students are now illiterate. I don’t know, I thought diagramming was dull and I suspect it is a gateway drug to Chomskyism.
To DE‘s point, I recall an Atlantic article about research showing the best way to teach English speakers to read more complex books and write more grammatically was to simply have them read more literature and do more creative writing. There aren’t magic shortcuts.
And basically two things are mixed here.
(1) what the modern curriculum in humanities should look like?
(Yes, in 19th century higher education was elitist and people who studied humanities (included Greek and Latin) thought of themselves as even more elitist. Still this does not prevent us from considering this question)
(2) is it true that with the spread of higher education (a few people, a half of young people, everyone) expectations from students decrease?
@Vanya,
https://languagehat.com/the-invention-of-diagramming/ is one of LH posts which I noticed before I began commenting here.
@DE, you argument much reminds me my own complaint. Until a certain age I wrote in Russian without errors (now I make a plenty of them, especially in punctuation: online communication in RUssian and foreign languages corrupted me), obviously because I read a lot. Russian lessons in school horrify me. But the goal “writing without errors” is wholly about what you appear, not what you are. It is not self-development, it is not about your internal state.
Being able to read on the other hand is about changing your internal state, what you are and not what you look like. There are bad English teachers and there are good English teachers and ESL teachers, and if the latter can somehow help a child then why not.
McIntyre’s “many fewer young people went to college at all” is very much to the point, but his “tired conservative trope” somewhat less so. When it comes to the teaching of Greek and Latin in the English-speaking world, a narrative of decline is simply accurate – not because the kids are any less smart than they were, but simply because it’s practically disappeared from the adults’ priority list. There are literally universities trying to make Latin optional for Classics degrees at this point. I don’t know that that’s such a tragedy – it’s fun to learn Latin, but not vital. But, at the collective level, it is the loss of a very long-maintained skill.
it’s a matter of cultural continuity for English speakers. Else why not Kusaal indeed
I think you can maintain that in several typological respects Kusaal is more like English than Latin is, e.g. SVO, but head-final order in noun phrases; no discontinuous constituents or “free word order”; no cases, no grammatical gender (both languages having abandoned a previous system); fairly simple morphology, mostly involving suffixes; uses “do” as a support verb …
I do in fact think it is a great pity that the teaching of Latin in schools has been abandoned. But that is because it can teach you that people who resemble ourselves and merit respect and understanding can have completely different ways of expressing themselves and have a worldview which differs greatly from our own, taking quite different things for granted. In other words, it can help you learn to engage with the Other.* This is not what cultural conservatives expect or want you to learn from it.
The instrumentalist view of Latin reflects a more modern, neoliberal kind of conservativism, in which public education (at all levels) is only justifiable as an expense (taxing billionnaires, and other Extreme Radical Socialist measures may ensue if the state overspends on fripperies) if it can be shown to directly result in more productive workers somehow.
* Objectively, Classical Arabic would be better, but the proposal might be a harder sell.
@de
I was unaware that conservatives (apart from people like Boris or Enoch Powell) were interested in an ability to read or use Latin. I think the appeal is more in the authoritarian and elitist “vibe”, and the fact that it is easier to assess a student’s mastery of the material than in something where the student is expected to be creative, and any assessment is heavily subjective. The fact that remedial English or maths is offered would demonstrate to them that secondary schools are providing certificates to people who are not prepared for further study, and that universities do not feel themselves in a position (because of State interference or competition with other institutions?) to discriminate against these people by refusing admission.
Ryan’s point does make me wonder exactly how onerous the demands of being a fringe vice-presidential candidate could possibly be. How many hours would you have to commit over how many months? How much in out-of-pocket expenditures that a fringe campaign might not be able to reimburse you for? To the extent Sobran was primarily making his living as a syndicated columnist, I wonder if some papers that ran his column had some sort of standard policy that would have required them to stop running it if he were an active candidate for high public office, such that the hopeless candidacy would then have imposed an actual economic cost on him in terms of lost income.
Separately, I’m just about Vanya’s age and as best as I can recall my K-12 education featured zero sentence-diagramming. It must have fallen out of fashion earlier in the area I grew up in than in the area where he did. Historically, pedagogical techniques and/or the rise and fall of various educational fads were regionally variable in the U.S. because control and oversight of public schools was politically decentralized, which had both advantages and disadvantages, I suppose. There has been more centralization over the course of my lifetime, due to a combination of herd-mentality dynamics and federal funding with strings attached.
Finally, however much it might sound highly plausible in the abstract that the best way to teach an understanding of English syntax, morphology, etc. would be to teach it directly (at least if you taught it, um, accurately), it does seem to be the case historically that that generally isn’t how it has happened and instead students have kind of figured it out approximately and by analogy from having explicit instruction in the syntax, morphology etc. of a school-learned L2, which in prior times was very often Latin. Just saying that that wasn’t the optimal way to do it does not solve the mystery of why the seemingly-optimal way to do it has virtually never been done. Has everyone running schools prior to the current generation of blog commentators just missed the obvious, or are there structural barriers to doing it that way? Is it possible that it’s actually harder cognitively to master explicit grammatical description of a language whose grammar you already have pretty good tacit competence in than it is to master that sort of explicit description for a language you don’t already know?
“…because it can teach you that people who resemble ourselves and merit respect and understanding can have completely different ways of expressing themselves and have a worldview which differs greatly from our own, taking quite different things for granted.”
@DE, I don’t like this first part about respect. How do you explain why Latin and not Kusaal?
Otherwise I understand you well, and Old Irish would be a natural candidate (perhaps Welsh too).
@JWB, they do it in Russia. It is horrible.
We did sentence diagramming in my seventh-grade English class in 1990. However, not all the English teachers at the school covered it. I’m not sure how much flexibility they had in their choices of topics, but sentence diagramming was apparently strictly optional.
When I started public high school forty years ago, my school offered seven languages: 3 to 4 years each of French, Spanish, German, Latin, and Russian, and 1 to 2 years each of Italian and Polish for students who completed three years of Latin and Russian respectively—taught by the same teachers. (It was possible to complete two years in one year, by studying independently.)
Nowadays, the school only offers French and Spanish through AP level. (Their course catalog mentions Italian in its “World Languages” pathway, but none of the districts’ three high schools actually offers it.)
Along the way, the teachers who taught the other languages retired, and the administration opted neither to replace them nor to shift to more in-demand languages like Mandarin.
High school education there has now more fully embraced career-oriented education where it’s clear that most of the kids will move toward non-academic paths and need to be trained to support local employers.
@JWB: We did sentence analysis in both native language (German for me) and foreign language classes. I tend to be good at stuff like that and enjoyed it, but I observed that most of my classmates hated it in German and were more positive about it in foreign language classes. I guess it’s a typical case where analyzing something you (think you) know seems tedious and useless, like analyzing your feelings or breaking down a process you are familiar with into steps, but analysis seems more useful as an additional tool to understand something you don’t know.
(think you)
@Hans, I believe kids DO know grammar of their native language and do NOT think that they know it.
If you can’t readily list all kitchen utensils you use or guess your teacher’s classification of those utensils, this does not mean you don’t know them.
“analysis seems more useful” – not just useful. Interesting. Meet people who use entirely different kitchen utensils and our theory of kitchen utensils immediately becomes more attractive.
I don’t think anyone here – JWB included – would ever consider studying English grammar in order to learn to read and write better. NOT because it is impossible to improve anyone’s reading skill.
Because the idea of using this specific tool appears utterly mad.
Separately, there are certainly fair questions about how good at Latin the median high school student got back when it was a mandatory subject rather than one self-selected by those with an unusual interest in it. The parallel today is perhaps typical U.S. L2 instruction in Spanish, where more and more school systems make x years of study of *some* foreign language mandatory, and Spanish has the largest market share and is relatedly the default choice for most students, very much including those who would not study any L2 at all if given their druthers. Which naturally means that Spanish (more so than other L2’s where the students are more self-selected for interest) is often taught in a way that makes it possible for students who are generally academically unmotivated in general and have zero interest in learning Spanish in particular for its own sake to get a passing grade. I guess one difference was that in the days when only 10% of each generational cohort was graduating from high school there wasn’t much pressure to make sure everyone passed and wasn’t much stigma to dropping out so it was politically easier for schools to say “look, either you satisfy this somewhat demanding standard or you decide that school just isn’t what you want to be doing with your time, which is fine if that’s your choice.”
The awful outcomes of mandating a particular “foreign” language on the school curriculum are, sadly, apparent in Wales, where the standard expected for non-native speakers is frankly lamentable, presumably because so many of the pupils are army volunteers that motivation is very low, and expectations are correspondingly minimal.
(I know someone who got an “A” without ever having realised – or been taught – that Welsh has grammatical gender.)
I suppose it rather depends on what you’re actually trying to achieve by making it a mandatory school subject: it is doubtless naive to suppose that the primary objective is to get monoglot English speakers able to communicate using Welsh. I may be using the wrong criteria to judge the “success” of the programme.
I have heard (falsely, I hope) that the teaching of Irish in Irish schools is attended by similar problems.
@hans
Since the L1 students have internalised the grammar, the goal of an L1 language course is mainly
1. to present standard/prestige spoken and written varieties (the “default”) and to cover usage of other varieties (the “delta”)
2. to give principles of rhetoric and critical analysis
3. to provide enrichment and familiarity with exemplary texts in a variety of styles: literary, business, legal, scientific
4. To express an argument, narrative, request etc., coherently and concisely.
Sentence diagramming is really only useful for 2 and (optionally) for
5. Equipping students with a “skeleton” for use as a memory aid for L2 with similar enough grammar.
In pursuit of objective 1 the teacher may try to enlist grammar to stop the student from saying something like “ain’t” where a more formal register is required.
Apart from its perceived lack of utility and effectiveness (Latin grammatical categories do not always fit even Modern Romance languages), I would suppose students could dislike sentence diagramming because it seems to be imposing a norm on nonstandard speech habits.
It occurs to me somewhat belatedly that we are working with different concepts of “grammar.” This being LH, we here mostly naturally default to thinking of “grammar” in linguistic terms, essentially the sort of thing you find in works like CGEL.
This is actually a technical sense which is hardly understood at all by the public in general (including those with higher education.) For them the word means either
(a) the aspects of “grammar” (in the technical sense) which are valuable in learning a foreign language as an adult (or high-schooler.) This is an important aspect of True Grammar, of course, though it bears the sort of relationship to linguistics-grammar that one part of applied mathematics does to all of applied mathematics along with pure mathematics.
or
(b) in relation to one’s mother tongue, a folk science comprised of stray bits of sociolinguistics, rhetoric (a valuable subject which deserves to be taught properly under its real name) and misapplied, misunderstood and generally irrelevant fragments of the kind of “applied grammar” useful to an adult learner of a (quite different) foreign language.
[Aha! Ninja’d by PP. Moreover, his rhetoric beats mine. Must have been all that Latin I did at school.]
@DE, I think what is taught in Russian school is closer to you (a).
I also think that is what JWB proposes to teach to English kids:(
I don’t see how it is different from what you find in works like CGEL. Just less information.
As I say, the sort of grammar useful for learning a foreign language as an adult is a (small) subset of Grammar-with-a-capital-G. It’s not something totally different in kind.
I can’t imagine anybody using CGEL to teach English as a foreign language, though of course real grammatical analysis of that kind provides an essential substrate for sound teaching grammars. (It’s a symbiosis, I suppose: modern linguistics began in the analysis of the useful-for-learning-foreign-languages kind of grammar and abstraction from the particulars of individual languages, and continues – Chomskyite dead ends aside – to be enriched and deepened by it. Among other things.)
@DE, but that’s true about any grammatical description.
I’m with poor, much-maligned Etienne for daring to speak out for Latin. After all, it’s much more populist to be able to pull the teaching of Latin to pieces than it is to support this dead, elitist language that harks back to colonialism. My experience – we could all parse sentences in English by the age of eleven. And yes, we could all do it – an ordinary class of ordinary government school kids. We didn’t need to learn Latin to be able to make sense of the written word but Latin in senior school was a continuation of this. The benefit for the pupils wasn’t just in improving vocabulary, but in the ability to construct logical, well-crafted sentences, to think logically, to solve problems and most important of all, to learn transferable skills. Can I remember much Latin? Who cares. Have I been able to think logically of the causation of events, to construct logical sentences? Yes. Did Latin help me in this? Yes again. Etienne, I’m on your side. Your cause is not lost. It is not popular. It is easy for the anti-elitists to criticize. But it is right.
The good side for you, Etienne, is that they’ll be gunning for me now. Three, two, one ……….
I took a year of Latin in grammar school, aced the exam, and then dropped it to study German instead. French was mandatory, up to O level.
The only solid grammar education I got was in learning other languages, because our English classes didn’t delve into that to any depth. So it was helpful for me, in understanding how English worked, that I learned some Latin and French and German. But as someone said above, thorough instruction in English would have been more efficient and effective. Or maybe Sumerian or Kusaal…
As for reading complex English sentences, this is the place to confess that I have made a number of attempts to read The Wings of the Dove but have always given up in despair, because I find myself getting halfway through a sentence and losing track of how it began.
David L. captures the same point I was trying to get at above, which is the unimpressiveness of the argument of the form “it would be more effective to take this theoretically-possible teaching approach to English grammar which we haven’t historically done and aren’t likely to start doing any time soon, so the fact that we have largely abandoned a less-effective approach that was in use historically without replacing it with anything at all is no real loss.”
But is it true that this hasn’t been done historically?
I remember some old books clearly written for Englsih-speaking children that teach to identify cases in English…
@Eliza. “I’m with poor, much-maligned Etienne for daring to speak out for Latin.”
I am just as much in favor of studying Latin as Etienne and you are (I have in fact studied it formally, that is, in a classroom, and continue to study it on my own), but you are doing more harm than good if you adduce reasons for doing so that are not reasons at all or are not the best reasons).
An example of a reason that is no reason: “Latin helps you to think logically.”
Can you give some examples of how it has helped you in that respect?
An example of a reason that is not the best reason: “Latin helps you to expand your English vocabulary.”
It does not help you at all with English vocabulary of non-Latin origin and it can be misleading with respect to immediate and non-immediate English reflexes of Latin lexemes.
For instance, if you allow Latin to guide you, you will have to use the English verb decimate only in the sense of ‘select by lot and kill every tenth man of’ (cf. Latin decem ‘ten’).
You write further, “[A knowledge of Latin improves one’s] ability to construct logical, well-crafted sentences.”
Construct such sentences in Latin? Of course. But what about other languages? Can you give an example of how your ability to construct grammatical Latin sentences has improved your ability to do so with English sentences?
If you want to improve your English in any way, study English.
P.S. We have not maligned Etienne (malign ‘speak about [someone] in a spitefully critical manner’). We have expressed disagreement with him and done so in a respectful, not spiteful, manner.
@drasvi: at times more than others, but usually with an approach (often distorted by applying Latinate analogies where they didn’t actually fit the data) that would tend to be deprecated by the sort of folks who comment here. Whether or not CGEL is used as the text, the fantasy goal is to have English grammar taught in a way that is consistent with the scientific/descriptive approach you might find in CGEL. Which I say is a fantasy because the actually-existing stock of teachers and school administrators in the U.S. and I believe other Anglophone countries generally know nothing about what academic linguistics thinks a plausible/useful account of English grammar looks like and have no interest in learning. You’d need to destroy the existing educational system and start from scratch. Which might on balance be worth doing for other reasons if you had the political support and funding …
As I have said before, it boggles my mind that whereas physics teachers are expected to know something about physics and biology teachers about biology, language teachers are not expected to have any knowledge of linguistics. I’m aware that there are historical/sociological reasons for this, but it’s still stupid and counterproductive.
however mind-boggling and counterproductive the reality is, it is by definition the reality. So “let’s stop doing imperfect thing X and replace it with obviously better thing Y” is a suboptimal way to think if Y is not feasible in the actually-existing world for historical/sociological reasons, however stupid they may seem.
In this case the imperfect thing X does not in fact do what it is claimed to at all: any benefit attributed to it is in fact placebo (i.e. a perfectly real effect, but one not due to any actual specific properties of the treatment.)
If the Eddyshavian diagnosis is correct, surely the responsible thing to do is at a minimum substitute an equally effective placebo. X-prime or something. But that may be hard to do in practice; surely the most straightforward way to continue to achieve the same degree of real benefit would have been to leave the then-existing placebo treatment (superstitiously believed by many of its recipients to be efficacious for non-placebo reasons) in place.
Possibly …
Though the plan seems somewhat defeatist.
If and when the necessary grand societal changes have been successfully made such that introducing Y is actually feasible, X or X-prime can then be superseded. It’s a holding pattern for an imperfect and broken world.
For me, it was the other way around: I was lucky enough to study English grammar through English before starting any foreign language (thanks Calvert School!), and when I got around to studying Latin a few years later, this knowledge of English grammar made learning Latin massively easier, allowing me to rapidly overtake kids who had already been studying Latin for years. I’m glad to have studied Latin, and hope to learn more some day; but I simply don’t believe that teaching grammar through foreign languages works nearly as well as teaching it through one’s own. (And – due credit to the otherwise repellent Gove – schools in England do now actually teach English grammar, which was simply not done in my time, so this is not merely a hypothetical possibility.)
LL provides some good background on the latter, btw, and on the key role of actual linguists in the process: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=10047
Reverting to the rugose batrachian crawling horror Sobran, my browser helpfully suggested “Joseph Sobran quotes”, and it turns out there are myriad pages of them, assembled presumably by the sort of people who have found such a congenial home in the modern Republican Party. The man is evidently regarded as a prophet by US fascists, and a ready source of pithy wisdom.
Even such purulent persons are occasionally right by accident; but it is a good discipline to examine one’s own views very carefully when you find them mirrored by such an individual. This is not ad hominem; it is a wise safeguard of one’s own mental hygiene.
We only did it in German (in 4-year elementary school). The foreign languages preassumed it instead of repeating it. That includes Latin.
I had Latin for six years and can’t even empathize with this.
It’s possible, I suppose to learn the construction of long and (apparently) logical sentences by studying (say) Cicero in Latin. But that’s not some quality of the Latin language, that’s Cicero, a man whose livelihood (and political career) was built on being able to do exactly that with Latin.
Latin, being a real language spoken by actual people (and not some ideal model of Language for Utopians) lent itself perfectly well to the construction of short, illogical sentences too. (However, few such works got copied by industrious monks in the Middle Ages.)
One of the things that truly amazes me about great Latin verse is how the poets managed to create something like that out of a more-than-usually-unpromising language of soldiers and farmers, patrii sermonis egestas and all.
Nobody actually appreciates Virgil or Horace if they imagine that the beauties of their poetry are somehow generated by the mystical properties of the Latin language itself.
But then, most such people don’t actually appreciate Latin literature at all. Just as you can be quite sure that anyone who talks about “Judaeo-Christian values” is neither a pious Jew nor a pious Christian. With friends like that …
[It’s actually a vital theological point that there are no distinctively “Christian” values. If there were, how could anybody tell that the Christian notion of “good” was not simply the tautological “whatever Christians do, whenever they are not actually sinning, as determined by their own in-house criteria”?]
