The History of Qur’an Translations.

Robyn Creswell, who teaches comparative literature at Brown and is poetry editor of the Paris Review, has an essay in the February 13 NYRB (archived) that is ostensibly a review of two new versions of the Qur’an but spends much of its time on a useful summary of the history of such attempts. It begins:

‘Umar ibn al-Khattab, the second caliph and conqueror of Jerusalem, was initially one of the prophet Muhammad’s fiercest enemies. According to early Muslim historians, ‘Umar was an exemplary pagan Arab: physically imposing, short-tempered, and somewhat sentimental, he was a lover of gambling, wine, and poetry. His conversion occurred in 616, three years after Muhammad began preaching to the polytheists of Mecca. One night, the story goes, ‘Umar was looking for drinking companions when he came across the prophet at prayer near the square shrine of the Kaaba (then a site of pagan pilgrimage). ‘Umar slipped under the great cube’s black covering and listened. Hearing the words of the Qur’an for the first time, he later reported, “My heart softened, I wept, and then Islam entered me.”

‘Umar’s experience was, it seems, typical. Early biographies of the prophet include stories of poets—the tribunes of pagan culture and Muhammad’s political rivals—who immediately renounced their art upon hearing the prophet’s revelations. Other stories recount the conversion of Abyssinian and Byzantine Christians who accepted the Qur’anic message even though they didn’t understand a word of Arabic. In the most extreme cases, hearing Qur’anic verses caused fainting, terror, ecstasy, and even death. In the eleventh century, Abu Ishaq al-Tha‘labi published a collection of such tales, The Blessed Book of Those Slain by the Noble Qur’an, Who Listened to the Qur’an and Subsequently Perished of Their Listening. Al-Tha‘labi wrote that people who died in this fashion were “the most virtuous of martyrs.”

Creswell points out that “Many Islamic authorities—and indeed many translators—believe that the Qur’an, as the word of God spoken to Muhammad via the angel Gabriel, is strictly speaking untranslatable” and continues:

Leaving theology aside, the Qur’an isn’t a book Muslims have historically encountered through reading. Instead it is recited, memorized, and used in devotional practices. ‘Umar converted after hearing the prophet recite the Qur’an; al-Tha‘labi’s martyrs were listeners, not readers. And this is only the beginning of the translator’s difficulties.

He goes on to discuss Robert of Ketton’s twelfth-century Latin version, Ludovico Marracci’s 1698 translation (also Latin), George Sale’s 1734 translation (“the most popular in English for some two hundred years”), Muhammad Ali’s 1917 The Holy Qur’an: Containing the Arabic Text with English Translation and Commentary (adopted by Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam), Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall’s 1930 The Meaning of the Glorious Koran: An Explanatory Translation (still widely used), Abdullah Yusuf Ali’s The Holy Qur’an: Text, Translation, and Commentary (1934-37), Arthur J. Arberry’s The Koran Interpreted (1955), and Michael Sells’ Approaching the Qur’án (1999) before getting to the books under review. For many of them, he provides their versions of Surah 100, al-‘Adiyat, which is a convenient way to compare their qualities. (I wish he’d included my own go-to edition, Muhammad Asad’s The Message of The Quran with its superb commentary, but you can’t have everything.) Here’s a sample passage on M.A.R. Habib and Bruce Lawrence’s new The Qur’an: A Verse Translation:

The punctuation marks point to a larger problem. Although Habib and Lawrence work hard to come up with an English equivalent to the Qur’an’s oral poetics, their own relation to poetry—like that of most contemporary scholars—depends on the written and not the spoken word. This is evident throughout their translation, but particularly in the editorial apparatus. In the longer suras, for example, they include numbered sections to mark changes of topic. This makes for easier reading, although the original has no such sections. They also include several hundred endnotes. In a note to the first verse of “al-‘Adiyat,” they explain the “like” in line two, which adds a simile that isn’t in the Arabic, as an acknowledgment of the standard interpretation of the racing horses as symbols of ungoverned desires. Without that explanation, “like” is indeed puzzling, but recitations don’t have endnotes.

