MULTILINGUAL BIBLE.

The Unbound Bible allows you to view any section of the Bible in four languages at the same time (in parallel columns). Right now I’m looking at the gospel of John in English, Russian, Georgian, and Greek (of which you get seven choices for the New Testament and four for the old). I meant to post this months ago when Joe Tomei sent me the link (thanks, Joe!), but it somehow slipped through the cracks. Better late than never!


In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
В начале было Слово, и Слово было у Бога, и Слово было Бог.
პირველითგან იყო სიტყუაჲ, და სიტყუაჲ იგი იყო ღმრთისა თანა, და ღმერთი იყო სიტყუაჲ იგი.
εν αρχη ην ο λογος και ο λογος ην προς τον θεον και θεος ην ο λογος

Comments

  1. Very cool!
    I was excited when I saw the “Modern Hebrew” option – look someone has implemented Ghil’ad Zuckermann’s suggestion and translated the Bible into “Israeli”! Unfortunately, it seems not to be the case. I don’t know why they call it “Modern.”
    Yrs, &c.,
    A Quibbler

  2. What were the original words for “the Word”? What did they originally mean?

  3. Greek logos is a complicated word. You can read about it here and (with a biblical focus) here.

  4. Very cool indeed. This will be a big help. I already own a parallel NT with the Greek, but to have other languages and various versions – and have it be so easy to search and customize- is just great.

  5. Very cool! Thanks–post is forthcoming.

  6. Michael Farris says

    I was interested in pulling up several slavic languages at the same time for geeky fun comparing them, but there’s no Polish version (the most conspicuous gap I noticed).
    Instead I pulled up Spanish Italian and Romanian (also fun).

  7. From the FAQ:
    We’d be glad to include any version of the Bible on our site, but we need permission from the copyright holder to do so.
    If there is a version you want us to include, find out who the copyright holder is and how to contact them. We’ll gladly ask for permission, and put the Bible on Unbound Bible if permission is granted.

  8. David Costa says

    I wonder if he would get permission to use the excerpts of Eliot’s 17th-century Massachusett bible archived here:
    http://people.umass.edu/aef6000/Texts/Algonquian/Algnqn.html

  9. Is that some sort of funky old-fashioned Georgian? I ask because I thought the word for “word” was sitqva (in the nominative), and they have sitqua*. I’ve written an asterisk to mark a Georgian letter that I don’t recognize.
    Also … you gotta love it. “God” is ghmerto, and this passage includes a case form that forces that poor lonely e, stuck between two consonant clusters, to syncopate, yielding ghmrtisi. That’s right; it’s the only vowel for miles, and they shoot it in the head.

  10. Yeah, that’s an archaic Georgian letter usually transliterated y; if anybody knows more about it, please weigh in.

  11. I thought you would be interested in a very early forerunner of this enterprise:
    (This is from C.S Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding Drama, 1954)
    “At Alcala (the Latin Complutum) Cardinal Ximenes superintended the monumental Bible known as the Complutensian Polyglot, in which Jerome’s Latin, the Vulgate, appeared flanked by Hebrew on the one side and Greek on the other, thus placed between the Synagogue and the Greek Church (as the cardinal pleasantly remarks) like Christ crucified between two thieves.”
    Ouch. Well, let’s just say that ecumenicism had a way to go…

  12. Hey, thanks for that! I’ve been looking for something like that, as I’ve been on a little project to figure out how my name is done in multiple languages. I did it thru google mostly, but with that, it would have taken 10 or 20 minutes, not weeks.

  13. Michael: Origen may have produced the first work of comparative Biblical scholarship in his Hexapla. “In six columns (hence hexapla), word by word or phrase by phrase down the page, he set forth (1) the Hebrew, (2) a transliteration of the Hebrew into Greek, the independent translations of (3) Aquila and (4) Symmachus, (5) the LXX, and (6) the translation by Theodotion” (Encyclopedia of Early Christianity 525).

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