DE: you can be quite sure that anyone who talks about “Judaeo-Christian values” is neither a pious Jew nor a pious Christian.
I fully agree, and I think so would Maimonides and Martin Luther.
J.W. Brewer : “Separately, I’m just about Vanya’s age and as best as I can recall my K-12 education featured zero sentence-diagramming. It must have fallen out of fashion earlier in the area I grew up in than in the area where he did.”
We learned sentence diagramming in Bulgarian class in 6th or 7th grade (12-14 years old), in the mid ’90s. I don’t remember if we did it with foreign languages.
Literature (in any language, including Bulgarian), and Bulgarian grammar were sort of associated — we had the same teacher, but Bulgarian grammar was taught in a separate period. Teachers of foreign languages were encouraged to teach the literature of the respective language, but it was not required until high school.
DE: “anyone who talks about “Judaeo-Christian values” is neither a pious Jew nor a pious Christian.”
=====
“There’s No Such Thing as Judeo-Christian Values.” JewishPress.com. 26 December [https://www.jewishpress.com/blogs/yoris-news-clips/theres-no-such-thing-as-judeo-christian-values/2013/12/26/].
[It’s actually a vital theological point that there are no distinctively “Christian” values. If there were, how could anybody tell that the Christian notion of “good” was not simply the tautological “whatever Christians do, whenever they are not actually sinning, as determined by their own in-house criteria”?]
In modern American evangelical Christianity “good” seems to be understood exactly that way – nothing a professed Christian does can be truly wrong, and even if it appears to be wrong is simply part of God’s plan. No non believer can ever be truly good.
And even shorter non-sentences! Proverb-like sayings can get scarily close to Classical Chinese.
nemo iudex in causa sua
nobody [can/should/… be a] judge in [their] own cause
Four content words, no verb. Omit needless!
@M:
Yes, as your linked article points out, the term is particularly offensive to Jews (in a way characteristic of US politically-conservative “Christians”*, who award “the Jews” a sort of Silver Medal walk-on part in a more or less entirely Christian scheme of history.)
* The scare quotes are a comfort blanket for me. I do actually think that the Trumpolaters are enmired in a serious heresy, entirely justifying my implied excommunication, but unfortunately the extreme-right-wing antidemocrat xenophobic bigots who think he’s Cyrus undoubtedly include genuine, if seriously errant, Christians. People are complicated. The second paragraph in my 2:17 comment was aimed at myself, rather than people with views on Latin teaching that I don’t approve of.
>>DE: you can be quite sure that anyone who talks about “Judaeo-Christian values” is neither a pious Jew nor a pious Christian.
>I fully agree, and I think so would Maimonides and Martin Luther.
I’m trying to understand this – anyone saying this today, because the word has been polluted? Or are you really saying the author of the Letter from a Birmingham Jail wasn’t a pious Christian?
Or maybe your concern is that needless a in Judaeo? I tend to agree that anyone who puts the a there in this millennium is not a serious person in any way.
In modern American evangelical Christianity “good” seems to be understood exactly that way
Indeed. And it is a monstrous heresy.
The single most important thing to be said about God in orthodox Christianity is “God is good” (despite all the abundant evidence to the contrary, but that’s a whole other question.)
This doctrine makes the statement vacuous, by making “God” (as proclaimed by Christians) good by definition. Everything God does is good because God does it. Thus, doing God’s will is good by definition: there is no other criterion of goodness. If God told us to rip hearts out with obsidian blades on the top of his pyramids, that would be good; there is no independent way of looking at it.
This is a sort of spiritually abject nihilism. Heretics! Burning’s too good for them. (Oops. Calvinist roots showing through a bit there. To be charitable, most holders of such views are probably merely very stupid.)
@Ryan:
Good find; and I concede the point. Partly.
writes MLK.
He uses the words I complained of, I agree. But he’s not doing what the Trumplovers and the Dominionist heretics are doing, but appealing to a better, humane tradition, lumping in these “values” with the entirely Deist-humanist conceptions of the Founding Fathers and Declaration of Independence. He’s doing the opposite of claiming a theocratic underpinning of the state. It’s the use of the term in that sense that I would claim is incompatible with genuine adherence to Christian belief. (Such a claim is of course also either historically illiterate or made in deliberate bad faith. So to speak.)
There’s probably a vintage Sobran column out there on the very topic of MLK not being authentically pious! If not, it would be an easy AI prompt (“write a vituperative-yet-attempting-to-be-witty newspaper column in the style of the late Joseph Sobran arguing that the Rev’d Dr. King was a fraudulent hypocrite”). At least if you could find a bot that didn’t refuse to respond because of some sort of Bad-Content-Avoidance override feature in its software.
As to the needless a, even conspiracy theorists seem to eschew it: the google books ngram viewer can’t generate a visual comparison of the incidence of “judeo-masonic” to “judaeo-masonic” because of insufficient hits for the latter.
Alas, I am doomed to write “Judaeo-” because I was exposed to Latin at an impressionable age. (Also, because Brit.*)
I feel that I am more to be pitied than censured.
* I would imagine that conspiracy theorists writing about things Jud(a)eo- would be largely US rather than UK, explaining the a-lessness. But that may be simply a naive unwillingness on my part to confront the true horror of Brexit Britain.
The view David E. condemns as “spiritually abject nihilism” seems no less than (perhaps also no more than) what’s called in the literature “theological voluntarism.” It was debated in medieval times in learned circles where folks had time on their hands: Duns Scotus, among others, was pro; Thomas Aquinas was con. So within Vatican-controlled circles Aquinas eventually won. Certain Vatican-affiliated polemicists argue that various sorts of Protestantism are bad because inter alia they are voluntarist or maybe crypto- or pseudo- voluntarist, although I don’t know that polemic very well and don’t know whether Calvinism is among the accused varieties although it wouldn’t surprise me if it were.
Gen 22:10 (“And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son”) does not specify what sort of knife Abraham had in hand. We probably unconsciously assume “not made of obsidian” without thinking it through because of various assumptions or stereotypes about the knife technology current in the Levant in the Bronze Age. But perhaps there is a tradition of rabbinical speculation and debate about the sort of knife?
I learn from Wiktionary that obsidian is “named after Obsidius, who was, according to Pliny, the Roman who discovered the stone in Aethiopia.”
And from this post I am reminded that “Obsidian is the oldest widely ‘traded’ commodity in Mediterranean history. […] it is found at the lowest levels in archaeological sites all over the Mediterranean from Malta to Crete, and from Lemnos to Egypt.” So sure, Abraham could have used it.
Obsidius
A typically Oscan name. How like them.
If God told us to rip hearts out with obsidian blades on the top of his pyramids, that would be good; there is no independent way of looking at it.
This is a sort of spiritually abject nihilism. Heretics! Burning’s too good for them. (Oops. Calvinist roots showing through a bit there. To be charitable, most holders of such views are probably merely very stupid.)
As so often I am slightly adrift, but how does this differ from the Justified Sinner? Or does he just not care whether he’s good as long as he’s right?
I assume that “Jud(a)eo-Christian” was created as a lazy substitution for “Christian”, out of a desire, genuine or forced, not to exclude Jews, once antisemitism became unacceptable. As a bonus, that stretches the pedigree of those supposed values another thousand years back.
Whether those supposed values are, say, universal love, or say, hatred of fornicators, depends on who you ask and what bits of the confused body of theological aurthority they choose to pick out.
And, for all the admiration MLK perfectly deserves, his usage of the term is still clunky.
now that i’ve started noticing when it happens, i can’t stop: thread sweep in the Recently Commented!
Strictly speaking, theological voluntarism need not entail
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_command_theory
which is what I was condemning ex cathedra. (My followers should take note and tremble.)
It’s certainly true that some very clever buggers have supported the idea, though I think usually in such a way that the statement “God is good” remains non-tautological, but becomes instead an axiom: it’s the only way to end up with a scheme of ethics recognisable as, well, ethical. God’s will is indeed good, as it were, automatically; but in fact, because God is good (as an axiom), what God wills will in fact always be good. (Phew!) My feeling is that this is just an elevated way of dodging the problem.
I can see where this comes from. It’s an effort to avoid the idea of some eternal moral standard, not created by God, that God may (but might not) conform to. (This reminds me a bit of the traditional Muslim worry about whether the Qur’an, as the eternal Word of God, is created.)
But I think this concern comes from reifying the moral standard in a way which makes it seem to be a “thing”, and thus either created by God or in some way prior to him. I think this is analogous rather to the idea that God’s “omnipotence” would be compromised by not being able to make 2+2=5. As CS Lewis remarked somewhere, nonsense does not cease to be nonsense just because you put “God could make it so that” before it.
I think the problem really comes (as quite often in theology) from trying to push language beyond what it can actually do, along with the idea that if you can state something in a grammatically correct way, your statement must have some sort of “meaning.”
how does this differ from the Justified Sinner? Or does he just not care whether he’s good as long as he’s right?
The idea is that the sinner has escaped being punished for his sins because God has not only forgiven him but taken on the punishment himself (in Christ.) That doesn’t abolish the ethics or mean that the sin was, in fact, not sinful at all anyway. In fact, the entire mechanism is predicated on the sin being entirely real.
Calvinist believe that if someone is forgiven in that way, they were always going to be forgiven (i.e. they were “elect”, i.e. “chosen.”) That need not at all entail knowing for sure that you had been chosen either before or afterwards, and most strains of Calvinism have historically been hostile to the idea that you could, though there have always been individual who thought so and doctrinal movements in favour of it.
The American fundamentalist conception of these things is, notoriously, somewhat different …
Since the “values” are not specified, I would focus on two, which were not common in organised pagan societies:
1. Extension of charitable obligations to those who are not family or “guests”.
2. Loving (or at least refraining from trying to injure) one’s enemies.
I believe 1 was a Jewish concept, where Jews, but not, say Samaritans, were “family”, whereas 2 was a sort of Christian extension.
in relation to jews, “jud(a)eo-christian” is quite simply a supercessionist phrase (just as “marxist-leninist” is in relation to non-bolshevik socialists). that’s as true for MLK as for anyone else. but its main function, since a bit before his time, is to extend the charmed mystic circle defining the line beyond which “no non believer can ever be truly good” to include carefully selected jews (primarily those agreeing with a core right-wing politics, especially zionists) as well as an equally limited assortment of christians.
MLK wasn’t any more infallible than J2P2. his use of the phrase – especially as a synonym for “good” – indicates a gap in his ethics and politics that’s intimately connected to his profession, which was, after all, as a christian ritual specialist. it’s not surprising that he had a gap there; there’s no need to pretend it doesn’t exist or is purely a matter of style.
speaking of which: never had a day of latin class. had sentence-diagramming inflicted on me. neither has much to do with my ability to read melville and james for pleasure, which i did well before knowing a damn thing (formally/analytically speaking) about english syntax. what does is long exposure to a wide range of english writing (in my case, that includes being read to from Moby Dick as a small child, but that’s because i was raised by highly literate wolves, not all that far from new bedford).
if someone’s never been exposed to writing that isn’t in the hemingway-poisoned mode that the u.s. literary publishing industry still seems enamored of, of course they’re gonna be stymied by 19thC literary english! but reading virgil in the original isn’t going to help with that – and reading virgil in translation will be just as much of a help in recognizing the references that crop up in english written by men reared with the classical canon. but it sure won’t help you with, say, the nods to yoruba praise-songs in The Salt-Eaters, or the many layers of reference in Almanac of the Dead.
i feel pretty confident that most of us here could devise a program of reading to get any student ready to read Moby Dick, and that the most effective and quickest wouldn’t be based on recapitulating the phylogeny of uncle herman’s education. off the cuff, mine might start with arthur conan doyle and samuel delany, pass through selections from the king james version and victor hugo (in translation), and depending on the person’s taste, could make stops with joanna russ, guy davenport, or/and charles dickens.
What rozele said about Martin Luther King Jr. He was a great man, with profound thoughts about man’s inhumanity toward man,* which he put into real action. But he had very real, human faults. He was also an adulterer, a plagiarist, and someone who (like his admired Gandhi) someone who hard a hard time accepting that other groups could be more oppressed than his own.
* Is there a way to change this expression to make it less sexist without sounding ridiculous?
1. Extension of charitable obligations to those who are not family or “guests”.
I believe 1 was a Jewish concept
Yup. Leviticus 19:34 goes
I presume that this verse has been excised from the Bibles of the Trumpolaters. But no matter: they don’t actually read the book anyway. The book only exists so that the Prophesied One can hold if upside down for the cameras.
WRT to “Christian extension”, it’s worth noting that the Gospels represent Jesus as specifically not innovating fundamentally in ethics, indeed making a point of not doing so: even “Love your enemies” references Leviticus 19:18:
Trumpites perhaps avoid Leviticus on the grounds that it is too Jewish. Who can say? (Do they possess consciousness?)
Buddhists might reasonably suggest that these ideas are not confined to either Judaism or Christianity.
“Judeo-Christian” started out as a somewhat condescending way of including perceived outsiders into mainstream American society, but by now is used primarily for excluding newer sets of perceived outsiders. At every stage in this process, the values it was associated with in practice have had more to do with American society than with any actual religious text.
It may not be orthodox, but I think it’s quite feasible to read the story of Abraham as being about how – contrary to what any Bronze Age Syrian would assume – God actually doesn’t want you to sacrifice children, even at moments when you’re pretty sure he’s told you to.
Buddhists might reasonably suggest that these ideas are not confined to either Judaism or Christianity
So might Muslims. The Judaeo-Christian thing might be rendered a bit more intellectually coherent by amending it to Judaeo-Christian-Islamic …
One can only speculate as to why this oversight may have occurred.
(Bad form to comment on one’s own comments, but Lameen got there before me.)
@David Eddyshaw: Jesus’s commentary on Leviticus 19:18, via the parable of the good Samaritan, involved a huge expansion in who counted as a neighbor under that mitzvah. Note that the original passage only explicitly prohibits blood feuds against other children of Israel. Extermination of the descendants of the Amalekites who wronged the Hebrews in the desert was still mandatory.
[…] according to Pliny, the Roman who discovered the stone in Aethiopia.
Note the “A”. Probably placed there surreptitiously by a member of the trumpenproletariat on its way to cut eye holes in sheets.
I diagrammed sentences in the sixth grade (1950s) and found it so easy as to be trivial. Reading lots of complex English prose led to a certain facility in reading complex English prose.
I learned a bit of Latin after first learning Portuguese, Italian and Spanish, so the Latin has not impeded my knowledge of English or its grammar. I find both Latin and grammar preferable to theology, but I can also add two plus two and come up with a sum >3<5.
@Brett:
Sure. An extension of scope, as PP was implying. But I wouldn’t call that a whole new principle.
Be that as it may, there is a certain grim irony in the fact that the Judaeo-Christian-values-merchants wish – very specifically – to restrict the scope of the application of these “values.” (On reflexion, this was probably PP’s exact point, which I duly missed. Apologies …)
But as Lameen implied, reading the actual religious texts with an open mind is not an activity which is valued by these people.
“I’m glad to have studied Latin, and hope to learn more some day; but I simply don’t believe that teaching grammar through foreign languages works nearly as well as teaching it through one’s own.”
@Lameen, first note that the proposal underwent a complete reversal: we began with Etienne’s friend and helping her with her English. That’s we began from using grammar to teach one’s native language.
Using one’s native language to teach grammar is not the same. Some considerations:
1. Are we going to use examples from foreign languages and comparisons when we teach grammar?
I think it is a VERY good idea to do that.
2. at what age children study it and do they know more than one language?
If they don’t then basically the question is “teaching grammar later or limiting comparisons to exmples from unfamiliar languages”.
3. Note that when grammar is taught in a course of a foreign language, comparisons with your native language are made by the teacher if she knows your native language – and by you if she doesn’t.
So call it however you like, a good course will use both (in undetermined proportion, presumably different for different students).
Of course linguists here can object to my idea that comparison helps.
And four:
as long as our teaching methods involve grammar, it’s necessarily used (and possibly taught) in courses of foreign languages.
So we’re speaking of teaching grammar BEFORE children are taught a foreign language.
Yes, teaching something in early age can be a good idea.
I expect
“grammar in grade 7 and Latin in grade 8” and
“Latin in grade 7 and grammar in grade 8” and
“grammar and Latin in grade 7”
to be better than “grammar and Latin in grade 8” – for the same number of hours (and assuming you decreace math hours when grammar and Latin are taught in the same year, so that children don’t get overloaded).
Leviticus 19:18 is aimed at bǝnēi ʿammeḵā, those of your ʿam, your own people. Others are presumably smitable.
I’m guessing that in Jesus’s time Palestinian society was too multiethnic for such isolationism to be practical anymore, and universal humanity was a better fit. I’m also guessing that hundreds of people smarter and more knowledgeable than myself have written about this already.
PS I see Brett said that already.
Of course linguists here can object to my idea that comparison helps
I can’t see why anybody would object.
It might not be very practical in some cases, but you’ve evidently already thought of that.
(I found analysing the aspect system of Kusaal remarkably illuminating when it came to understanding the aspect system of English, though I concede that there may not be many classrooms where such a comparison would have all that much to offer. Perhaps after the Kusaasi Empire has conquered Europe. Hey, maybe I can be the Exarch of Britain!)
“It might not be very practical in some cases, but you’ve evidently already thought of that.”
@DE, I don’t think it is impractical.
If you already know two languages, they can be used in comparison. Especially if you were taught your second language you have already been comparing them and have discovered some things.
So the course designed for you can be different.
But I think if you are going to teach grammar to small children (not children from Tunisia who watch Rai Uno but Russian small children), comparisons are a very good idea.
One problem with any course is the very nature of schooling. School education usually does not offer exploratory activities.
The goal: “make sure that children can correctly identify this, this and this.”
The method: “exercises and correction of errors”.
Of course if you want to insert comparisons into this scheme, you have a problem.
“Should some subset of Kusaal be added to the list of ‘this, this and this’?”
“Should it be embedded in the exercises?”
“If both are based on Russian, then can Kusaal be used in accompanying explanations؟”
Would it be right to say that the coinage of the word “Abrahamic” marks the next stage of amalgamation (call the process what you will)?
1. Judaic + Christian = Judeo-Christian
2. Judeo-Christian + Islamic = Abrahamic (as in “the Abrahamic religions”)
Given that ʿămālēq was the son of Esau and therefore a descendant of Abraham, do the so-called Abraham agreements (which opened relations between Israel and the UAE and Bahrain) preempt the divine edict about the extermination of the Amalekites?
@Brett But he [MLK] had very real, human faults. He was also an adulterer, …
Do you have evidence for that adultery claim? Or are you just repeating FBI propaganda/character assassination — which fake ‘evidence’ was ordered to be destroyed.
@DE the Gospels represent Jesus as specifically not innovating fundamentally in ethics,
Huh? Then what is “I give you a new commandment …” saying? (What’s simultaneously “new” and “not innovating”?)
And does ‘Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth’ continue to be part of Gospel ethics? BTW that from Leviticus applies for fellow Countrymen-on-countrymen injury, not clear from that passage what rule applies for injury from utter aliens. Like — I don’t know — those who turn up with rifles and smallpox-infected blankets and wipe out a whole race. Is that where the ‘sins of the father’ bit comes in?