Habib and Lawrence also include many bracketed words and phrases where the Arabic is hard to construe. In “al-‘Adiyat,” their bracketing of “the world’s” is clarifying—it resolves the ambiguity that troubles Arberry’s version—but misleadingly suggests that everything not in brackets is more or less a literal translation of the Arabic. Literalism is a chimera, however, as authoritative interpreters of the Qur’an have pointed out: God’s words can bear more than one connotation, making literalism untenable even as an ideal. The added simile in line two suggests that Habib and Lawrence don’t take the ideal seriously either. So it’s unclear why the brackets are there at all, especially as they interfere with oral performance. How is a bracketed word to be recited? Do we say it aloud, like all the other words, or ignore it—or speak it in a whisper?

He ends with The Devotional Qur’an: Beloved Surahs and Verses, selected and translated by Shawkat M. Toorawa, which he likes quite a bit; the essay ends:

Toorawa’s rhyming is as experimental as his versification. Where one rhyme falls flat, another opens our ears. He’s especially fond of consonant rhymes, an alliteration of word endings rather than beginnings, as in the first four lines of “al-‘Adiyat.” It can’t be a coincidence that this type of slant rhyme mirrors the Arabic, where rhyme is made by a repetition of final letters. (If this sounds easy to achieve, it is: Arab poets commonly use one rhyme for fifty or even a hundred lines.) Toorawa sometimes makes that parallelism explicit. “Al-Insan” (“Humankind”) is a short sura that mostly rhymes on the letter ra’, pronounced similarly to the English r. Toorawa’s version rhymes on “hear,” “favor,” “fire,” “camphor,” “pleasure,” “far,” and “pauper.” In this way the original echoes uncannily into the English, though one needn’t know Arabic to hear the music.

Yusuf Ali hoped to Islamize English through his translation of the Qur’an. In Toorawa’s devotional texts, we have a sense of what that might sound like. In his version of “Ya Sin,” a sura often recited to a person on their deathbed, we hear the happy susurrus of a life to come:

That Day, the Garden dwellers will be busy in their joyousness. ♦ They and their spouses will recline on couches, in shade and coolness. ♦ They will have fruits and whatever they request in abundance. ♦ The Ever Compassionate will greet them with a salutation of peace.

(The only Toorawa Google seems to know of is Shawkat M.; does anybody know anything about the name?)

Comments

  1. That’s not the usual folklore of Umar’s conversion, so far as I know. More commonly, I think, the story has him hearing a recitation by Khabbab ibn al-Aratt—one of the earliest companions—and only after Umar converts does he go to meet Mohammed at the Kaaba.

  2. J.W. Brewer says

    The theology may be different re theoretical untranslatability, but of course for most of the history of Christianity the Christian scriptures were more commonly heard* than read by the general mass of believers. The Protestant notion of the ordinary individual layperson dutifully engaged in solitary Bible-reading did not arise until the 16th century, and arose then only in some locations. It necessarily presupposed both mass literacy and widespread and affordable access to physical Bibles via new-fangled printing-press technology. In a U.S. context that sort of relationship with Scripture easily seems the default, but across the full range of Christian experience in time and space it’s more the exception.

    *Whether they were heard as read aloud in a language the listener actually understood is a separate question, to which the answers have varied.

  3. Quite so.

    Whether they were heard as read aloud in a language the listener actually understood is a separate question, to which the answers have varied.

    In tsarist Russia, they heard the scriptures read in Church Slavic, which (as our friend Veltman pointed out) was an impressive but only occasionally comprehensible experience.

  4. David Eddyshaw says

    I have read that the formal beauty of the Qur’an in oral recitation is attested to even by Christian Arabs, though I can’t recall my source, and I imagine that it could be pretty difficult to determine the answer. Too many confounding factors, and too many pious myths. Even so …

    Quite apart from the doctrinal issues, I can well believe that it is not translatable, in the same sense that effective poetry is not really translatable.

  5. J.W. Brewer says

    Modern Greek nationalists typically insist in the teeth of the so-called evidence that the antique Greek of the Scriptures as read in church is perfectly comprehensible. From which I infer Church Slavonic is perfectly comprehensible to a speaker of any modern Slavic language, given sufficient nationalistic commitment. (I believe until the earlyish 19th century the scripture lessons were also typically read in Slavonic to congregations whose L1 was e.g. Romanian, which may have been more challenging.)