@DE 7:02 Buddhists …
The Judaeo-Christian thing might be rendered a bit more intellectually coherent by amending it to Judaeo-Christian-Islamic …
I say ‘Humanist’. (Which has overlap with some of each of the above. Especially much with Buddhists IMO.)
@DE 2:50 It’s actually a vital theological point that there are no distinctively “Christian” values. If there were, how could anybody tell that the Christian notion of “good” was not simply the tautological “whatever Christians do, whenever they are not actually sinning, as determined by their own in-house criteria”?
I am struggling to keep up with the Eddyshavian hermeneutics.
Christians are supposed to have some special communing with the godhead, forbidden to heathens. (Being so excluded, makes it difficult for me to comment.) Suppose your communing starts instructing you to acts that your extra-Christian mores label as “bad”? Do you stop being “Christian” despite the continued communing? (which is typically characterised as arriving unbidden) Do you start labelling that particular godhead as “anti-Christ”?
re “in-house criteria”, it’s not merely I can’t tell whether some particular (what I’d call) sinning is not condemned by some particular house (sect), it’s that different houses call “sin” what others call “good”. (Abortion in case of maternal distress, for example.) Can’t the godhead get the communing co-ordinated better?
Speaking of hijab:
I googled for “love your enemies” and one of the first links is some random site with an article illustrated by a photo of two (perhaps Jordanian? Not sure) girls in hijab.
The same stock photo illustrates How to Serve the Afghan Refugees The church must prepare to be the hands and feet of Christ to the Afghan evacuees arriving on our doorstep. on the same site.
I assume the athors do not mean that ME women are their enemies – they are just truly enlightened and don’t notice such horrible readings…
(girls) I of course expected something like this. Or maybe Kadyrov with Kalashnikov. But maybe the force is not strong enough with some young padawans.
I am struggling to keep up with the Eddyshavian hermeneutics.
Oh, come on, you have no interest in keeping up, you just want to continue your mockery of all things religious. It’s a tiresome practice. I’m not religious, but I learn a lot from DE’s exegeses; I learn nothing from your sarcasm except that you still think it’s all nonsense.
@Hat actually no. (There’s plenty of mockery of those claiming to be Christian already on this thread. Not coming from me.)
Genuinely, it’s the first time I’ve heard a Christian talk about the notion of “good” being distinct from “what my Church says”/”what my interpretation of Christianity says”/”what my (selectively chosen) sacred text says”. So I’m surprised/confused and would indeed like to learn from DE’s exegeses. We might end up talking past each other, because I’m not in that privileged communing position; but it’s worth asking/trying.
@J.W. Brewer, as we grew up in about the same time and in the same state, I should note that I learned diagramming at least as early as seventh grade.
I particularly remember when a classmate and I had to take over teaching from our ninth grade teacher who was fairly incompetent at diagramming, despite a roughly 35 year career in English teaching. (I don’t believe he was faking his lack of skill either.)
I couldn’t tell whether King used Judeo- or Judaeo-. I opened a few versions and they were split.
Dear M,
You’ve taken a stance – fair enough – and your post seems to want to justify your stance by asking me for particulars of generalisms about influences on my life. All I know is that point-scoring is counter-productive – I suppose now I’m going to be asked for a specific example of that(!) But to try to bring closure – Latin does help expand your vocabulary – of Latin-based words. I never claimed otherwise. To impute from that that Latin has no value in expanding vocabulary is plain silly, which is what your post implies. Implies, not states. Your example of decimate is illogical. Words have various meanings in English and other languages, including Latin, both literal and figurative. Words also change in meaning. You ask for a specific example of how Latin has influenced my logical thought process. Again, I know it has made me think about every word I commit to paper and to organise my thoughts in a way in which I would not have had I not studied it. Please try to understand that. I am not giving specific examples, not because I have none, but because your response to a specific (judging by the tenor of your post) would presumably then be to prove that an episode in my life was different from the way I lived it. My post obviously struck a raw nerve with you. But try not to let emotion influence logic.
Perhaps apropos: https://youtu.be/7609TWnhUIU?si=uzZGumGNP21cr5mt
Using one’s native language to teach grammar is not the same.
The missing assumption that I failed to state there was that learning “grammar” – basically, learning to think analytically about language – is the part that actually helps people become more comfortable with reading complex prose in unfamiliar registers of their own language (and hence that Latin is not a necessary part of achieving that goal, fun though it can undoubtedly be.) But sure, I agree that cross-linguistic comparison can help with the process too; learning grammar exclusively through its application to a foreign language, not so much.
He didn’t, actually. It just had the bookmark coming out the other side.
(He also never said “bigly”. It was big-league with unreleased [g], as demonstrated in a LLog post – related to W’s major-league.)
I graduated from a so-called math school (a part of an informal, that is, designed by enthusiasts, system of math education in USSR).
It is different in that a part of the course is taught in problems. Children are given problem sheets, there are several teachers in a classroom (often university students) when a child decided she has solved a problem (not necessarily from this sheet – it can be from a sheet from two months ago) she raises her hand, a teacher comes and they discuss it. Often the discussion is just: the student says something (some assumption used in the solution), the teacher asks “why?”, the student says “er” and realises that the assumption is false. When the problem is solved a good teacher can ask additional questions – or tell some interesting fact.
A problem in this case is not application of a known algorithm, but something where you have to invent the solution (such problems are occasionaly offered in other schools or published in books “for entertainment”). Elsewhere in Russian schools children encounter “problems” in this sense in the course of geometry (say, they prove theorems) while within school algebra they mostly deal with exercises, where the algorithm is told to them and then they apply it hundreds times. This activity is not in principle useless: it is like physical exercises, when you have applied same algorithm 1000 times, however boring it is, you begin to do it fast and often see the result immediately. But it does not involve thinking.
So sometimes it is just sheets with problems (for the sake of problem solving). Other time instead of teaching an important but difficult theorem you design a problem set such that when a student has solved easier ones she can solve the harder ones and when she’s solved them she can not only prove the theorem – she also understands why this theorem is so cool. Children basically rediscover it. Also a whole theory can be converted into problem set.
Of course what makes it efficient is numerous teachers, one-to one communication and friendhsip with same teachers (small age difference, informal athmosphere and hiking together encourage this).
12 out of 16 girls and boys in my class are researchers now (linguists, mathematicians and biologists) – but of course they were pre-selected.
So why I am writing this all: I think this component (rediscovering) is important and one – but not the only – benefit of learning a foreign language is that you ask questions and come up with theories.
However children DO ask questions about their own language too.
Moreover, when I like a language I often prefer to play with it on my own before reading the grammar – so the grammar could answer my already existing questions (instead of being just a list of facts to remember – even though comparative perspective makes lists of facts interesting as well). It is more interesting this way. Similarly, reading essays by foreign learners of Russian is my hobby – I love their errors, also explaining why something they wrote sounds “unnatural” is an immensely interesting occupation, you learn a lot about your L1. For the first three years I did not allow myself to use existing grammars of Russian, then when I began to compare I discovered that most of what is written there on various obscure points are theories – “theories” in plural because those are obscure points, for professionals as well – that I have already invented on my own.
The other important thing about foreign languages is that they let you see how something taken for granted could be different (but again, children sometimes refuse to take everything in their own language for granted).
____
Russian lessons in a Russian school are actually very boring, they are wholly about error-correction and memorisation. I think it’s a catastrophe, because I’m curious about grammars, I’m curious about my language – all children are – and yet nothing is more boring in Russian school.
While I do believe that some amount of comparison is necessary in a good course of grammar, of course one reason why I sympathise to foreign grammar is that with foreign languages the school (the unidentified destructive forces behind it which turn everything they touch into crap…) simply won’t be able to eliminate all thinking and exploration from the course.
It is nevertheless true that names of forms like “Present Perfect” are going to be just as obscure to Russian children who don’t know names of Russian aspects as to those children who do know them.
And they will remain just names of forms (to understand what they mean you need to speak and listen to English a lot and they don’t match anything in Russian:)).
The interesting fact about them (apart of different semantic structures of English and Russian) is maybe just that they’re analytical, not that they are called “Present Perfect”.
IANAT and in many ways am not a suitable person to try to explain this, but I take AntC’s questions as entirely sincere, and certainly worthy of any attempt at answering. So …
I say ‘Humanist’. (Which has overlap with some of each of the above. Especially much with Buddhists IMO)
Sure. The term “Judaeo-Christian values” is offensive to everybody (including the two groups actually name-checked, is all I’m saying.)
[Reading actual Buddhist texts does not give quite the comfortable sensation that Buddhism is a kind of spiritual Humanism, mind. It really isn’t. ]
Christians are supposed to have some special communing with the godhead, forbidden to heathens. (Being so excluded, makes it difficult for me to comment.) Suppose your communing starts instructing you to acts that your extra-Christian mores label as “bad”? Do you stop being “Christian” despite the continued communing? (which is typically characterised as arriving unbidden) Do you start labelling that particular godhead as “anti-Christ”?
Dunno about “forbidden to heathens” (more on that below.) But your scenario has quite often actually happened. Quite a few Christians (or Christian-adjacent-persons) have decided that God is telling them to do something traditionally regarded as wrong. The mainstream response is indeed characteristically to tell the Communicated One that they need to be better at validating the end-to-end security of their communication modality.
In the more floaty kind of (mainstream) kinds of Pentecostalism, there are actual procedures aimed at validating alleged messages from Above. Persistent offenders against the communication protocols can find themselves excommunicated.
Genuinely, it’s the first time I’ve heard a Christian talk about the notion of “good” being distinct from “what my Church says”/”what my interpretation of Christianity says”/”what my (selectively chosen) sacred text says”
You’ve met the wrong sort of Christians.
However, a lot of perfectly genuine Christians have weird misconceptions about orthodox Christian theology. Most Christians find theology boring and abstract and take no interest in it at all. I’m unusual (though hardly unique) only in having been an atheist for decades before I became a Christian, which meant that when I did, I was keen to scrutinise everything, including a lot that people who have just always been Christian never give a thought to at all. (In hindsight, this involved quite a lot of reinventing the wheel for myself, if I’d only known. But I’d still have wanted to work through it all myself.)
Huh? Then what is “I give you a new commandment …” saying? (What’s simultaneously “new” and “not innovating”?)
It was be stupid to deny the Christianity innovates considerably from its Jewish roots (though it was quite a while before contemporaries really decided that it actually constituted a radical break with Judaism: the discussion is still ongoing in the New Testament. It was Paul’s determination to preach to the gentiles that was the crunch point.)
However, I take the “New Commandment” as a new way of fulfilling the already accepted moral imperatives. It would only be an innovation in values if he’d said: “A new commandment I give unto you: do what you feel like and never mind if you hurt others in the process.”
My views on this are not some personal idiosyncractic interpretation of Christianity that I’ve made up. They are mainstream (though not undisputed in detail, as JWB flagged up.)
Most of what I mean is implied, indeed stated outright, In Paul’s Letter to the Romans, which is as foundational to Christian doctrine as well can be.
In Chapter 2, he says
The letter was clearly written in the specific context where Paul, controversially, was extending his remit to non-Jews, and is defence of his practice, which clearly involved him in considerable criticism from other Christians at the time.
It is crucial to his argument that non-Jews are just as morally responsible before God as Jews (and, as far as he is concerned, therefore in just as much trouble.) In particular, they are in trouble with God on the same basis as Jews are. They are not in trouble with God because they are unbelievers: they are in trouble because they are not morally good enough; exactly like Jews. And, like Jews, they themselves know better: otherwise they would not be responsible at all. So unbelievers must have access to essentially the same basic “values” as Jews. He says this as plainly as he ever says anything at all.
There are different mainstream Christian views as to how exactly it can come about that you can be a “virtuous pagan” (my own brand invokes “Common Grace”) but complete agreement that the thing is perfectly possible. (No amount of such virtue will save you, acccording to Christian doctrine; but no amount of virtue can save a Christian either. Everybody is on the same footing in this.) The concept only makes sense at all under the assumption that believers and unbelievers share the same basic set of “values” (differences in detail do not invalidate the general principle; not even the kinds that you specifically mention.)
Thank you @DE. It’s late now for me, so I’ll digest this tomorrow.
unbelievers must have access to essentially the same basic “values” as Jews.
It’s not that I sin by having another god before Jehovah. (It seems to me some claiming to be Christians do make a god of Mammon — or indeed of Trump.) It’s that I sin by having no god full stop. Neither do I observe the Sabbath. Do those not count as “basic values”?
I of course defend to the death _your_ right to observe the Sabbath in your own way [**]. (Providing that doesn’t interfere with my café habit.) That’s just regular Humanist tolerance/liberalism. Is religious tolerance a “basic value”?
[**] Round the corner from me is a Seventh-day Adventist church. It always bemuses me on my way past it to ‘worship’ at the Saturday Farmer’s Market how darned inconvenient it must be to tie up your Saturday like that. Don’t the kids want to go play sports?
“having been an atheist for decades before I became a Christian,”
Unexpected
“… which meant that when I did, I was keen to scrutinise everything, including a lot that people who have just always been Christian never give a thought to at all. ”
Much in line with what I wrote about grammar – but different for me. “Atheist” is Soviet default. In reality for many people “do you believe in God” is a complicated question whether they go to church or behave like atheists.
Some day I discovered that I do believe in God – basically it happened when I for the first time truly loved someone (a woman, but I only discovered that she is also pretty some moths ago. “Love” here means a different thing – and it also changed my feelings about other people, male or female, that’s I learned this feeling).
And I felt surprise. I mean I discovered it, was surprised with this fact, and since then consider myself a believer.
Let me ask a boringly linguistics-centered question. Whence came the “E” in the compounding prefix “JudEo-“?* English “Judaic” derives straightforwardly from Greek Ἰουδαϊκός, via Latin Iudaicus, perhaps further mediated by French “Judaique.” Same “ai” sequence in the orthography throughout. Maybe the “ai” needed to turn into the Eddyshavian “ae” as an intermediate step before being simplified to “e,” but why would that have happened in English if it hadn’t already happened when the Greek original was being mediated through Latin?
*The final “O” in Judeo- is presumably parallel to that found in prefixes like Anglo- or Franco- or Sino-, none of which have that O in their root. So a separate pattern I’m not focused on right now.
Do those not count as “basic values”?
No. They are great examples of things that don’t count as “basic values.”
From a Christian POV, God is the ultimate source of both virtue and reason.
There are Christians who conclude from this that reason has no place in the thinking of a Christian about the fundamentals of faith at all. Some of these are mystics, and I respect them, but I don’t understand them and am not equipped to follow them at all. The rest seem to me to advocate spurning one of God’s actual gifts. It seems to me entirely legitimate to use reason to investigate not only how things are in the natural world, but to speculate about metaphysics, religion and faith. The belief that you cannot arrive at any ultimate Truth by reason alone hardly excuses you from taking it as far as you can; and anyway, nobody sane thinks you can arrive at the ultimate Truth by reason alone (even if they think that there actually is any such thing to be arrived at.)
I think it’s just the same with ethics. For a Christian, God is the ultimate source of all virtue, but that does not make it in any way illegitimate for a Christian to reason about ethics from principles which are (as far as possible) common ground among normal human beings.
You see this with debates about abortion, even. OK, there are Christians who say “It’s forbidden in the infallible Word of God. Discussion is unnecessary.” (Actually, it’s quite difficult to justify this on scriptural grounds alone, and their arguments tend to be short on details. The actual Bible does not address the question at all.) This is not really argument at all, much less valid argument, of course.
But much more often the argument is conducted by all parties by attempting to appeal to common values: thus, abortion is wrong because a foetus is (supposedly) an innocent human being. The significant thing about this line is that it takes it as read that innocent human beings should not normally be killed without some very good extenuating reason: an appeal to common values. That is the kind of level of common values I mean: and it’s a level at which mainstream Christianity has always assumed that (almost) all human beings, no matter how exotic, share their “values” (in this sense.)
To say that something is a “Judaeo-Christian value” and that this somehow settles the matter is to assume that any discussion of the matter with non-Judaeo-Christians (whoever they may be) is actually logically impossible. because there is no common conceptual framework for any such discussion to take place. In other words, the use of the term in this way is intended to close down any ethical discussion at all. That is …. blasphemous.
“…have decided that God is telling them to do something traditionally regarded as wrong.”
“Traditionally regarded”?
I mean, all right, this will certainly bother those people who traditionally regard it as wrong. But for an individual it is a bit different, because an individual can regard as wrong quite different things than those that are traditionally regarded so.
Moreover, traditions differ.
Here it is not “God and your heart”, it is “God and the tradition” which is not so far from “your heart and the tradition”. And when your heart and the tradition disagree, following your heart can be a good idea.
Craig’s report of sentence-diagramming is interesting since we grew up in approximately the same time and place. The possibilities are:
1. I was exposed to it but have zero memories of it, which is certainly possible, but comparatively unlikely, especially given that “diagramming age” as reported by others is around the time I was starting to get obsessed with language-related topics, what with obsessively rereading the philological appendices to the last volume of the Lord of the Rings and the lexicon of IE roots at the back of the American Heritage Dictionary.
2. Pedagogy was in those days sometimes radically decentralized, not only varying state to state but district to district within a given state and maybe even school to school within a given district. Example of the latter is that my high school had a mandatory 11th-grade social studies curriculum not even shared with the other high school that had historically always been in the same district (other high schools had become part of the “same district” recently enough due to consolidation that their lack of identical curriculum was less notable). As I understand it at some point in the early Seventies two specific faculty members thought that particular stuff they were interested in was important enough that everyone should be exposed to it, and their wish became reality within the four walls of that specific school and not beyond them.
Moreover, traditions differ
Sure. In this context, all I meant was the tradition of the people on the receiving end of the supposed communication from God. (A popular one is the revelation that one has been dispensed from a local norm of having only one spouse at a time. This would not be an instance of what I’m talking about in the context of a usually-polygamous society.)
@DE, yes. But let’s say “heart”.
What if your heart tells you that some tradition is thoroughly evil?
The second comment under McIntyre’s post reminded me of an occasion in Rome many years ago, where I was with my father; I was then about fourteen, I think.
Neither of us then spoke any Italian. I actually did manage to ask directions of a passing priest in Latin without any difficulty, though.
In what may be part of the answer to my question re the E in JudEo- posted above, I belatedly note the orthographic development of the toponym that (after an adaptation from Hebrew that is not particularly relevant to subsequent developments) went from Greek Ἰουδαία to Latin Iudaea to English JudEa. But that again raises the question of why Latin did not make a parallel change of the αί to ae (or æ) when it adapted Iudaicus from Greek. And/or the question of why the eventually-developed compounding prefix, in a diasporic context, would have followed a non-local toponym rather than a locally-salient ethnonym if there had been some phonological/orthographic divergence between the toponym and related ethnonym.
@DE, I mean it seems easy to think of tradition as something that restricts your ‘selfish’ inclinations (whatever ‘selfish’ means). But it is not that simple.
And it is a question how (verbal) God’s command is different from knowing in your heart that something is just wrong (which must be familiar experience).
@Hat actually no. […] So I’m surprised/confused and would indeed like to learn from DE’s exegeses.
My sincere apologies; I really must learn not to make assumptions and shoot from the hip. (As my ex-wife used to say: “Don’t ASSUME, it makes an ASS out of U and ME.”) Thanks for being tolerant of my cranky outburst and for inspiring more exegesis from DE; I am learning more about theology than I ever got in Bible class.
Much in line with what I wrote about grammar
I thought the same thing when I read it!
@JWB:
Isn’t “Iudaicus” tetrasyllabic, in fact? It’s from “Iudaeicus.”
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/iudaeicus
And the Greek original is Ἰουδαϊκός.
@DE: Well, I had the Greek right even if I was looking at a source that may have simplified the Latin. You can find a few hits for “Judaeic” in English, but tiny in number compared to “Judaic” and that gets you to the question of why the æ in Judæic (if there was ever a stage in English in which that was the dominant form) was simplified to a rather than e, when the latter seems to be the usual pattern. But maybe there’s something going on in terms of the Greek αϊ being (parts of?) two distinct syllables rather than a diphthong?
I think a monophthong (by the time the ME became Roman).
I think a monophthong
No, that’s why there are those two dots above the iota — it’s still αϊ (two syllables) in Modern Greek (cf. ιουδαϊσμός /i.u.ða.iˈzmos/).
But maybe there’s something going on in terms of the Greek αϊ being (parts of?) two distinct syllables rather than a diphthong?
That’s what I was driving at, though I didn’t put it very clearly. It wasn’t a dipththong and was therefore not adopted as Latin ae.
This is not unique to the word “Judaic”, of course: Aramaic, Hebraic …
Dunno about you, but I pronounce all these with disyllabic -aic even in English.
Thebaic, Ptolemaic … Cymraeg* …
* OK, not an instance. But it actually owes its unexpected final stress to the fact that it was trisyllabic in Middle Welsh: Kymraëc.
LH, yes, sorry. I was thinking about -aios (and eventually about “Hebrew”)
Christians are supposed to have some special communing with the godhead, forbidden to heathens.
Who sez? The sources of authority in the Church (as I learned them before I left it) are Scripture, Tradition, Reason, and Experience. I have the same question as others: What on earth sort of Christians instructed you so poorly?
Is there a way to change this expression to make it less sexist without sounding ridiculous?
The genderedness of common expressions makes countless thousands mourn.
AntC had the life experience, not his own fault, of spending his earlier life in a largely secularized post-Christian society that still retained an Established Church. There’s an argument that this might be a uniquely bad combination in terms of the odds of schoolchildren learning true and useful things about the Christian religion, whether considered for its merits or considered as an object of anthropological/historical study that ought to be of interest and relevance to non-believers because of its effects on the wider world.
Although I must say that Rodger C.’s list of four “sources of authority” sounds suspiciously modern and potentially factional. I’m not even sure if it dates back as far as John Wesley himself versus having been composed by those subsequently trying to organize the Wesleyan inheritance into a system.
Separately, it’s not that I find the modern English spelling of “Judaic” itself mysterious and as noted in a comment it’s part of larger pattern including e.g. “Ptolemaic,” it’s that I don’t know why it differs orthographically in its immediate post-deltic vowel(s) from that of the “Jud(a)eo-” prefix. Unless as I wondered above the prefix was instead generated directly from “Jud(a)ea.” Which seems unexpected (to me, but what do I know) but not impossible.
It’s from “Iudaeicus.” — I question Wiktionary’s reliability on that. The Oxford Latin Dictionary (2016) gives the headword only as Iūdaicus ‘Of or originating in Judaea; Of or relating to the Jews’. In English the spellings “Judaeic” and “Judæic” never achieved enough presence even to appear in the OED’s form-list for Judaic (revised 2013).
However, in Hellenistic Greek Ἰουδαία and Ἰουδαῖος, if I understand correctly, those Greek spellings indicate that the αι was a diphthong in those words, with the accent written by convention on the second vowel; hence the Latin ae.
JWB wondered “why the eventually-developed compounding prefix, in a diasporic context, would have followed a non-local toponym rather than a locally-salient ethnonym” — not that I’m an expert on post-classical Latin, but I think the ethnonym in Latin *was* Iūdaeus (rather than Iūdaicus), continuing into diasporic times and eventually when the Iudaeo- combining form appeared (which wasn’t until the 1600s in Latin, 1700s in English).
Old English had Iūdēas ‘Jews’ and Iudeisc ‘Jewish’ from Latin Iūdaeus, but in Middle English that was replaced by Jew, via French, where it had been shortened.
I may have used “ethnonym” imprecisely. If Iūdaeus means (in Lateish Latin) “Jew” while Iūdaicus means “of or relating to the Jews” I was thinking of them both as ethnonyms, but the latter as the adjectival one. But maybe my tacit assumption that the adjectival form rather than the noun is where you’d naturally get a combining form from is inaccurate?
Iūdaeus, -a was both a noun ‘Jew (m./f.)’ and an adjective ‘Jewish’, typical of Latin. As far as I can tell from the entries in OED and OLD, Iūdaeus, -a was used for people, vs. Iūdaicus for things or practices characteristic of Judea or the Jews.
I suppose by that logic we should have “Judaic-Christian” values rather than “Judeo-Christian” values. (Incidentally, the OED says that “Judeo-Christian” applied to values etc. didn’t appear until the 1880s, and was preceded by several decades by a different sense: ‘Chiefly Church History. Designating a church or community consisting of Jews who have become Christians, esp. while retaining many characteristic Jewish traditions and practices’.)
I had a comment on Judaeus and Judaicus that has disappeared, perhaps into moderation, perhaps because I made yet another blunder while half-awake. At any rate: It was Roger Bacon (I just found out) who said that all knowledge is based on authority, reason, and experience. The Church, I was taught, subdivided authority into Scripture and Tradition. The Anglican Church’s version is truncated (meseems) by the omission of experience, which Wesley restored.
My lost comment, briefly and without using the Greek alphabet: Ioudaïkos is a straightforward contraction of Ioudai-ikos. Ioudaios and Ioudaïkos give Latin Judaeus and Judaicus equally straightforwardly.
Welsh Iddew “Jew” seems to be from a vulgar Latin *Iūdeu̯us, with monophthongisation of the ae and the *u̯/*w picked up by resegmentation from the flexion -us. Presumably something similar is at the back of the the f in French juif.
And so AntC was taught about Christianity by state schoolteachers who had only a passing acquaintance with it? That explains a lot.
AntC can (and doubtless will) speak for himself, but I don’t think that’s the case.
Actually, I myself was taught about Christianity as a schoolchild, in RE lessons that I still remember in part, and think in retrospect were actually pretty good (at our school you were either Presbyterian or, possibly, Jewish. I never met a Catholic. I still, deep down, think of them as exotic creatures.)
Nevertheless I seem never to have become acquainted with any of the actual core doctrines distinctive of Christianity, which came as complete news to me when I encountered them in later life.
(Though my girlfriend from my atheistic university days, who was Christian, informed me when I met her again later on and said this to her, that she herself had told me them often. So the matter may be more complex than my memory alleges.)
Ah, so the source of my befuddlement is that I should never have seized on Iūdaicus and/or its English descendant to start with as the presumed point of origin of the “Judeo-” combining form.
In a contest solely between Roger Bacon and John Wesley on how to pursue the Christian life (as opposed to improving ones scientific understanding of optics or whatever), Wesley seems the less-bad option,* although that’s an opinion based on things other than what Rodger C specifically mentioned.
*Roger Bacon probably better than Francis Bacon, who was no doubt better in turn than someone.
@Rodger C.: Perhaps taught also by ordained clergy of a State church whose teachings had been weakened and diluted by an improvident alliance with secular power in a secularizing age? (Hardly a new phenomenon post-WW2; many Dutch, Scandinavian, German etc etc immigrants to the U.S. in the 19th century were intensely religious folks who were on the outs with the Protestant state churches of their countries of origin because they perceived those institutions as having diluted their piety and theology as a result of what the secular rulers had judged politically expedient.)
Cymraeg
(That’s from an ABC in a silly book whose name I don’t remember. The Space Child’s Mother Goose, maybe?)
The f on French juif is by analogy from the feminine juive, from older French juiu; that’s probably the “something similar” that DE had in mind.
i’m very much appreciating (as i always do, here as in few other places) the conversation about christianity! i do, however, want to note a little bit of a drift towards a No True Christian (no need to bring in the scots) argument, of a kind that’s quite familiar to me from similar conversations about marxism and anarchism. i’d prefer a world where christianity definitively meant what DE means by it, and was practiced in that light – but my experience of actually-existing christians is much closer to what AntC’s described. i’m hesitant to say that a likely majority of adherents are doing it incorrectly, though i certainly think they’re ethically wrong.
i’m not inclined to a majority-rules view of what counts as the proper form of a belief system, but i also don’t think a (small) layer of rigorous thinkers, or the (somewhat larger) layer of people who think about these questions at all, get to define that either. there are points where the general practice under a term makes it untenable for folks holding to a more rigorous version of its meaning to stay associated with it – there’s a long history of erstwhile christians deciding such a point has arrived at various times and places (and others in relation to other traditions), and the current conversations among christians about that analysis certainly aren’t mine to take a position in.
@Y:
Yes, I don’t know who invented “Cymric”, but it’s a deformity. Cymru “Wales” is an artificial respelling-to-introduce-a-distinction of Cymry, the plural of Cymro “Welshman”, feminine Cymraes “Welshwoman.” Cymro is from *kombrogos. which has the uninspiring meaning “fellow-countryman”; the second part turns up in Welsh bro “homeland”, cognate with Old Irish mruig “border” and Latin margo (and with “march.”)
The actual Welsh word for the adjective “Welsh” is Cymreig, which is from *kombrogīkos, and has also (like Cymraeg, the name of the language) got final stress because it was trisyllabic in Middle Welsh.
So something like “Cumbraic” would be an improvement, at least. “Combrogic” is probably expecting too much.
The Wales/wails rhyme reminds me of Cavafy’s technically brilliant and moving poem Τείχη/Tύχη “Walls/Fate” which as it were weaponises all the homophony that has happened in modern Greek from the collapse of the ancient vowel system. I can’t find a text online at the moment, but a Hatter with superior Google-fu to mine probably could.
This is exactly correct.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wesleyan_Quadrilateral
@rozele:
I know what you mean, and am certainly prone to this myself.
However …
(Hah! bet you knew there was going to be a “however” …)
As I said, normal Christians (normal everybody, come to that) think theology is boring and abstract and has little or no bearing on their actual Christian lives.
“Boring and abstract” is one of those eye-of-the-beholder things, but actually I agree that theology has little (direct) everyday relevance in living as a Christian.
But I think it has a vital defensive role, as when power-hungry criminals set out to weaponise Christianity and harness it to build support for their fascist project. This is bad directly, because it supports fascism; but it is also terrible for Christianity, because these people proclaim loud and clear that support for their xenophobic bigotry, corruption and inhumanity should follow from Christian doctrine. I am not at all joking when I say that the Trumpolaters are in serious shit theologically. Correct theology may be a niche interest, but when monstrous lies about Christian doctrine are being explicitly used to undermine democracy, it seems to me to be necessary to call them out. There’s nothing sectarian, particularist or intellectually elitist about doing exactly that. Trumpolaters need to repent of their heresy*: in Christian terms, to say anything less would be mealymouthed cowardice.
*It’s a very old one, and multiform, and has often disgraced the Church before. It doesn’t have a single name: but it always involves choosing power over love.
The “Cymric” did come from The Space Child’s Mother Goose. It’s a fun little book with wonderful illustrations. Unfortunately, that Cymric appears in a footnote to a rewriting of the regrettable Taffy was a Welshman.
I never met a Catholic. I still, deep down, think of them as exotic creatures.
Same here! I had Jewish friends (and, later, girlfriends) from the very beginning, but Catholics were sort of like Hindus: I knew they existed and thought no ill of them, but… yes, exotic. (This is what comes of having parents from the Ozarks and Iowa.) No offense to any Catholics in the crowd; we can’t change our upbringings!
Taffy was a Welshman
I think I once linked to a poem by Dafydd ap Gwilym himself, in which the poet recounts falling foul of this stereotype when he falls over a drunken Englishman sleeping in the corridor of an inn in the middle of the night, when he (Dafydd) was in reality only engaged in the pursuit of a bit of blameless fornication. If you people aren’t good, I may be forced to link to it again.
A quite substantial percentage of the population of Iowa is Catholic and this has been true for a century or more, but I think there’s also quite significant local county-to-county variation in that percentage due to the vagaries of early immigration/settlement patterns. So perhaps the relevant part of the Hattic family tree was in one of the counties where they are scarce. It is a more recent development for devotees of the Maharishi to be comparatively common in Jefferson County, Iowa while remaining quite rare in the rest of the state.
I myself grew up around plenty of Catholics although there was always the sense that perhaps the Catholic kids who went to public school instead of Catholic school (who were the ones I tended to know) were not a fully representative cross-section of that demographic. Likewise, the Ukrainian-Catholic guy* in my Boy Scout troop had parents who were okay with him being in a troop sponsored by a Methodist church (although probably more than half the other boys, including myself, were from non-Methodist households), which not all Catholic parents would have been.
*First person I ever knew with a surname with the -enko/chenko suffix. Haven’t seen him in over 40 years; hope he’s doing well.
Yeah, my mom came from a town that was pretty much entirely Norwegian Lutheran.
If you people aren’t good, I may be forced to link to it again.
Rotten, rotten to the core, here.
Looking at the improbably-precise 2020 ARDA data for the specific rural Iowa county where my grandfather was born in 1893, it looks like they’ve got 545 Catholics (approx 20% of those classified as “adherents” of anything), which is good enough for second place after the 613 Methodists. If you lump together the two main Lutheran denominations they’re in 3d place with 458, followed by the Baptists in 4th place just ahead of the lumped-together “Amish Groups, undifferentiated” in 5th. Last place among those with a specified-positive-integer number of adherents is the one person in the county reportedly adhering to the Baha’i Faith. No Jews reported; you may need to drive up to 30-40 miles closer to the Des Moines suburbs if that’s who you’re looking for?
Rotten, rotten to the core, here.
OK: I warned you …
The poem is Trafferth mewn Tafarn; English WP has links to the text and some English translations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trouble_at_a_Tavern
[WP wrongly calls the text “Middle Welsh”; in fact, it’s (admittedly, early) Modern Welsh.]
Huh. Links to the translations don’t seem to work. Try this one:
https://dafyddapgwilym.net/AnaServer?dafydd+146104+printPoemEng.anv+poem=English%20Version:%2073%20-%20Trafferth%20mewn%20Tafarn
(It, erm, misses some of the poetic qualities of the original …)
it has a vital defensive role
absolutely!
in many traditions, that same heresy being a common one in belief systems that spring from liberation movements.
rabbinical speculation and debate about the sort of knife
Ginzberg actually does note:
There is the additional complication of the Vulgate’s choice of gladium and not cultellum. LXX has μάχαιραν.
DE: Thank you. I found two more translations on archive.org, by Loomis and by Bromwich. Unfortunately, like the one you linked to, they feel like — well, like trying to get somewhere pleasant, but constantly bumping against furniture and knocking things over.
@Hat I really must learn not to make assumptions and shoot from the hip.
Well, my reputation precedes me. But you seem to have freighted that reputation with every sneer from Christopher Mockery-Hitchens himself. Atheism/Humanism is a broader church than that, as I tried to alert in noting the passing of Dan Dennett.
OTOH you don’t have to be an Atheist or even agnostic to think mockery is the only valid response to a lot of what is going on under the name of Christianity in the U.S. today. (Not that the rest of the world is entirely immune: NZ has its own Fundamentalist inspired anti-vaxers one of which turns out to be a child-abusing hypocrite; and the most prominent of which (a self-style ‘Bishop’) is filthy-rich on the back of tithes from his congregation.)
Then it’s unfamiliar for me to hear ‘God’, ‘virtue’, ‘reason’ in the same sentence and where the latter two aren’t used “blasphemously” as DE puts it.
I never met a Catholic. I still, deep down, think of them as exotic creatures.
@Hat Same here!
I was married to a (lapsed) Catholic, with a huge extended family; some of whom were lovely; but many of whom were deeply troubled (beaten at Seminary for being left-handed, for example, turned into an alcoholic; a young woman forbidden from marrying a Baptist, out of spite defrocked a seminarian who was lodging with the family, was forced to marry him, in later years took up with a practicing Priest despite her being still married).
There have been endless stories in NZ/Aus (ref Cardinal Pell) of Catholic abusive priests getting magicked from parish to parish to evade accusations of child abuse.
And abuse in small things as well as large: on the site of my local Catholic school, the congregation was invited to subscribe to building ‘housing for the needy’ on a portion of the land. Who’s in there? Retired Nuns/teachers from the school single-occupying rent free houses big enough for a family.
Of course there’s non-Catholics/non-Christians committing sins just as heinous. I daresay Catholics on-average are no worse than the population at large on-average. I myself keep at a safe distance from virtuousness. But child abuse is beyond the pale, particularly where someone’s gone into the Priesthood precisely to get to a position of power over children or vulnerable women. A bunch of male celibates making rulings over women’s most difficult decisions about their own bodies appalls me.
Catholics on-average are no better than the rest of us; and still they keep up this holier-than-thou.
Never the less I need to give myself a stern talking-to: if not all Atheists are Hitchens-alike; not all Christians are Catholic.
OTOH you don’t have to be an Atheist or even agnostic to think mockery is the only valid response to a lot of what is going on under the name of Christianity in the U.S. today.
Yes indeed. Though one shouldn’t stop at mockery. These people need to be actively opposed, both in political terms and in their poisonous lying ideology.
Never the less I need to give myself a stern talking-to: if not all Atheists are Hitchens-alike; not all Christians are Catholic.
Come to that, not all Catholics are Catholic (in the sense you mean.) Despite my indelible sense of their imbued exoticism, I have meant plenty who aren’t like that at all.
in many traditions, that same heresy being a common one in belief systems that spring from liberation movements
My very limited experience of Christian Liberation Theology is that its adherents are essentially opposed to oppressive power, though I suppose that effective opposition might indeed lead to pacts with the devil for countervailing power.
I was canvassing a while back with someone I’d seen at meetings but never spoken to, who asked me how I came to join the Labour Party. I explained that this had come about because I was a Christian (even UK Labour Party members can be ignorant enough of the history of the Party to expect to hear that you are a Socialist despite being a Christian, rather than because of you being a Christian. Of Americans, we do not speak.)
He immediately said that he understood exactly what I meant, and proceeded (unwittingly) to make me feel positively fraudulent by saying that he had become a Socialist through (Catholic) Liberation Theology. Fraudulent, because I knew, in fact, that he was Chilean and had been tortured in prison by Pinochet’s regime, but I hadn’t known anything about his original background and motivation.
Catholic social teaching has made conservative trade unions possible.
@Rodger C What on earth sort of Christians instructed you [AntC] so poorly?
@JWB AntC had the life experience, not his own fault, of spending his earlier life in a largely secularized post-Christian society that still retained an Established Church.
@Rodger C And so AntC was taught about Christianity by state schoolteachers who had only a passing acquaintance with it?