  6. (The only Toorawa Google seems to know of is Shawkat M.; does anybody know anything about the name?)

    Maybe here, p. 59, footnote 1, as Turava, near the end of list of Bohra surnames. I would like to know the spelling in Gujarati. There is neighborhood (mohalla) in Surat called તુરાવા , so perhaps that is it.

  7. Thanks!

  8. David Eddyshaw says

    Modern Greek nationalists typically insist in the teeth of the so-called evidence that the antique Greek of the Scriptures as read in church is perfectly comprehensible

    If they’re old enough to have been taught Katharevousa at school, they might not be altogether fantasising.

    When I first went to Greece (in the Colonels’ era) I did not know any modern Greek, but I managed to read articles in the stodgier newspapers that used Katharevousa.

  9. Dmitry Pruss says

    Familysearch.org has 185 Toorawa vital records, mostly in the UK but also in the US.

  10. J.W. Brewer says

    @David E.: Did you understand those articles if someone read them aloud to you? (Admittedly, the allegedly medieval accent ideally used by clergy in Greek-language liturgical contexts may deviate from various varieties of modern pronunciation but it deviates perhaps even more so from the conjecturally-reconstructed pronunciation of ancient Greek taught in 20th century Anglophone university Classics departments.)

    Which raises an interesting parallel question. Do we think modern Koran* recitation in the original Classical Arabic actually preserves 7th-century (CE – I guess 1st-century A.H.) pronunciation, or has the pronunciation silently evolved over time much the way Church Latin did, however authentically archaic the lexicon and syntax may be? Or is this the sort of question where pious beliefs and empirical evidence are in some tension and it may be hazardous to get into the issue in certain quarters?

    *The preferred English spelling of the legendary Muhammad Mamaduke Pickthall, apparently.

  11. David Marjanović says

    First of all, the reading traditions – even just the canonical ones – don’t even have the same sound system. Some have a few extra vowel phonemes, let alone allophones, and two consonants get tweaked sometimes. This post “covers most of the main issues”, some pretty stunning.

    Second, even just by the undotted consonants alone, it’s not in Classical Arabic. It’s in a “Hijazi dialect” that had, IIRC, a few extra archaisms, but also a whole bunch of non-Classical innovations that are shared by some to all extant dialects. Notably, some of the word-final short vowels (grammatical endings!) were evidently gone, and so were a lot of alifs; this is covered elsewhere in that blog (and in the author’s big Brill book that came out more recently and which of course I haven’t had access to).

  12. David Eddyshaw says

    “Classical” Arabic did not actually exist yet when the Qur’an was composed. It was the result of later codification by Muslim grammarians, partly on the basis of pre-Islamic poetry and partly on the Qur’an itself.

    However, the Arabic grammatical tradition is more sophisticated than the premodern European one. The situation with the reading of the Qur’an is not like reading classical Latin as if it were Italian; it’s more like reading New Testament Greek as if it were reconstructed Thucydides-era Attic.

  13. This would be the place to mention a blog devoted to Qur’an translations, GloQur / The Global Qur’an. And at long last, an in-depth essay on the Qur’an in Volapük. Awfully esoteric, yes, but it’s interesting to see two very different universalist movements intertwine.

  14. I assume Italians mostly “understood” the Latin Mass before Vatican II, given that the priests pronounced Latin as it it were Italian, New Testament Latin is pretty simple, and the parishioners had exposure to the same phrases over and over again.

  15. J.W. Brewer says

    I’m certainly not going to criticize Cresswell for not writing a different piece with broader scope than the piece he did write, but it may be significant to note that this is really a “history” of translations of the Koran into modern-ish English, with a bit of medieval backstory. Migration patterns etc. over the last few generations have led to substantial Muslim populations whose L1 is e.g. French or German, and I would expect there to have also been some recent translations into languages like that. Whether they are broadly similar or whether the theological marginality within Islam of the whole idea of doing translations means a whole lot of ad hoc projects not always encouraged by the local Powers That Be, and that thus aren’t really aware of each other or engaged in ongoing dialogue about methodology, is a question I find interesting but have no idea of the answer to.