As @DE has alluded to, in buttoned-up post-WWII Britain, nobody (not in school, not at Sunday School) talked about theology. Authority figures would rather die of embarrassment than talk about personal belief or intimacy with God. So Christianity (I was exposed to both High-church Anglican, middle-brow wishy-washy Anglican and Methodist/Baptist Sunday School) was bible stories (qua fairy tales), with a sort of unspoken assumption that belief would arrive for you sooner or later, no need to worry about that yet.
The RE teacher at school I’d describe as sanctimonious. My main memory of him was fulminating at school assembly at a pop performer (and by inference all pop) whose performance was mocking the disabled. I later discovered the teacher had a disabled kid. I later later figured out the performer was Ian Drury, who’d had polio as a kid, so should have been lauded for overcoming it to go on stage, and was for legitimate reasons mocking all sorts of establishment stuff (considering how he’d been treated), but not the disabled.
I lapsed from Christianity/found better use for my Sunday mornings rather than made a big conscious decision.
Although my subject at Uni was Philosophy, this was strictly Epistemology/Ontology/formal Logic; not Religion. We had a gallop through Enlightenment thought: chiefly to show how modern science threw off Christian mysticism (concentrated bollox).
So really I’ve only learnt about Christianity/belief under my own steam in much later years, as I observed the overweening and disproportionate power of Christians in a secular society; and the stories started coming out of abuse within the Churches. So admittedly I’ve learned more via Atheists than via Christians — and chiefly because proselytizers I’m ipso facto suspicious of being hypocrites.
Clearly DE is not proselytising, so I’m really valuing these insights; whilst also mildly suspicious how unrepresentative he might be/how idiosyncratic is his belief system.
I had no idea about the Ian Dury song. Strong stuff, with an interesting back story. It got used at the opening of the 2012 London Paralympics.
Ian Dury was one of those who made you feel that there is hope for the English yet.
With the peripheral stuff cleared away, back to the main plot:
@Rodger C Who sez?
Errm, sez Christians. Or at least some Christian (official Anglican, not loony-tune) with a dog-collar put on TV to debate with Atheists. (Sorry, can’t remember more detail.)
DE mentioned ‘reason’ above (I’m coming back to that). To the objection belief in god doesn’t stand to reason (in the sense lacks sufficient observable evidence), the response was: Exactly! If I believed in god solely from arguments of Pure Reason, it wouldn’t be ‘belief’, it’d be common-or-garden scientific knowledge.
So that ‘intimation’ (trying to use a neutral word) is what distinguishes a believer from somebody who merely follows “Scripture, Tradition, Reason, and Experience.” by rote — which would have been the earlier me.
And I’d be pretty suspicious about ‘Experience’ there. I get an uplifting experience from Bach Religious choral works without it being for me an ‘experience of God’. I know because I get the same uplift from his secular works — indeed more from his abstract studies that probably were never written for public performance.
If a Christian says they’re going to pray/talk to God about some thorny issue, I’m taking it they mean something different to when I say ‘I’ll need to think about that.’ I mean I’ll reason it out, look for evidence, figure out the consequences of various courses of action, talk it over with others who might have a different view.
The difficulty for me not being on the inside of that ‘intimation’ is how varied and contradictory and downright sinful (in my judgment) this claimed secret knowledge allows (/encourages?) some Christians to be. What was ‘Christian’ about Pence’s support for Trump? What ‘Christian’ has changed that he no longer supports Trump? AFAICT Trump has only ever paid lip-service to Christian values/his behaviour in office was entirely consistent with his behaviour before. “Reason and Experience” would have told that. Was Pence relying only on “Scripture”/the Cyrus prototype? Is that not “blasphemy”? How do I tell a blasphemous Christian (or a Christian being temporarily blasphemous in pursuit of a higher goal) from an honest one?
Or is it that Christians are especially gullible? (Hitchens would say: having gained belief in one load of nonsense, they’re hooked on the habit.)
@DE 7:45 They are great examples of things that don’t count as “basic values.”
You’re being pretty coy about what does count, then. Your message goes on to the example of the sanctity of life (with which I can agree). Amongst the religions of Abraham still located in the lands of Abraham, I don’t see that counting for much. (Not just in the current conflict but throughout the history of the State of Israel; and amongst Sunni-on-Shia genocide &vv, when they weren’t being distracted by Israel.)
For me religious tolerance — as part of wider diversity — is a basic value. I tolerate religions that tolerate other religions, and non-believers.
From a Christian POV, God is the ultimate source of both virtue and reason.
This seems to be backsliding from your earlier claim that got us to this point. That’s exactly what I’ve heard “the wrong sort of Christians” claim:
God is the ultimate source of both virtue and reason; but there’s nothing distinctively “Christian” about those values. ?
Those without access to that “source” are excluded from virtue and reason? Or have to get them second-hand?
I rather think the virtues and reason of modern Liberal-Humanism were won _against_ what was sourced from Christianity; were drawn from pre-Christian Hellenic values. (Yes there was a fair bit of willful idealising of the Hellenes. Yes you can source some of those virtues from a willful reading of the NT; but then you can source almost anything from willful reading of the Bible. It’s the willing that’s the source.)
I’m perfectly capable of reasoning about virtues without going to some further authority. I listen to Hitchens, Dummett, Dawkins doesn’t mean I follow them slavishly. (They don’t follow each other.) Some of my values coincide with some Christians’. I don’t hold them because they’re Christian.
@Y I had no idea about the Ian Dury song. Strong stuff, …
I fear my reference might be attracting undue street cred. I should point out I seldom/never watched Top of the Pops; certainly hadn’t seen the show in question; hadn’t heard of Dury (apologies for the mis-spelling above: shows how much I don’t know [**]); thought and still think Punk is a talentless racket; registered only the teacher’s moral outrage.
I don’t know if the teacher thought they were earning brownie points by watching; failed with me. My only learning was that RE teachers are just as capable of mis-placed outrage as anybody else.
[**] Today was the first time I heard that song Y links to. I’ve watched as much of any Paralympics as any other Olympics — that is, zero.
@AntC
You seem to be coupling “values” with “people who are supposed to have these values but do not act in accordance with them”. This may reflect an overly mechanistic view of human nature, and does not leave scope for either (a) limitation of applicability of values or (b) resolution of cases where values conflict with one another or are felt to be ambiguous or even (c) genuine bad faith on the part of the “believer”. If you want to elicit Christian values, I think it can be accomplished by consulting various catechisms, the fundamental texts and commentaries, without reference to the behaviour of individual Christians or groups of such. If you want to know what is unique to Christianity, I think DE has already admitted “nothing”. If you want to know what Christianity has to offer, given the record of some of its advocates, then I think you may be asking the wrong question; if you feel that there is no “version” of Christianity or any other religion that has anything to offer you, then no one can argue with this–it is a subjective judgment, and I think it is a fruitless exercise to attempt to find objective underpinnings for it.
Thanks @PP, there’s a smidge of your observations in what I’ve been saying, but I don’t think you’ve caught my drift.
If you want to know what is unique to Christianity, I think DE has already admitted “nothing”.
I was looking for what’s common (not necessarily unique) to all the varieties of Christianity — that is of what calls itself Christianity rather than what you or DE or whoever might ‘allow’ as Christianity. In terms of proclaimed virtues or reason. Is there nothing inside the shell of a building with a cross on the roof?
“people who are supposed to have these values but do not act in accordance with them”.
All us poor sinners are capable of falling short of our own values. It’s the holier-than-thou authorities who shove their values down my throat I’m objecting to, especially when they use that authority to cover their hypocrisy. (Lawmakers banning abortion except for the mistress they’ve got pregnant.) The cathedra not the nave.
And when they claim to have a special hotline to an invisible/unquestionable superior authority. (Which might be some perverse reading of a sacred text, which is open to any number of contradictory readings they conveniently ignore.)
I hasten to point out DE has not shoved no values anywhere — indeed he’s been quite reticent about specifics.
If you want to know what Christianity has to offer, …
No I wasn’t looking for any offer(ing). I was trying to get insight into how the belief ‘gets off the ground’ as it were. And how it informs daily life.
If personal virtues/reason are independent of/logically precede belief (as DE sometimes seem to be saying), there’s hope of rational discussion leaving the religious trappings out of it altogether. But as it is, abstruse bits of doctrine seem to be blocking any coming together of different sects. Is there not enough virtue/reason in common to be able to sidestep doctrine?
As in: it looks like there’s no God/Christ everybody believes in; rather each (small group of) believers has a distinct God/Christ. To an outside observer like me, this situation is indistinguishable from there being no God/Christ at all.
“I was looking for what’s common (not necessarily unique) to all the varieties of Christianity”
I am afraid that might still be the wrong question. The answer may again be “nothing” or “appeal to sacred text and tradition”, where sects can interpret the sacred text in radically inconsistent ways and mandate aspects of tradition while de-emphasising or ignoring other aspects to produce a radically different result.
“authorities…hypocrisy…special hotline”
Religious authorities in the behaviour you are talking about resemble other authorities who are not religious–their values can be summarised as “Might makes Right” and “the end justifies the means” ; maybe an anarchistic party (Hat?) would be more congenial for you than a Church.
“looks like there’s no God/Christ everybody believes in; rather each (small group of) believers has a distinct God/Christ. To an outside observer like me, this situation is indistinguishable from there being no God/Christ at all.”
This is unassailable but incomplete. Like scientists, ethical thinkers may be searching for the Truth but not expecting to find it, the pleasure lies in the chase and the company.
“Like scientists, ethical thinkers may be searching for the Truth but not expecting to find it,”
@PP, scientists agree. The question of whether a certain mathematical conjecture is correct makes mathematicians find common language.
To a lesser extent same happens in sciences (though sometimes scientists disagree).
Conversely minor differences in answers to rather abstract theolgical questions cause wars. It is possible for a Catholic and Protestant, or Jew and Buddhist to join their forces and try to find the Truth. Together.
It is not what they do and not what religion encourages people to do even now.
I do see a problem here. This is indicative of lack of interest in the truth and “God” has a lot to do with “Truth” for me.
AntC, I now realize you’re not asking out of a desire to mock or condemn, but I still get the strong sense that there is no answer that would satisfy you — it seems to be of the same nature as a desire to understand what makes flat-earthers tick. As PlasticPaddy says, you seem to be equating “Christianity” with “whatever anybody who calls themselves Christian says or does” and if the latter doesn’t suit you you say “See, Christianity is a crock.” That’s neither intellectually honest nor likely to provide you with enlightenment.
@LH, but I see no meaningful way I can identify what is say “Islam”.
There is such a way, very meaningful for a humanist me : to see what an individual Muslim sees there. Sadly (or fortunately) different Muslims see different things there.
People never agree about anything. Sure, it’s good to see what individual Muslims say, but it’s also important to read about the history and the official doctrines (Sunni, Shia, and “heretical”). And poetry and other literature. The more input, the better a picture you have. “This guy I know said…” is not enough.
I have a shelf of books on Islam, including two Korans (one heavily annotated), histories of Islam in general, the Shi’ites, and the Ismailis, specialized studies, and personal accounts, I visited lots of mosques in Turkey and Syria, and I knew Muslims of various flavors when I lived in NYC. I still feel I’ve barely scratched the surface.
I was looking for what’s common (not necessarily unique) to all the varieties of Christianity
It’s relatively simple (though, of course, we all know what is in the details). Christians by overwhelming majority either 1) believe in the resurrection of Jesus known as Christ and 2) that such believe is a way (or maybe the way) to get into the God’s Kingdom, however they perceive it. Or, if not 1 and 2, are raised in or adopted one of the Christian traditions and do not think too much about these abstractions.
The question of what anthropologically differentiates Christians from other people and how much it was because of 1 and 2 and how much it’s just a historic contingency, cannot be reasonably answered in a blog thread or, actually, I don’t think even known, the subject being somewhat complicated.
@LH, yes, absolutely, though as long as you have associations which Russians generally have with Islam, you risk reading the Quran the same way as ISIS guys do – and not as your Muslim freinds do.
I was looking for what’s common (not necessarily unique) to all the varieties of Christianity
Good luck with that. I thought you’d read Wittgenstein?
When you’ve finished, go and see what’s common to all the varieties of Buddhism.
The implication that if there is no such common feature, the overarching concept is meaningless, is an interesting one. You seem to have discovered a sort of universal conceptual solvent.
Your questions may be genuine, but in retrospect I may have been showing the characteristic Christian global free-floating “gullibility” in supposing so.
By associations I mean just that we learn about Muslim conquests of Christians lands and we think it is “a very strict religion”…
A remarkable collection of grey and black tones – and nothing else. All exciting things associated with Muslim cultures are in 1001 nights.
Obviously this set is unrealistic: obviously “Allah” means much the same for a Muslim as “God” for a Russian, obviously a Muslim feels much the same things about a masjid that a Russian feels about a church – but these things are included in another set of associations, that with Christianity.
And God in Muslim context is even called “Allah”, not God.
Basically, my Jewish (in this case it means ethnicity: he’s a Christian) freind and a poet when he mistakenly thought that I am an Islamophobe (I told him what I told above, about associations) and for some half a hour was explaining to me that Islam is a good religion (I did not stop him, because the lecture was beutiful) relied on 1001 nights:)
obviously “Allah” means much the same for a Muslim as “God” for a Russian
The matter is not so straightforward.
There has been a long-running effort by Muslims in Indonesia to prevent Christians from using the name “Allah” for “God”, for example.
While this is obviously wrong, I can in fact understand it, and up to a point I even agree with it.
Muslims well-disposed to Christianity (the great majority of those I have talked to about faith, though this may well reflect the fact that the others wouldn’t be wanting to talk to me about faith anyway) will say “we all believe in the same God, anyway.” That is kind of them and shows a fine eirenic spirit, but (although I usually mumble at that point something that could be taken as vague agreement) I don’t in fact think that’s true, exactly.
Christian core doctrines about the nature of God are so different from those held by Muslims (and are, indeed, seriously blasphemous to Muslims) that calling the Gods “the same” seems dubious to me.
On the other hand, as I have said before, being a Christian (in the sense that I am) is not fundamentally about doctrines at all; it is having a personal relationship with Jesus (though not necessarily in the “personal saviour” mode of US fundamentalism, which seems to me to owe much to distinctively American concepts of how personal relationships work.)
Now AntC would say at this point (I am confident) that this is basically the same as having an imaginary friend. I think this is, in fact, perfectly true.
But having an ordinary human friend is also to have an imaginary friend. We cannot know them as they truly are; we are loving an image of them that we have constructed for ourselves. If our relationship is a good and healthy one, we will be keeping that image as like the reality of our friend as we can, though we will never succeed completely.
If my image of my friend seriously at odds with their reality, that will significantly damage our relationship. But it does not have to mean the end of the friendship, and it does not even have to mean that the friendship is an illusion through and through, or that is not still of enormous value and significance to both of us.
This is where (I think) doctrine comes in to the practice of Christianity: it’s a set of principles for preventing our imaginary friend from deviating too far from the reality (and especially, from the ever-present danger of remaking the image into our image – an idol.)
Projecting my own understanding of my relationship to Jesus onto the Muslim’s relationship to God (which they would hardly thank me for), I would say that although (from my point of view) they are greatly mistaken about the nature of the object of their adoration, that does not have to make the adoration invalid or mean that they are merely worshipping an idol. After all, the object of my own adoration is also far from being a perfect picture of the reality. (Obviously, I think it’s closer; otherwise I have no real reason for calling myself a Christian at all; except maybe cultural inertia.)
@DE, again, I am speaking about associations (and even when I speak about religion, I still need an individual human’s perspective): emotions people associate with God, feel when they hear “God”, think, and so on.
Obviously there is an overlap between English God and Arabic Allah (and with all due respect to Indonesians, it’s an Arabic word…) in this respect.
This overlapping part belongs to a Russian’s set of associations with Christianity – as result some easily accessible part of what Muslims think of religion is not associated (among Russians) with Muslims and Islam at all.
Church vs. masjid is an easier example.
As to what you wrote – your and my understanding of Steve may differe and sometimes it can be convenient to designate your and my Steves as d-Steve and D-Steve. But most of the time we don’t do that.
Because, I think, we believe in reality of Steve.
I in turn believe in reality of God.
Yes, in principle you can describe a wrong confession’s view of God with a new word, and your own view of God with a new word, and use “God” only for God’s view of God (if, of course, God is not using humans for observing God:))
Well, yes: I agree with you.
However, what I described in my comment is an understanding of my relationship to God in terms analogous (in some way) to my relationship to an ordinary human being (though in both cases, believing in the objective reality of the other party independent of my own relationship with them.)
This seems a natural way to think about God in our, largely shared, tradition, but it is not usual even for many Christians, let alone Muslims and other groups.
Many “religions” (can’t think of a less loaded term, hence the scare quotes) do not really put anything like a personal relationship with God centre-stage, of even acknowledge the possibility of such a thing at all. Which gives me an excuse to trot out one of my favourite Kusaal proverbs again:
Dim nɛ Win, da tu’as nɛ Winnɛ.
“Eat with God, don’t talk with God.”
To such a person, my argument would cut no ice at all.
I strongly suspect that the kind of Muslims who persecute Christians in Indonesia for using the name “Allah” for “God” subscribe to a highly formalised notion of their own relationship to God in which any kind of warm personal devotion on their own part to their Creator is largely absent. The genuinely pious would not be so insecure in their own beliefs as to engage in this kind of malevolent pettiness.
This is actually analogous to the weaponisation of “Judaeo-Christian values” in the service of xenophobia and bigotry. This sort of behaviour is completely inconsistent with any kind of genuine personal commitment to the real Christ. Where not simply hypocrites, these are worshippers of carefully selected trappings of Christianity, not of Christ. Devotion to holy relics, perhaps …
I honestly don’t understand how (thinking) Muslims and Christians (and Jews) can think that they believe in different Gods. They don’t believe that different Gods exist! That leaves two possibilities – either a) the other side believes in the same entity in a wrong way or b) the other side is utterly confused and their beliefs are just the old wives’ tales. The similarities of representations of God in the Abrahamic traditions are so striking that I don’t see b) as a viable option.
Regarding Indonesians: if “God of Abraham” is not Allah, then are Abraham and Ibrahim similarly unrelated (same for a really long row of Jewish/Christian characters shared with Muslim tradition)?
If yes, who’re “People of the Book”? (and who gave them the Book, God or Allah?)
P.S. Sorry if there is an (unknown to me) motivation for this practice within Islam. I presently can’t see how it can be compatible with what’s written in the Quran:/
@DO:
In many ways, this is a question of language, rather than theology: how different can a thing be before it ceases to make sense to call it “the same”?
However, the weight you give to different criteria of difference is going to be very dependent on your own culture and general attitudes.
Is Moses, “Moses”, if there was in fact a person called Moses, on whom the Exodus stories are based, via much later mythmaking, but he never confronted Pharaoh, there were never any plagues of Egypt, and there was no Exodus?
Is he still “Moses”, if everything else is the same as I just proposed, but in fact he was called Ishba’al, and the name Moses is a later invention by someone who knew a bit of Egyptian and thought it made a nice touch to go with the bullrushes story?
Suppose you are genuine devotee of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, not tongue-in-cheek at all, but perfectly sincere (could happen, right? according to Richard Dawkins, it effectively has happened.)
You find “Flying Spaghetti Monster” a bit unwieldy, so you call your deity “God” for short. Moreover, you (genuinely) believe that all the nice bits in Genesis have actually been appropriated by the Jews and Christians from the FSM tradition.
Do you then believe in the “same” God as Christians and Muslims?
The Christian concept of God as a Trinity is, to Muslims, a horrific blasphemy of the most fundamental kind. FSM nothing. (Many Christians probably underestimate the weirdness of the orthodox Christian view of the Trinity, and its potential for upsetting Muslims, because in reality they operate with an understanding that God the Father is, like, God God, God the Son is actually Jesus, who is a kind of superman superprophet but not like God God, and the Holy Spirit is God God when communicating with Pentecostals.)
who’re “People of the Book”?
Not the book you’re thinking of: Zoroastrians, for example, have counted as a “People of the Book” historically. (This actually accounts for the Hausa term Maguzawa, “Magians”, applied to pagan Hausa: it was a handy dodge for Muslim Emirs to get away with not forcibly converting them, which would have been both difficult and, for various reasons, actually undesirable. Long story.)
The Muslim take on the evident similarities between parts of the Qur’an and the Bible is that the Jews and Christians have corrupted the original stories, in part deliberately.
The Muslim view of Jesus is actually a good instance of the “Moses” question: for Muslims, he was born of a virgin and was a great prophet. The Christian scriptures are based on him (but seriously distorted.) However, he was not crucified, and of course was not the Son of God, a title he would have been horrified by.
Furthermore, he was not called “Jesus.” The Muslim prophet’s name عِيسَى is, in fact, etymologically not “Joshua”, but “Esau.”
So, is Jesus there in the Qur’an? Or not?
DE, yes but yet the people of the book received revelation from someone and have obligations before this someone and if this someone is “Allah” but the people of the book must either refer to someone else or just use a different word when discussing these matters among themselves, the whole scheme gets overcomplicated.
Sure. I agree with you. But that’s because we share so many of the same preconceptions about God.
@D.O.
there’s a fair amount of hedging, but the rabbinic jewish tradition is pretty solidly monolatrous, as opposed to monotheistic. there’s a lot of oscillation among different versions of the relationship between Nameless* and other divinities, from “Most Important” to “the only one who Gets Things Done” to “the only one for Us” (and more), but denial of the divinity of other deities isn’t very common. i suspect that mapping the variations through time and space would find that the versions closest to montheism are from contexts where jewish legitimacy to christian or muslim state power was seen as important by the rabbinate.
i don’t have any thorough sense of the range of opinion in the observant world about whether the christian or muslim god are the same as Nameless. to the extent that josh is the christian god, as opposed to his father, it’s an unambiguous no**; but the whole question of that relationship is mainly (i think) meaningful to the rabbinate because it casts doubt on christian monolatry, let alone monotheism. there certainly are jewish adherents to the “abrahamic” rubric that identifies the three deities*** to form a united front against the savage masses, but to my (3rd/4th-generation veltlekhe) eye that position is evasive at best, and can’t be honestly sustained as part of a halakhic outlook.
.
* thanks to roz kaveney for this handle
** yes crucified, no virgin birth, no prophetic role, no kind of messiah
*** i trust someone more fluent than me can make a better snap from this.
“Thou shalt have no other gods before me” has a pretty strong implicature that there are other gods who might have been placed before him.
I think you can make a pretty good case that full-fledged monotheism develops over the course of the Tanach, but actually tracing the development would lead into the quagmire of trying to find criteria for dating the various parts that weren’t question-begging and circular. Few have emerged from that swamp with their academic credibility completely undamaged.
Come to think of it, the Hebrew actually say על פני “before me” in the “in my presence” sense, so the implicature is perhaps not quite so evident. Still …
Oddly, the Kusaal version goes
Da dɔlli winsieba lɛm paas mam ya’asɛ.
NEGATIVE follow.YE god.other.PLURAL again pass me again.NEGATIVE
“Don’t y’all follow different gods again.” (or “in addition.”)
which kind of doubles down on the polytheism.
Come to think of it, paas “(sur)pass” is typically used with numbers, e.g. lin paas atan’ “the third one” (“the one which amounts to three”), so this is indeed best read as “Don’t follow any additional gods besides me.”
Furthermore, he was not called “Jesus.” The Muslim prophet’s name عِيسَى is, in fact, etymologically not “Joshua”, but “Esau.”
LH readers can get a relatively up-to-date overview of the facts relating to the Arabic form of the name of عيسى ابن مريم ʿĪsā bnu Maryam (as named in Surah 19:34) and to the theories that have been proposed to account for it in Dye and Kropp (2011). Also note the recent contribution of al-Jallad and al-Manaser (2021).
والله أعلم wa-Llāhu ʾaʿlam.
That’s a common attitude these days, and completely avoids the “God of the gaps” problem. It’s even spelled out in the Book of Mormon (Alma 32):
It is also what my RE teacher said (Catholic, public school – separation of church & state works differently in Austria): Ein Gott wär ja arm, der sich beweisen ließe – God is above being proved by Puny Humans because being provable by Puny Humans is puny.
On Wikipedia, however, I learned much later that the Catholic Church refuses to take this easy way out. It calls it fideism and condemns it as a grave error. (…Most recently in 1998, which may be the same year as the teacher’s heretic oopsie.)
I strongly suspect Pence agreed with this Irreverend:
“I never said he was the best example of the Christian faith. He defends the faith. And I appreciate that very much.”
– Franklin Graham, president and CEO of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, about Trump in late November 2018
Trying to get Pence hanged would seem to outweigh appointing reactionary judges and Injustices.
Now you’ve got me interested. What do you mean?
That’s fascinating; somehow I didn’t know about the عِ. Still, isn’t that more like… phonosemantic matching of the Greek form? Islam got the names of other Biblical personalities through Greek as well; Ilyas even still has his nominative ending.
I honestly don’t understand how (thinking) Muslims and Christians (and Jews) can think that they believe in different Gods. They don’t believe that different Gods exist!
They believe that things which aren’t God exist, though (a few pantheists excepted), and that people can – and should not – worship them and call them “gods”. Many such “gods” have unquestionably existed, even to the most ardent materialists’ eye – Roman emperors, for instance, or the Sun and the planets. And both Muslims and Christians also believe in an unseen world of spirits (for want of a better word) – angels and devils and more ambiguous figures – which can also be worshipped by misguided people. Some Christians (perhaps especially ones unfamiliar with Arabic) seem to believe that the God Muslims worship is some kind of evil spirit. Muslims can hardly reciprocate this belief – though the whole Malaysian controversy looks very much like an effort to approximate it. The Qur’an states quite clearly that Christianity and Judaism were originally based on the worship of God (Allah), with all mistakes introduced later on. Trinitarianism obviously messes up this semantic cognacy with a double etymology, as it were, and is accordingly roundly condemned. But the non-divine members of the trinity – Jesus and the Holy Spirit (identified in Islam as Gabriel) – are both identified as unambiguously good messengers of God, not to be blamed for the emergence of such a belief.
looks like there’s no God/Christ everybody believes in; rather each (small group of) believers has a distinct God/Christ.
I have encountered polytheists online who claim to believe just that: that different Christian sects (Muslims weren’t discussed) are actually in relationships with different gods under the same name. I assume they also believe that Republican and Democratic congressmen are in fact swearing allegiance to different nations.
Very interesting articles, Xerîb: thanks (as usual.)
Looks like the name عِيسَى may in fact have been a pre-Islamic man’s name, and it may have already been adopted by Arab Christians as a phonosemantic loan for “Joshua/Jesus”, perhaps helped along by a perhaps-evident-to-speakers connection with roots meaning “create” and/or “save.”
The parallel with Yahya/John is interesting.
Current Christian Arabs, I believe, avoid it; but there are certainly West African Christians who use it, including the Kusaasi. The 1976 Kusaal Bible had just “Jesus”, while more recent versions use “Yesu”, which I suspect of having been either made up by the translators, or just taken from Twi; in real-life speech people say “Ayiisa”, and the Toende New Testament actually writes the name as “a Yisa”, quite rightly. (All personal names begin with the particle “a”, except for a few which are based on adjectives: the translators of the 1976 Kusaal New Testament for some reason didn’t do this, and nobody has ever corrected this pointless divergence from natural speech.)
Also note the recent contribution of al-Jallad and al-Manaser (2021).
It has always been clear that the etymologically peculiar naming of Jesus as ʕīsē rather than Yasūʕ dates to pre-Islamic times; the Qur’anic text presupposes that the audience initially addressed was already familiar with tales of Jesus under the name of ʕīsē. Al-Jallad and al-Manaser’s analysis of the inscription implies that it was written by a Trinitarian Christian – or at least someone who believed Jesus was a god – a few centuries before Islam; if so, at this period, the use of this name did not entail a Unitarian position on his status.
Islam got the names of other Biblical personalities through Greek as well; Ilyas even still has his nominative ending.
And Yūnus. Many of the names can’t have passed through Greek though: Ismāʕīl, Isḥāq, Yaʕqūb… We have to assume multiple lines of transmission into Arabic.
(edited to remove comment preempted by David Eddyshaw)
Of course the first thing a Russian child thinks when she learns that Jesus (Rus. iisus) and Moses (moisej) are Isa and Musa is that they rhyme.
P.S. which is not unparalleled (Qābīl wa Hābīl etc.)
There is actually a suggestion that this is deliberate, or at least, no accident: the original form of the “Jesus” name seems to have been ʕīsē (as cited by Lameen above), and the vocalisation has been influenced by “Musa” (who is is Amuusa in Kusaal-as-she-is-actually-spoke, incidentally, though he is “Moses” in the Bible. I’m sorry to report that in the Toende version he has been Frenchified to “a Mɔyiiz”, though. I had to think about that one for a second or two …)
Yes, it is one of those things which seem silly because when they occured to you (say, when you were 6 or 7) you were confident in nothing that occurs to you – and which are not silly.
“Vocalisation has been influenced by “Musa”.”
Not Mūsē?
(Actually, discovering all this about the name عِيسَى has really made my day. Thanks again, Xerîb! Lesser blogs do not provide such joys.)
Al-Jallad and al-Manaser, page 124:
“In fact, the earliest material we have to inform the pronunciation of the name عىسى is the transctription of the Arabic name موسى ⟨mwsy⟩ in Greek. …”
(with eta)
Also referenced there (note 62 > note 43)
Marijn van Putten, The development of the triphthongs in Quranic and Classical Arabic
https://scholarlypublications.universiteitleiden.nl/handle/1887/47177
The weird thing about the rhyming names in the Qur’an is that they’re not used as such within the text. It’s obvious that Qābīl and Hābīl are a rhyming version of Cain and Abel, right? But the name Hābīl doesn’t occur anywhere in the Qur’an at all. Ṭālūt (Saul) and Jālūt (Goliath) are both found in the Qur’an, in close proximity, but not in a verse-final position where they could actually rhyme. These clearly tell us something about the pre-Islamic oral tradition that the Qur’an’s listeners knew these figures from, if only that it too went in for rhyme. There is some temptation to explain Mūsē and `Īsē that way, but there’s no obvious pairing context for them the way there is for those.
Yes, one reason to doubt for a Russian child s that the context could be created by Russians themselves (“By the way, Musa is Moisej. And Iisus is Isa”.) Who knows, maybe all Arab names are -sa?
—
Apparently other pairs cited in this connection are:
Hārūn and Qārūn (Aaron and Korah), Hārūt and Mārūt and obviously Gog and Magog (Yājūj, Mājūj) who rhyme outside of Arabic as well.
These clearly tell us something about the pre-Islamic oral tradition… There is some temptation to explain Mūsē and `Īsē that way, but there’s no obvious pairing context for them
Just rank speculation, but perhaps pairing in association with the Tawrāt and the ʾInjīl, respectively, mentioned together Surah 5:46 (quick link to this here for general LH readers) and Surah 7:157 (here)?
The scheme “AX and BX” where AX and BX rhyme (perhaps Gog and Magog is where I encountered it first) itself can be a natural place for a rhyme.
But somehow all examples that come to my mind are reduplications, like Turkic m- and Jewish shm-, like Russian большой-пребольшой (большой “big”, adj-adj “very adj”, пре- is a prefix which means more or less “very” and often appears in such reduplications).
___
Tried to remember something with “and”.
Instead remembered am[o]úr-budúr – someone’s jokular version of amour-toujours which I saw online, where “Budúr” is the name of Badru l-Budūr in the Russian Aladdin. The guy was discussing love in scence fiction and fantasy.
He used it in the sense of lyubóv’-morkóv’, an ironical way to refer to love and romance. Lybov’ “love”, morkov’ “(here: collective) carrot”.
As in “What about A and B [two freinds previously not known to be interested in each other]?” “Ah, they have lyubov-morkov and all such.” “wow”)
___
So all right. The question: are rhyming pairs in the from “[Name] and [Name]” specifically Semitic or are there (folk/old/) European examples? I only remember Tofslan och Vifslan from Tove Jansson’s book who add -sla to every word.
“Tofslan och Vifslan ”
Just found: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=mymla
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Moomin_characters#Moomintroll
I wonder if has any etymology. (Tove Jansson’s books used to be immensely popular here. Or maybe “popular” is not the right word: they were, but many books were. But her books captivated/affected imagination of many readers. Maybe the only “chidlren writer” I’m ready to list among my favorite writers)
“Moomin sex” is probably something it is better not to google.
The Snork-not-so-Maiden …
@DE, thinking about reality of Steve, God and things.
Personal relationship is not necessary: we normally don’t introduce different names for you and my views of the same individual object, no matter what is this object.
We can do that when we differently identify individual referents (in the world believed to be the same). When you and I are speaking of similar but not identical geographical regions (including/excluding Arab Africa in “Africa”). Usually we don’t do it even then.
We can do it with various elements of mental worlds: with classes, with characters of novels.
Inserting God in this scheme raises some questions, of course.
Say, I believe in you. And I beleive in you somewhat differently from the way I think of material objects. Nevertheless you are material.
But of course, again speaking of personal relationship, you don’t have to think that you have a relationship with god for me to believe that you have a relationship with God.
Not simply “save” (I just finished reading the paper), but “redeem” in its etymological sense – buy out of slavery, out of bondage to sin and hell. Several other verbs are used in the inscriptions for “save” as in “save us from the enemies” or I think “save us from drought”, but not this one outside of that one inscription.
@drasvi:
We are getting ahead of ourselves here. I think we should be asking Hat (respectfully, of course) whether he is real before building elaborate hypotheses on the supposition.
(If not, this may be a case for the Ontology Crash Team)
https://languagehat.com/ai-language-learning-and-grammar/#comment-4491576
Well, if Hat is imaginary then God is real. Someone must be imagining Hat.
“Allah” is obviously a loanword in Bahasa Indonesia. If the Muslims there followed the Christian pattern in e.g. Greek/Latin/English of referring to the only-existing deity with the pre-existing common noun for a polytheistic deity but maybe capitalized for emphasis (Θεός, Deus, God) they would apparently just go with Tuhan. (Plain old lower-case “tuhan” is reportedly cognate to e.g. Maori “atua.”) And in fact one of wiktionary’s glosses for capital-T Tuhan in both Bahasa Indonesia and Bahasa Melayu is “(Islam) Allah,” as well as the more generic “God (single god of any monotheistic religion).” Using a loanword from Arabic may well make it seem in context more like a “proper” personal name a la YHWH, which it is thus likely more irksome-feeling to have appropriated by outsiders, however supposedly monotheistic they may be.
But note that there may be a parallel to the Malaysian/Indonesian practice in the Philippines, where the word for (the Christian) God tends to be a Spanish loanword (“Diyos”), and the pre-existing lexeme “bathala” (itself a loanword from Sanskrit before any “Abrahamic” influence had gotten to the region) is reportedly in pejorative use to mean “false god” or “idol,” although at least in Cebuano capital-B “Bathala” can still be a “poetic” synonym for Diyos. (Another Tagalog way of saying false god or idol is reportedly “diyos-diyosan,” where the reduplication plus morphological suffix yields a diminutive that may be pejorative: compare “bahay” (house) to “bahay-bahayan” (toy house or doll’s house).)
Using a generic word (with honorific capitalization or the equivalent) does seem a very Team Monotheism move – if your God is the only actually-existing member of the generic category of “gods,” why, He hardly needs any more specific personal name for disambiguation, does He? But it just struck me that this is not necessarily inconsistent with rozele’s account of many historical iterations of Judaism as being more monolatrous (“henotheistic” is also a word one finds in the literature) than monotheistic in a stricter sense. Using the generic word to refer to your particular deity even though you do not per se deny the existence of others would be akin to the widespread practice of having an endonym for your tribe or ethnic group that means in your language more or less “the People” or “the Human Beings,” even though you are well-aware of the existence of rival tribes/groups/societies who do appear at least superficially to consist of individuals of the same species.
in the Philippines, where the word for (the Christian) God tends to be a Spanish loanword (“Diyos”)
I think something like this has happened in Kusaal, though my evidence is largely linguistic.
The (traditional) Creator is often referred to in Kusaal proverbs and greetings and suchlike, and the word used there is Win: this appears to be just a specialised use of the common noun win “spiritual individuality of something”, which the Bible translators very misleadingly forced into service to translate (pagan) “god.”
“God” in the Christian sense in Kusaal is Wina’am, which looks like a compound of win and na’am “kingship,” However, this form is all wrong for Agolle Kusaal linguistically: it’s /wɪ́nà̰:m/, whereas if it really were an indigenous compound, it should be /wɪ̄nnâ̰:m/. However, both the simplification of the cluster /nn/ and the tone sandhi are regular for the other Kusaal dialect, Toende, which was in fact used by the first Christian missionaries. They arrived from what is now Burkina Faso, and before they learnt any Kusaal, they used Mooré: I reckon that the whole word is probably borrowed from Mooré Wẽ́nnàám “God”, with a bit of loan-translation along the way in Toende Kusaal, with the glottalisation introduced from Toende na’am “kingship” = Mooré naam.
(It seems likely to me on first principles that the Mooré Wẽ́nnàám and its analogues in other Western Oti-Volta languages, which certainly antedate Christianity coming to the region, began as expression to render the concept of the Muslim creator God, Allah; but I must admit that’s pretty speculative.)
Using a loanword from Arabic may well make it seem in context more like a “proper” personal name a la YHWH, which it is thus likely more irksome-feeling to have appropriated by outsiders, however supposedly monotheistic they may be.
While the word Allāh almost certainly derives etymologically from al-ʔilāh “the god”, it is synchronically clearly distinct from the latter within Classical Arabic, not only by the missing ʔi but also by the anomalous pharyngealisation of the l; it has no plural and no feminine, a point much emphasised by tract-writers. It is accordingly best analysed as a proper name in Arabic as well – but a proper name referring to the God worshipped by all three Abrahamic religions. I can only speculate that the difference in reaction has something to do with local history: Muslims in the Middle East have lived alongside significant Arabic-speaking Christian and (until recently) Jewish populations ever since the beginning of the Islamic era, whereas in Malaysia I presume that the most familiar religious minorities would have been non-Abrahamic until the colonial period, leading to a feeling that the word properly belonged only to one religion.