    Trivia: the present tense in “who teaches comparative literature at Brown” in hat’s description of Cresswell is apparently more than a decade out of date, but I assume hat was misled by wikipedia, whose article on Cresswell has apparently not been updated in over a decade. He apparently published a book in 2019 titled _City of Beginnings: Poetic Modernism in Beirut_ which sounds of Hattic interest although I cannot vouch for its quality.

  16. Van Putten’s research on Qur’an reading traditions and orthography has been exemplary, but I’m nevertheless unconvinced by his arguments for a half-caseless “Old Hijazi”. More precisely, I think he demonstrates nicely that the orthography used in the Qur’an was created for such a variety, but – bearing in mind that the pre-Islamic Arabic alphabet writing tradition was centered much further north – it does not follow that the Qur’an was originally recited in the variety whose orthography it used. Good news though: his Brill book is open access! So you might as well go to the source.

    As for translations in other languages, GloQur (linked by Y) is a nice starting point. A lot of cross-linguistic translation activity – especially from a broadly Salafi perspective, of course – is now coordinated from the King Fahd Glorious Qur’an Printing Complex in Madina, but there are plenty of solo efforts. In the IMA library in Paris I once found myself sitting across from an elderly man with multiple dictionaries open, who seemed to be working on a translation of the Qur’an into Breton. And a few months ago I found a PDF of a beautifully hand-calligraphed interlinear translation of one sura into Tamasheq.

  17. David Eddyshaw says

    There is a Hausa translation, and (unsurprisingly) one in Swahili. There’s also one in Yoruba; again, unsurprising: despite Kemi Badenoch’s astonishing remark that the northern people of Nigeria ‘were our ethnic enemies’, a great many Yoruba are in fact Muslims, and have been for centuries. It’s not unusual to find Muslims, Christians and “pagans” within a single family: the Yoruba traditionally regard kinship as much more important than such minor details as “religion.” It’s a pity that Badenoch feels such contempt for her own heritage.

    None in Kusaal; there are some Kusaasi Muslims, but not all that many. There is one in Dagbani; not too surprising, as the Dagomba royal clan has been Muslim for centuries, and Islam is much more pervasive there than among the Kusaasi. I think that’s it for Oti-Volta languages so far.

    Hardly surprising that there are many more Bible translations, given that there are several well-funded organisations specifically aimed at producing them, and a strong strand of Christian doctrine promoting this.

    Still, there are plenty of versions of the Qur’an:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quran_translations

  18. Bruce Lawrence also has a “Biography” of the Koran in English, part of Princeton’s Lives of Great Religious Books series; it is regularly discounted in their annual sales.

  19. David Eddyshaw says

    Interesting that there is one in Oromo. I suspect that the impetus for producing vernacular versions of the Qur’an is often increased by the presence of Bible versions in the vernacular in question; perhaps also by an absorption of (modern Protestant) Christian notions of what the written Word of God actually is, and the role it should assume in the life of believers.

    I recall reading the preface to one of those English versions gifted to libraries by Saudi Salafists, and being very struck by the similarities between ths approach to reading it advocated there, and that advocated for Bible reading by fundamentalist Christians. A lot of it was pretty much identical: essentially, that you should always read it in a prayerful frame of mind, prepared to be spoken to by God in the reading, and open to being changed by the message. (I’m not sneering: I try to do that myself, though I also think that this does not preclude other ways of reading, or mean that you should take your critical facilities off-line for the duration.) But this seemed very different to what I had encountered among actual West African Muslims.

  20. Trivia: the present tense in “who teaches comparative literature at Brown” in hat’s description of Cresswell is apparently more than a decade out of date

    Also the poetry editor of the Paris Review is now Srikanth Reddy, according to the masthead. Robyn Cresswell is one of the many advisory editors.

  21. OK, I’ll delete the fake news.

  22. J.W. Brewer says

    Well, “fake” is a bit harsh. In the old hard-copy world it was often more obvious that a description of someone’s job titles published in 2013 should not be assumed to still be accurate as of 2025 even if it was perfectly accurate as of 2013. Websites that are not obviously derelict and abandoned often give the impression of having content that was not only true-when-posted but has been updated as necessary to be true-when-viewed. But cutting-and-pasting can run the risk that that impression was inaccurate in a particular case.