There is actually an interesting difference in Arabic usage between Muslims and Christians in referring to God: Muslims readily call Him Rabbī “my Lord” or Rabb(i)nā “our Lord”, but only Christians commonly call Him ar-Rabb “the Lord”.
In Hausa, the word Allah has done the reverse thing, and can mean (even pagan) “god”, with a plural form alloli “gods.” Language goes its own way …
“Allah” is capitalised and spelt with a (silent) h when used in the Muslim sense, but is still pronounced identically to alla “god.”
I think something similar has happened in other West African languages too.
Lameen’s points (including that about the different contexts of the Near East v. East Indies) are unsurprisingly interesting and well-taken, so I will only take mild umbrage at his suggestion that there are only three “Abrahamic religions.” At a minimum on behalf of our Baha’i brethren and sistren. Some other candidates for inclusion on the list (such as the Mormons) seem to find the suggestion uncharitable rather than flattering. And e.g. the Druze perhaps cannot be trusted (for perfectly understandable historical reasons) to give a reliable answer on what they truly think about the classification issue.
Speaking up on behalf of my Mandaean friend, I’m pretty sure that the Mandaeans would say that they count too (though they would add that all the rest are, in fact, Satanic. However, still “Abrahamic.”)
In the North Slope Iñupiaq New Testament (Uqalugiksuat) which adorns my bookshelves (I knew it would come in handy one day), I see that “God” is translated God. (Ergative case, Godim.)
(Just noticed that Mandaean is yet another of these Judaeo-/Judaic words. Their traditional language – still just about alive, mirabile dictu – is, as all Hatters know, Mandaic.)
And Maltese also turns Allah into a common noun to render lower-case ‘god’; alla, plural allat
Well, if Hat is imaginary then God is real. Someone must be imagining Hat
I don’t think that follows. He could be a collective hallucination. We’ll just have to ask him. (You first.)
The Massachusett Bible of 1663 is another one that translates God as “God”, as well as Jesus Christ as “Jesus Christ”.
The proposal of drasvi that David E. is rejecting is an update and/or practical application of Bishop Berkeley’s clever move of arguing that we are obviously all someone’s imagination (or hallucination) and the apparent continuity of our existence can only be explained by an arbitrarily perfect Someone, whose imagination of us is continuous because He never falls asleep or otherwise gets distracted and temporarily forgets about us.
another one that translates God as “God”
Greenlandic, too, though from Danish rather than English, of course, and at least a bit more adaptation of the phonology: Guuti, ergative Guutip.
Classical Nahuatl had Dios for the Christian “God”, too; teotl was only used for the traditional Mexica gods.
Navajo as well.
Mandaeans are certainly classed as People of the Book. But their Gnostic position on God introduces complications of a different sort; “Yurba” – i.e. “great Yahweh”, the god of Moses – is quite clearly presented as an evil spirit (apparently not even Demiurge?) in their scriptures, not as the Supreme Being and not as worthy of worship. I don’t remember their position on Abraham, though. Druze and Bahá’ís both call God Allah, I believe; no idea what Arabic-speaking Mormons (if any) do.
Now I think of it, it’s interesting that Swahili doesn’t borrow “Allah” for “God” (it has Mungu), despite being originally the language of a people who consider themselves pretty much Muslim by definition, like the Hausa (if not more so.)
I suppose the word doesn’t really lend itself very well to typical Bantu noun structure constraints.
Something similar might account for why it never seems to have been borrowed into a Western Oti-Volta language, either, even Dagbani, despite the Dagomba royal clan seemingly having been at least notionally Muslim for centuries. It’s not that there aren’t plenty of other signs of longstanding Muslim influence, even among groups like the Kusaasi, who to this day mostly see no reason to become any kind of monotheist, thankyou very much.)
Actually, I think the Yarsi are solidly Muslim. There’s not a lot out there on their language though. I think there is some evidence that they started out as speakers of Dyula too, before they got WOVicised; that might confuse the issue.
(Ah: Tony Naden’s very brief dictionary says they use Naawuni.)
It may be an areal trend not to borrow the word: Songhay and Tuareg both normally use “our Lord” – Irkoy and Mǝss-inăɣ, respectively. Tuareg does also have Yăḷḷa, though.
FWIW, the apparently-officially-endorsed Arabic translations of the Book of Mormon and several other important LDS texts can be found linked at this page: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/translations-and-downloads/languages/arabic?lang=eng
Those who unlike me can read Arabic can browse at their leisure and see how not only “God” but perhaps a variety of other potentially-contentious lexemes are handled.
The Wali are another Muslim-by-definition group of WOV speakers. I don’t have anything on their language; essentially Dagaare, I think, but it presumably has its own distinctive features. The Dagaaba proper seem to be pretty much all Catholic nowadays: they say Naaŋmene “Chief-God.”
Now that I ponder more, I am struck by the fact that: (a) at least from an outsider’s perspective, Sikhism is what it is only because the historical matrix whence it emerged resulted from the incursion of “Abrahamic” (if we are being politely vague) monotheists into the prior non-Abrahamic religious milieu of South Asia and the various cultural/intellectual ripples of that incursion, but (b) it doesn’t actually follow from that that the specific Sikh account of monotheism is recognizably Abrahamic or ought to be slotted into the Abrahamic category on Wittgensteinian-family-resemblance grounds.
Like everything human, Sikhism is a special case. Still, monotheism in itself is not very unusual across the world’s cultures.
Most African traditional cultures seem to have a single Creator god, like the Kusaasi Win. But the Kusaasi Creator also seems to be fairly typical in not having anything much to do with everyday life, except as a sort of divine backstop guaranteeing that everything will eventually work out somehow, and certainly not being a focus of worship. A sort of Deist creator God. And the Bible translators were wrong in thinking that Kusaal wina meant “gods”: the Kusaasi are not polytheists. Their world view is actually more like what the philosophers call Panpsychism (though still not very like …)
I think that the more activist Creators in West Africa are very likely due to Muslim influence, even when they don’t adopt the actual name and/or attributes of Allah.
And who generalises is lost … the Yoruba traditional religious system, for example, is usually described in a way which seems highly reminiscent of Graeco-Roman anthropomorphic polytheism, though I must say I sometimes wonder how much of this goes back to a European tendency to force everything into familiar categories, then taken up by local people reinterpreting their own tradition into something more “respectable”, i.e. something more like what Europeans think a “religion” should be.
i’ll try to find my source, but my memory is that one of the differences between west african and americas yoruba practice is that in the former, a particular community tends to focus a specific divinity, while on this side of the atlantic, communities tend to spread their attention more evenly among a set of them, as a result of stemming from multiple pre-enslavement lineages.
but really i was just coming by to point to the ladino/judezmo use of “dio”/”dyo”, rather than “dios”, to avoid the plural ending. i don’t know how deities other than Nameless get referred to.
yiddish is content to use “got” for Nameless (as well as various hebrew and aramaic terms), and reserves “gets”, “opgot”, and “getin” for his competitors (according to refoyl’s dictionary, though i think i’ve seen “getin” in the wild).
A quick scan suggests that the Mormons go in for the usual Christian terminology: Allāh and al-Rabb.
It’s kind of an interesting puzzle: Muslims say they worship the same God as Jews. Mandaeans explicitly say they do not worship the same God as Jews, but do (IIRC) claim to worship the same God as Muslims. How to square that circle?
They seem to have originated as a Jewish sect, so perhaps being not-Jews was an essential part of their becoming a distinctive group, but other “Abrahamic” religions could be regarded as less Satanic.
They apparently venerate John the Baptist, so perhaps have something of the same attitude as early Gnostic groups who saw YHWH as an evil (or at least incompetent) demiurge, and Old Testament heroes as villains, but who saw Jesus as proclaiming the true path of Gnosticism. (There have actually been a lot of attempts to read this kind of thinking into parts of the canonical New Testament, both by ancient heresiarchs and modern scholars with theses and papers to write.)
And it is probably a better survival strategy in their homeland to imply that Muslims are mistaken about the Jews than that Allah is an evil demiurge.
Yes, “same God as Muslims” seems better if you need the status of ḏimmī…
And about Maltese: perhaps “gods” is just a bookish word in a monotheistic society.
I mean, it appears of discussions of history/anthropology and is transmitted in written texts – and the Maltese don’t have access to Arabic literature. (on the other hand whoever – presumably using Latin books – began to talk about Christian religion in Maltese could be perfectly familiar with Muslim Maltese…)
(Maltese as – self-ironically – described by a Tunisian: “a tourist asked me for directions in really bad Arabic. ‘You speak Arabic so well!’ said I and he said ‘It is not Arabic. It is Maltese’.”)
Hm. A confusing comment. By “history/anthropology” I meant that the referent is people somewhere far away. But the discussion can be initiated by the priest:)
I took Latin in the last year of junior high (grade 9), but did the science track in high school so no Latin. And I retain enough 50 years later that I was able to look up Spanish impreso the other week and find that it is indeed still an alternative past participle beside imprimido. Not ever having encountered the former. I don’t know if that counts as “useful,” but it’s a thing.
On the other hand, to me experience with German-inspired mid-19th-century prose style in Danish is more useful with stuff like Melville than my Latin. Simply the skill of keeping track of the heads of 5-6 nested clauses, though the details differ; we only got yobbish stuff like De bellis gallicis Liber in Latin class, and that only in easily digestible mouthfuls. (I don’t doubt that the complex “chancellery” style [kancellistil], as we call it in Danish, was calqued on a German calque of Latin prose style). It also helps with reading WP.de…
der Herrgott
der Herrgott
It looks rather like that, but actually there are some difficulties with the parsing.
The various Western-Oti-Volta words for (the Christian) God are all compounds, but they are actually rather odd compounds semantically, which may reflect them having been created semi-artificially at some point.
Compounding itself is nothing odd in Oti-Volta languages (they just love nominal compounds, especially “postsyntactic” ones), but the relationship between the components is not altogether clear in this case.
The WOV “God” compounds come in two kinds (some languages having both.)
The Mooré Wẽ́nnàám type has as its first element the stem of wẽ́ndè, which is the exact cognate of Kusaal win and has the exact same range of meanings, viz. spiritual individuality of anything (including, but not limited to, people) and also the traditional Creator referenced in proverbs and greetings.
The second element has the same root as nàabá “chief, king”, but it’s not the same stem: it is a derived abstract noun meaning “kingship” (also “kingdom” in the geographical sense.)
The first element of a head-final compound often has a sort of quasi-adjectival sense, though it can’t, strictly, be construed as a possessor (that needs an uncompounded construction.)
So the literal sense of the compound is not “god-king” (leaving aside the fact that “god” is not an accurate rendering anyway) but something like “divine kingship”, a formally abstract noun, which seems like an odd way of referring to God. AFAIK there is no tradition of using abstract nouns as an honorific way of referring to people, like the English “his honour”, “your worship.”
The second type is the Dagaare Naaŋmene type, with the elements in the opposite order “chief” + “god”, which looks more like what you might expect; except that it can’t be an appositional compound (those exist, but only when both stems have human reference, and the ŋmene/wẽ́ndè etymon definitely doesn’t: a human being has a wẽ́ndè, but a wẽ́ndè is not a human being.)
So the first component must be quasi-adjectival again: “royal god” (again ignoring the uncomfortable fact that “god” is a mistranslation in any case.) “Royal god” seems more like something a (human) king might have than a Supreme God. A God suitable for kings.
Come to think of it, “God suitable for kings” might even be a possibility, if the original meaning was “Allah”, as seems quite possible. The founders of the Mossi-Dagomba kingdoms are traditionally supposed to have been Muslim (though the details are pretty equivocal), and even now there are many groups (like the Dagomba) where the royal clan is (in principle) Muslim but the peasantry mostly aren’t. (The traditional chieflessness of the Kusaasi, too, aligns with the fact that few of them are Muslims.)
a human being has a wẽ́ndè, but a wẽ́ndè is not a human being
That sounds like an invocation of traditional motifs in Western philosophy. Something like “attributes do not inherit from the substances to which they are attributed”.
A human being has a head, but a head is not a human being. Some human beings have a dog, but a dog is not a human being.
“Who was that lady I saw you with last night?” “That was no lady, that was my wife”.
Father Zerchi’s, “You don’t have a soul, Doctor. You are a soul. You have a body, temporarily,” is technically heretical (at least in this this timeline), but it’s a good line.
“You don’t have a soul, Doctor. You are a soul. You have a body, temporarily,”
That line annoyed me no end when I read Canticle at age 20. Who instructed Walter Miller?
I read the book for the first time quite recently: it was a lot better than I anticipated (I’m not a fan of the cod-mediaeval post-apocalyptic thing, but I suppose Miller was the earliest and the best, or at least among the earliest.)
I did find it best to let the specifically theological stuff just slip on by, though. Rather like you do with the physics in (otherwise) well-written Space Opera.
the ladino/judezmo use of “dio”/”dyo”, rather than “dios”, to avoid the plural ending
IIRC “Dio” is the normal reflex, while “Dios” has been influenced by hearing Deus at Mass.
I remember Judezmo also borrowed alhad from Arabic for “Sunday”, to avoid any unwelcome religious implications of Domingo.
Where al-ʔaḥad and Domingo themselves are products of religious inlcination to rename days of week.
i recently read richard & sally price’s Saamaka Dreaming, a charming and fascinating look back at their fieldwork years in suriname from fifty years’ distance (tiny excerpt here). they have an intriguing chapter on the saamaka calendar, including their attempts to work out why saamakas call friday “dimingo” and consider it the first day of the week.
the historical evidence shows that in the 1690s, speakers of dyutongo (the vernacular spoken by enslaved africans on sefardi jewish-owned plantations), began the week on sunday, calling the days domingo – tu daka – dri daka – fo daka – fefi daka – pikinsaba – grangsaba. which is itself fascinating for including both specifically jewish (friday “little sabbath” and saturday “big sabbath”) and specifically christian names (“domingo”) alongside numbered days.
an incomplete record from the 1770s has wednesday – thursday – friday as pikkien sabba – grang sabba – domingo.
another from the 1820s has the same (with some spelling/pronunciation variation), with the intervening days numbered, in the form X-dakka-voe-sabba [X day after sabbath].
and what they encountered in the 1960s was a cycle beginning friday, with days called dimingo – sata / tudaka-u-saba – sonde – fodaka – fefidaka – pikisaba – gaansaba. clearly the same (though likely better transcribed), with saturday and sunday having absorbed dutch or english names alongside the numerical ones.
the prices think, of the three explanations they entertain, that it’s most likely that the two-day slide in the names has to do with an interruption in day-counting during the war years that established saamaka autonomy, reestablished through a consensus unrelated to the christian or jewish practice that anchor the cycle (which weren’t part of saamaka ritual life at the time). they think it possible that the u.k.’s 1752 julian/gregorian shift might have caused it, with a one-day inaccuracy – but believe it less likely, because the gregorian calendar was put into effect when the dutch took over the colony in 1667 (though english influence does linger, in saamakatongo and elsewhere). and they think it least likely that it resulted from deliberate shift to align “gaansaba” with the thursday day of rest proclaimed in an asante-oriented religious revelation in the late 1600s.
The Saramaccan days-of-the-week info is fascinating, although I am dubious about the old-calendar/new-calendar theory for essentially the timeline reasons given, plus the calendar shift generally had no day of week impact: in the U.K. and its colonies, for example, Wednesday September 2 of 1752 was immediately followed by Thursday September 14. I am mildly surprised at the absence of a theory (whether substantiated by specific evidence or not) that the Friday “dimango” has to due with Muslim influence in West Africa before the ancestors of the Saramaka were forcibly relocated to South America.
Not sure that Muslim influence was very prominent that far south in West Africa at the time. The received opinion seems to be that the main African linguistic substrate in Saramaccan was Fon.
(Also, Muslim Friday is not “Lord’s Day” but “Assembly Day”; and Muslims make quite a thing of it not being a “Sabbath”, IIRC. Saturday is still called يَوْم السَّبْت “Sabbath Day” in Arabic.)
For some reason Arzuma “Friday” is the only day-of-the-week name commonly given to boys by the Kusaasi; most of them, like Atalaata “Tuesday” seem to be only given to girls. Presumably, Friday is just more manly.
the prices say that the 1690s names are basically direct from the portuguese / judeo-portuguese that the sefardi plantation-owners contributed to dyutongo (i’d add, perhaps with some influence from english or dutch). i don’t see a reason to think otherwise, especially given what DE said.
and, JWB, the prices very much share your skepticism about gregorianization – i’m guessing that it’s one of the explanations that comes up often in the literature, so had to be addressed (and seems to them better than others proposed).
at some point i’ll try to find out more about dyutongo, which seems like a fascinating parallel to papiamentu!
For some reason Arzuma “Friday” is the only day-of-the-week name commonly given to boys by the Kusaasi
Evidently, the Kusaasi were originally Crusoesi.
It may be so.
Παρασκευή is a name of a number of female saints, but for some reason they seem to be mostly known in the Eastern Orthodox world.
Apart from Crusoe’s victim, I actually can’t think of any males named after days of the week in our culture either, but I expect othet Hatters can.
There is a character in Tade Thompson’s excellent Rosewater trilogy called Motherfucker Danladi (named for Sunday), a fairly classic Drill Sergeant Nasty type (though on the side of the angels.) But he is presumably Hausa. They go in for day-of–the-week names a lot more than the Kusaasi, for whom “weeks” have a bit of a foreign exotic vibe.
@DE: it seems to happen
In Spanish, of course, Domingo is a perfectly unexceptionable name
Domingo maybe gets a pass as a suitable name for a boy for being the most important day of the week. Like Arzuma.
Sabbath actually does sound rather as if it ought to be a girl’s name. Like Polythene or Sherbet.
Day-of-week names are rare-but-known in AmEng onomastics. Although it appears to be the case that the actress Tuesday Weld was in fact born on a Friday, and was originally named Susan.
Susie, Tuesday… maybe with a baby accent…
But it’s rather homo dominicus than dies dominicus… it’s certainly taken that way in French, German and Polish.
A rather horrifying example of American occurrence of the African practice of naming after days of the week was translating those of new slaves, into English or French, depending on the locale. See the table reproduced here, for example. Or here.
Day-of-the-week names most certainly are a traditional Akan and Fon thing.
Despite what I was saying before, I wonder if the seven-day-week is itself a sign of Muslim influence?
Against that, is the fact that it’s certainly not a longstanding thing among the non-Muslim groups to the north of the Akan and Fon, which makes you wonder how they got bypassed if it was a cultural diffusion thing. (The WP article on Akan names says “this naming tradition is shared throughout West Africa”, which reminds me of those journalists who say “in living memory” when they mean “I can’t think of a previous example offhand.” But then I have seen bloody linguists, who really should know better, talking about something as “characteristic of West African languages” when they mean something they’ve found in Fon. You know who I mean …)
” Domingo maybe gets a pass as a suitable name for a boy for being the most important day of the week.”
Boys named Domingo aren’t named after the day of the week. They are named after Saint Dominic. ”Domingo” in Spanish is the Lord’s Day/first day of the week but also the equivalent of the name “Dominic” in English.
One of the most famous saints in Catholicism is a Domingo, St. Dominic de Guzmán, a Spaniard who founded the Dominican order and was a contemporary of St. Francis of Assisi.