    There is probably a whole class of folks out there with wikipedia articles devoted to them who were: a) “notable” enough that someone bothered to set one up in the first place however many years ago; but b) not “notable” enough to have a sufficient critical mass of fans or detractors who will be incentivized to keep coming back to the article and updating as circumstances change.

    This is less likely to be a problem when the subject of the article is deceased and the article correctly reports that … Or I suppose even retired in some relevant sense if their post-retirement activities are not really mentioned in any significant way. So for example I’m looking at the wikipedia article for Manny Trillo, a second baseman who played for seven different clubs over the 1973 through 1989 MLB seasons. We may hope that he’s still alive (aged 74) from the article’s silence on the topic, but otherwise pretty much the entire coverage of his post-1989 life is his 2007 induction into the Venezuelan Baseball Hall of Fame and his 2020 ditto into the Philadelphia Baseball Wall [not a complete Hall, apparently?] of Fame.

  23. But this seemed very different to what I had encountered among actual West African Muslims.

    Sounds interesting – what did you encounter?

    The WP article is very Wikipedia – mostly not in a good way, but at least it has a lot of examples. Shame it doesn’t discuss the Old Kanembu interlinear, which for my money is the most interesting case in West Africa as well as one of the oldest. But as a historical linguist I’m probably biased.

  24. David Eddyshaw says

    The Muslims I talked to seemed to have an outlook much more centred on right praxis than inner illumination; an analogy in Christian terms might be that they were more Episcopalian than Pentecostal.

    My sample may well have been unrepresentative. Not all Muslims are keen to talk about such things (not all Christians, come to that.) There may be a regional thing involved, too: the great Sufi orders in West Africa seem to be much more like social mutual-aid associations than the mystics that Westerners think of when you say “Sufi.”. But I suppose that there need not be a real dichotomy there …

    A Turkish Muslim friend (who was adventurous enough actually to come to church with me once, though – albeit tactfully – completely unimpressed by the experience) was quite different in this regard. Unfortunately, in those days I was myself much less interested in other people’s views than I subsequently became (this was before I went to Ghana), so I never enquired much into his own religious background (and I had the usual European misapprehensions about Islam being some kind of ideological monolith.) Missed opportunity … (we did publish a paper together, though.)

  25. David Marjanović says

    “Nineteenth-century German universalist provincialism”! I’ll have to read that at the earliest opportunity.

    it does not follow that the Qur’an was originally recited in the variety whose orthography it used.

    Good point; that will have to be argued separately, though.

    Good news though: his Brill book is open access!

    Yay! Maybe I’ll get to it in a month…

  26. Giacomo Ponzetto says

    @Vanya:

    I assume Italians mostly “understood” the Latin Mass before Vatican II, given that the priests pronounced Latin as it it were Italian, New Testament Latin is pretty simple, and the parishioners had exposure to the same phrases over and over again.

    I’m no expert, but chances are your assumption is unwarranted. The educated elite studied classical Latin in school anyway, most likely better than Italians of my (significantly later) generation did. For all but a few decades before the Second Vatical Council, the great mass of parishioners was unlikely to know even Italian (unless they were Tuscan), and their understanding of Jerome’s Latin was rather doubtful.

    You can still easily find online recordings of a Piedmontese folk song to the tune of the liturgical plainchant setting of Pange lingua, starting with an alternative understanding of “Tantum ergo sacramentum:” namely, “Tanti merlo ch’as lamento,” viz. “So many blackbirds that are wailing.”

  27. David Eddyshaw says

    Thanks for the van Putten link, Lameen. Fascinating stuff.

    Not too convinced by some of his supposed evidence for the artificial nature of the reading traditions. He needs to cast his net more widely before leaping to conclusions that a phenomenon could not occur naturally; e.g. (p91)

    A lack of a merger of a phonemic contrast in pause, while the merger is found in all other positions is rare cross-linguistically. The only other parallel that comes to mind, where however it has become apart of morphology, rather than a phonemic contrast, is found in another reading tradition of a holy text, namely that of Biblical Hebrew.

    This happens all the time and regularly in Mooré, Kusaal (inevitably), Mampruli, Dagbani … just because examples doesn’t spring to mind immediately, it doesn’t follow that something is “rare cross-linguistically.” Moreover, pretty much every natural language probably boasts at least one “rare” feature … * Furthermore, Arabic (like all Semitic languages) is plainly typologically quite impossible anyway.