There also exists a female version of the name, Dominga.
I wonder how the Cree politician Ovide Mercredi got his surname.
As shown by its Three Capital Letters, this is a TV Trope. I succumbed to the temptation so you don’t have to:
the ladino/judezmo use of “dio”/”dyo”, rather than “dios”, to avoid the plural ending… i don’t know how deities other than Nameless get referred to.
What an interesting topic! I looked in the Ferrara Bible (1533). See for example Exodus 20:
Note the singular translation (sea) of the singular verb yihyeh, but the plural translation (dioses) of its subject ʾĕlōhîm. Also, Daniel 1:2 is interesting:
(The first verb in this sentence also just happens to be dio, ‘gave’, to confuse things.) Here ʾĕlōhâw, grammatically plural in form, is rendered with singular su dios. It was interesting to see that ʾeṯ- in ʾeṯ-yəhôyāqîm was not rendered with Spanish a (‘personal a’. It was also interesting to see how closely the Ladino sticks to the Hebrew, since I had never looked at this kind of text before.
Norman Roth (2002) Conversos, Inquisition, and the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain, p. 201f, on the topic of Dio:
His account leaves me with some unanswered questions… I wonder if there have been any important studies of the usage of Dio clarifying its history and development since Roth. How did Abraham ben Salomon Usque end up using Dio for ‘God’ and dios for ‘god’ in the Ferrara Bible in the first half of the 16th century, for instance? I gather he didn’t just translate from scratch, but brought together translations already in use in the community, so the usage would already have been established…
Unrelated: I saw in a dream a classification of patriotisms. 5 of them.
I remember names of two (“lyrical patriotism” and “бравурный patriotism”) and meanings of two, (apart of the obvious “lyrical p.”) – one is about “everyone hates us!” and one is about “everyone loves us!”.
Posting it here just to write it down.
Re “Sabbath” as a girls’ name: there’s an extant Italian surname “Sabato” (e.g. the Italian-American academic and political pundit Larry Sabato), where the etymology offered by the internet (not guaranteed accurate!) is that some remote and presumably male ancestor was nicknamed “Sabato” on account of having been born on a Saturday, which was supposedly thought lucky in some parts of Italy in some prior centuries.
Also the Italian-Argentine writer Ernesto Sabato (whose mother, interestingly, was Arbëreshë).
Also Russian numbered days of week are strange, as if they underwent dissimilation.
2 vtornik (vtor-, stem of “second”)
4 chetverg (chetver-, root of “fourth”)
5 pyatnitsa (pyat-, stem of “fifth”)
2 and 5 have -n- which is a suffix used to form adjective stems. I’m not sure what it is doing after “second” which is already a stem:/ They differ in gender.
4 in turn is the root, the stem of fourth is cherver-t-. Instead -g is added. -g is about as weird as it would be in English. Say, there is Twitter, and there is Twitterg.
I see that Ernesto’s mother came to Argentina from San Martino di Finita (in Arbëreshe merely Shën Mërtiri) in Calabria, so I’m naturally wondering if this is named for a different St. Martin than the most prominent one. Martin the Finite? Martin the Finished?
Origini del nome
It’s notable that in the Welsh weekday names, which are all Latin loans (unlike the month names), there is no “Sabbath” or “Lord’s Day”, but just Dydd Sadwrn and Dydd Sul. English, too, has all-pagan weekends. Yet even the Germans manage “Sabbath.” Not the Icelanders, though.
@Pancho:
That is unassailably correct, and yet didn’t stop funny guys at school from asking my classmate Domingo whether his parents planned to name the next kid ‘Lunes’. Etymology is not destiny.
Ah, so a more cromulent English translation would be something like St. Martin-upon-Finita, like Stratford-upon-Avon (or Frankfurt am Main).
St. Martin-upon-Thrung (: thring ‘to shut up, confine, bind; figurative to confine, restrict’).
@David E.: Those are not necessarily “pagan” weekends, merely astronomical ones. Are there any European societies where Christianity led to an abandonment of pagan-rooted names for astronomical objects? Consider this excerpt from the writings of the impeccably Orthodox St. John of Damascus:
“There are, we are told, seven planets amongst these luminaries, and these move in a direction opposite to that of the heaven: hence the name planets. For, while they say that the heaven moves from east to west, the planets move from west to east; but the heaven bears the seven planets along with it by its swifter motion. Now these are the names of the seven planets: Luna, Mercury, Venus, Sol, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and in each zone of heaven is, we are told, one of these seven planets:
In the first and highest Saturn
In the second Jupiter
In the third Mars
In the fourth Sol
In the fifth Venus
In the sixth Mercury
In the seventh and lowest Luna
The course which the Creator appointed for them to run is unceasing and remaineth fixed as He established them.”
Now obviously this is translated and I don’t have the Greek text immediately to hand, but I have no reason to believe that St. John did not use the conventional paganism-derived Greek names for the planets, e.g. Κρόνος for Saturn. The hedge “we are told” I think ties to a passage elsewhere where he says that the Church generally accepts the current secular wisdom about the physical universe (which was in those days geocentric/Ptolemaic) but does not teach that that knowledge flows directly from divine revelation – thus keeping the door open to accept potential revisions in the secular wisdom about the physical universe.
The Greek text (pp. 888-89 = 50-51 of 220). Yes, he uses the conventional Greek names.
Somewhat relatedly I see that the current name for the planet Saturn in Russian (as well as several other Cyricallly-scripted Slavic languages) is Сатурн (or Сатурнъ, prior to Bolshevik orthographic reform), but I don’t know if this has been true since deep into the medieval period or if the Latinate form was adopted let’s say circa Peter the Great because of the perceived prestige of Western science.
As far as I can tell, it’s always been Сатурн(ъ), but why? Why didn’t they borrow the Greek term as Кронъ?
I believe in OR they were Greek. But I suspect most of texts dealing with them are translations. Compare these two texts that contain Arabic names – presumably because the source contained them.
What you see in astronomical text is not necessarily the same as what you hear in the countryside.
it ought to be a girl’s name. Like Polythene or Sherbet
or the well-known diva Celanese Acetate.
I wonder if there have been any important studies of the usage of Dio clarifying its history and development since Roth
me too! and thank you for those excerpts!
it does seem to me that roth’s account is a bit confused because of not paying enough attention to the very different registers of writing and speaking in his sources. in word-by-word translations from the Tanakh, and texts modeled on them, preserving as much as possible of the hebrew grammar would be a priority. in translations of original compositions like the Kuzari (originally written in arabic, which may make a difference as well), that won’t be the case, and spoken norms may well be the reference point. and inquisition records are going to reflect either actual or plausible everyday speech.
i’ve heard the distinction referred to as a feature of diasporic / post-expulsion judezmo, rather than the language as spoken in iberia; i wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it’s operated very differently (including not at all) across time periods, geographies, and conversion or concealment experiences.
Kiwi Hellenist has covered how the planets became associated with gods: in short, the Greeks got those associations from the Babylonians, and nobody knows how the Babylonians assigned them. Modern explanations like “Venus was named because it’s beautiful” and “Mercury was named because it’s fast” are completely bogus.
He’s also covered why the order of the weekdays is different from the order of the planets: Nobody knows that, either.
Aha, in MS. Муз. № 1372 (from here):
Ill, Wise and Violent – a nice title for something.
But note in a text with Arabic names: “5 planida Afrodit Zuhrya friday, the morning star is on this planida” (my link p 681).
заряница звѣзда – more literally, заря is illumination of sky when the sun is near the horizon, not exactly “morning”
Interesting stuff at the Kiwi Hellenist site.
I particularly liked “Silences in the Homeric Odyssey“:
You’re right, that’s a good post (link) — thanks for pointing me at it.
Hurrapatriotismus – jingoism?
Wow, I did not know that Russian ура-патриотизм is a calque.
It does look so, but when I first read it I just thought that someone coined it for some particular reason.
It’s what Germany was like just before and into WWI. Fictionalized here.
And how do we call pre-WWII Germany then? (speaking of classification of patriotisms…These two must be different)
The years between the two world wars are simply called Die Zwischenkriegszeit, because they were not simple. The endpoints did not define the interval. It was the other way around.
@Stu, yes, but I think pre-WWII German society too experienced an upsurge of jingoism, and jingoism of a different sort than the pre-WWI society.
Actually no. There was a certain enthusiasm for Nazi rule and the “national rejuvenation” it was supposed to bring, and the effect of all those mesmerizing mass rallies and torch marches the Nazis were so good at organizing, but no pro-war jingoism – it’s known that Hitler complained to his inner circle about the lack of enthusiasm about the war among the masses contrasting it with the celebrating, flag-waving crowds at the beginning of WWI.
I don’t think that any masses anywhere were enthusiastic about the idea of war so soon after the last one. (Actually, I don’t think that any masses anywhere are ever enthusiastic about the idea of war unless poked and prodded by a ruling class greedy for power and money, but as we know I’m a pacifist anarchist with all sorts of crackpot ideas.)
@drasvi: yes, but I think pre-WWII German society too experienced an upsurge of jingoism, and jingoism of a different sort than the pre-WWI society.
Reality and Facts are taken seriously around here, though I do say so myself. Just “I think” won’t hack it. You can’t know much even about the 20s in Germany, the period of the Weimar republic. That too was “between the world wars”. See the sections on culture and social policy.
Bluff if you must, but not in the buff.
@Hans, well, I did not mean specifically “pro-war” sentiments.
I just mean a variety of patriotism distinct from the Hurrapatriotismus which DM connects with WWI. It needs a name.
I’m still concerned with classifying patriotisms:)
@Stu, I’m using pre-WWII (and not die Zwischenkriegszeit!) in parallel to DM’s “just before WWI”.
I understand of course that Jesus is a pre-WWI era Jewish politician…
Define “masses”, but a few generations of militaristic education did generate scarily widespread genuine enthusiasm for war that has not been seen since. As we’ve seen, comparative linguists weren’t immune to thinking that war was necessary and sufficient for the constant improvement of society.
a few generations of militaristic education
That’s what I mean by “poked and prodded.” Left to their own devices, people want to cultivate their gardens, not go off and kill each other.
I don’t share your optimism on this. We have evidence of people killing each other millennia before states and governing elites even existed.
I’m not talking about “people killing each other” — of course that’s part of human nature — I’m talking specifically about war, mass killing (of people one doesn’t know) at the behest of rulers. Don’t change the subject.
@hat
Are you saying something like “tribal wars, even genocidal ones, are not real wars”? Or do you mean that “in a genocidal tribal war it is always the case that a few leaders are responsible for the atrocities, because they have not left the others to their own devices and have somehow brainwashed them into committing the atrocities”? Or something else?
I don’t know enough about tribal wars to comment about them. I’m talking about the mass warfare we’ve had for centuries, and about the attitudes of modern populations.
I’m not talking about “people killing each other” — of course that’s part of human nature — I’m talking specifically about war, mass killing (of people one doesn’t know) at the behest of rulers. Don’t change the subject
But that’s tautological then – “people kill at the behest of rulers only at the behest of rulers”. What I was talking about is that there’s archaeological evidence of precisely the tribal warfare Paddy mentions, people killing other people because they are part of another group and in the way, of which modern warfare is only a blown-up version. You don’t need rulers for that, just people split into small groups that regard others as “not like us”.
of which modern warfare is only a blown-up version
You might as well say a modern megalopolis is only a blown-up version of a mud-hut village. That’s one way of looking at things.
Large-scale deliberate killing of non-combatants as part of warfare seems to be largely a modern thing. Part of the Age of Reason. At least, I suppose, moderns find it sufficiently embarrassing that we pretend it’s all accidental, which shows a fine sensibility. In any case, civilian enemies deserve it, of course, what with their wicked sheltering of the people we were actually aiming at and their deliberately provocative decision to live near them. If they will choose to put themselves in harm’s way …
On the other hand, death by violence seems to be pretty common in at least some hunter-gatherer societies. I don’t imagine that it’s any better for the victims than our own more impersonal industrial methods. More authentic as an experience, no doubt.
Yeah, as I say I’m not talking about death by violence but organized mass murder. I mean, I don’t know how anyone can consider it anything but insane that John can be shooting at Hans with intent to kill, and vice versa, for years on end and then Peace Is Declared and John and Hans shake hands and sign trade agreements and go back to their normal lives. I don’t understand how anyone can think that is something they want to participate in. It has nothing to do with bar fights or jealous rages.
John and Hans
Er, no reference to present company intended!
Tripped up by cosmopolitanism !
Most activities in our modern society are organized and people take part in them in that specific way because they have been brought up to do it that way. People in a warm climate don’t need to wear clothes, but they have been brought up to do so. There are people who would like to kill the person who took the last free parking space, but usually refrain from it because they have been brought up to think of that as wrong. People who normally wouldn’t kill other people over personal matters like that do kill others when they’re part of a mob or an army, because that’s okay then. Society both makes people behave better than they normally would and worse, depending on the individual and the situation. And modern society enlarges and multiplies both good and bad things to degrees not known in history. Without the modern state, perhaps Mr. Smith would tend his garden instead of going to fight against the enemy of the day, but maybe Mr. Miller would be running around with an axe and killing all the neighbors whose gardens he covets.
maybe Mr. Miller would be running around with an axe and killing all the neighbors whose gardens he covets.
Maybe, but the occasional Mr. Miller running around with an axe would be more than made up for by the tens of millions who wouldn’t be killed in wars. And allow me to observe that even under the conditions of the modern all-dominating warmongering state there are plenty of people running around and killing other people, often by the dozens. The “security state” doesn’t actually provide security for anyone but its overlords.
That’s what always gets me about the usual response to the idea of anarchism: “But then people would be running around stealing and murdering!” Gee, good thing that doesn’t happen now…
I’m not talking about the merits of anarchism here; I’m just not sure that it’s “the elites” or “the system” that’s the source of all things bad. Pre-state societies were no peaceful paradise, and any complex society will both amplify and soften good and bad impulses. Simple things like gun laws and methods of policing and treating lawbreakers can make a huge difference in the incidence of people killing each other per capita, even in systems that are very similar in their economic and political order.
Doesn’t the Thirty-Years War count?
Yes. Modern. (By which I mean post-Renaissance. We Welsh take a long view.)
Estimates of non-combatants deliberately killed when the Mongols conquered Baghdad in A.D. 1258 seem to run from a low of a bit over 100,000 to a high of around 2 million, with the possible intervention of an epidemic being a complicating factor in assessing the numbers. But it seems perhaps arrogantly Eurocentric to think that large-scale massacres are a recent Western innovation in human affairs.
Because “reason”, or even “Age of Reason”, is not quite what I think of when I think of the Thirty-Years War.
Ah yeah, that. Supposedly perpetrated mostly by auxiliaries from Georgia.
Note the possibly relevant factor, BTW, that as humankind became more enlightened and moral (just ask them!) over the centuries, it ceased to be the Done Thing or even an Acceptable Thing (timing varying considerably by region of the world, of course) to drag away defeated enemy civilians as captives reduced to slavery. The irony being that elimination of the enslavement alternative took away one practical disincentive to massacre. (And indeed, sufficiently archaic apologies for slavery sometimes advance the “well, they could have been massacred instead, so isn’t this less-bad” argument.)
Hans, apart of modern society we also have modern culture and modern economy/industry, so LH at least can ask what if we keep industry and culture – and get rid of states.
(Of course with economy there is the uncomfortable question of “what if it enslaving another people becomes economically feasible”, but as a matter of fact today it is more or less collaborative)
Similarly, the existence of the International Criminal Court is an important motivation for the gravely unpopular military rulers of Sudan to stay in power…
The charm of Neoliberalism is that it outsources the slavery. This allows billionnaires to feel good about themselves and to lecture us all on their Ethical Altruism.
Similarly, the existence of the International Criminal Court is an important motivation for the gravely unpopular military rulers of Sudan to stay in power…
No ICC is needed for this dynamic to operate. Clearly a large part of Trump’s motivation for his campaigning is that he urgently needs to be President again so he can pardon himself for his crimes and/or cripple any attempts to convict him for treasonable activities and gangsterism. The Mugabe/Amin problem: can’t risk giving up power, so will stop at nothing to retain/regain it. But this is not a good argument against the rule of law.
. . . it outsources the slavery . . .
and other kinds of toxic waste as well
After falling from power, Idi Amin spent a quite lengthy retirement in Saudi Arabia, where (after a few bumps in the road) the local authorities supported him financially and protected him from any risk of prosecution in return for him maintaining a low profile, staying out of the press, and not trying to plot or stage a comeback. Not a very just outcome, perhaps, but arguably the least-bad practical alternative in terms of not risking even-worse side effects. Of course Amin’s high-minded prior proposal that the border conflict with Tanzania that eventually led to his overthrow be decided by a mano-a-mano boxing match between himself and Julius Nyerere, to avoid additional casualties on either side, had been ungallantly rejected by his adversary.
“outsources the slavery.”
Not slavery. Just capitalism as portrayed and criticised in USSR (and hopefully in China even though China is to where it was exported in 90s-00s:)).
Large-scale deliberate killing of non-combatants as part of warfare seems to be largely a modern thing.
“As part” are the crucial words here. Deliberate killing of everyone was the meaning of warfare before the alternative came around of replacing one elite with another one.
Dunno about that. When I were a lad, we fought our neighbours so we could kill all the men and take all their women. I don’t hold with this modern fad for killing ’em all. Wasteful, I calls it. Young people of today …
Because “reason”, or even “Age of Reason”, is not quite what I think of when I think of the Thirty-Years War.
I always told my students that the Thirty Years’ War fostered the Age of Reason by way of rejecting the kind of sectarian thinking that had led to it.
Hans, apart of modern society we also have modern culture and modern economy/industry, so LH at least can ask what if we keep industry and culture – and get rid of states.
I don’t know whether LH is asking that question. But you can’t have a modern econmy/industry (and probably also not modern culture, but that’s not a question I have thought about a lot) without having a framework of rules and conflict resolution, if necessary by force (and if it’s just forcing people to sit and negotiate instead of fighting or letting economic power play out), and I would call any such framework a state. It may be that at some point it will be possible to have all the enforcing of rules done by robots and AI, without giving power to individual people, but I’m not sure whether that would be an improvement. But again, I don’t know what LH’s vision is, and IIRC, he has in the past stated that he doesn’t see this forum as the place where he wants to discuss it.
Yeah, I’ve spent a lot of time discussing the issue with all sorts of people, and have discovered it’s rarely productive because people have all sorts of automatic responses based on unquestioned assumptions fostered by the fact that we all grow up in nation-states and are soaked in statist propaganda from birth, so I don’t see it as a good use of my time. I state my position when the occasion arises because I want people out there to see that a respectable, apparently intelligent person can have such ideas (it’s not just unwashed crackpots carrying handwritten signs and/or bombs), and if people want resources on anarchism I can give some basic recommendations, but it gets very tiring fielding the obvious “but what about…” questions. I do not expect anything to change in my lifetime or those of my grandkids, and it’s quite likely that “follow the Big Man” is so ingrained in us we’ll keep plugging along in that destructive path until we wipe ourselves off the face of the Earth, but all I can do is say “non credo, non serviam” as the parade passes by.