    It’s an intimidatingly thorough work though. Will read on …
    Learning much …

    I was vaguely aware of suggestions that the received text of the Qur’an was settled much later than the traditional Uthman account says. Didn’t know that such ideas had been so thoroughly debunked.

    Hadn’t really appreciated that the tradition of the consonantal diacritics is less robust than the rasm, though I suppose it’s not surprising.

    * There are so many rare diseases in my own subspecialty that you actually come across one or another rare disease all the time. Just not always the same rare disease.

  28. There are so many rare diseases in my own subspecialty ,,,

    I suspect in most subspecialties, and indeed most disciplines if you get down to an excruciating-enough level of detail. So I was appreciative when I recently grew a strange lump, the GP was 99% sure it was a common-enough doo-dah but never the less sent me to a Consultant (who confirmed I’m not any sort of medical curiosity).

    In my own discipline this comes under ‘risk management’: probably we’ll be ok, but we need an old hand to keep an eye out for the exceptions.

  29. David Eddyshaw says

    I myself have one extremely rare (very annoying, but not life-threatening) disease, but this is an occupational hazard. Doctors are more prone to rare diseases than muggles are.

    On the whole, if you’re going to have a rare disease, you should go for one of unknown cause (as I did.) These are preferable to those where the cause is well-known (for example, from the well-documented findings at post-mortem.)

    Further gleanings from the van Putten thing: I was vaguely aware that the Arab grammarians had greatly limited the variation found in real-life Arabic in the course of codifying Classical Arabic, but I hadn’t fully appreciated just how much variety there was, and how late this pruning process was historically. I’ve seen the strikingly systematic and regular structure of Classical Arabic described as “oppressive” (in contrast with Ethiopic, IIRC); I hadn’t appreciated how much of that was actually by design, rather than because it just growed. (Personally, I have nothing against systematic and regular, but clearly this is a case of de gustibus.)

  30. I have had two bizarre fevers, both when I was under eighteen. The first was probably relapsing tick fever (rate of less than one case per million per year in America), but the specific spirochaete responsible was never identified. The other was completely unknown. One guess was hantavirus, which is a couple nepers yet rarer, but there are probably lots of other obscure viruses in animal reservoirs, which only rarely make zoonotic jumps to humans (because very few people sleep facedown, mouth open on loose forest dirt).

  31. For all but a few decades before the Second Vatical Council, the great mass of parishioners was unlikely to know even Italian (unless they were Tuscan),

    Yes, so Latin wasn’t necessarily a much bigger obstacle than Italian mass would have been. We aren’t talking about reading chunks of text, more that the rote responses would have been fairly transparent. E.g.

    „ Gloria in Excelsis Deo. Et in terra pax hominibus bonæ voluntatis. Laudamus te; Benedicimus te; Adoramus te; Glorificamus te. Gratias agimus tibi propter magnam gloriam tuam. Domine Deus, Rex cœlestis, Deus Pater omnipotens. Domine Fili unigenite, Jesu Christe. Domine Deus, Agnus Dei, Filius Patris, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis; qui tollis peccata mundi, suscipe deprecationem nostram. Qui sedes ad dexteram Patris, miserere nobis.“

    I could understand that from Italian before I ever studied Latin. I‘m not claiming the entire mass was 100% comprehensible to most parishioners, just that if Greeks and Slavic speakers want to make exaggerated claims about how intelligible older forms of their religious language are to them, then Italians might as well jump aboard.

    It’s also not surprising that Piedmont speakers would have more trouble with Latin than Tuscan or Roman speakers.

  32. J.W. Brewer says

    Well, if the pre-V2 parishioners in many parts of Italy didn’t know Standard Italian they certainly had some other Romance L1. In a purely visual sense, and from my own POV as someone who never really formally studied any Romance language other than Latin, I find Standard Italian the most “transparent” on average of the standardized nation-state-controlling daughter languages, in terms of ease of recognition of the Latin etymon from the daughter-language spelling. But aural transparency need not match up 1:1 with orthographic transparency, and of course there’s the further complication that at least in medieval/early-Modern times there was considerable regional variation within Europe in Latin pronunciation, so you need to figure out distance between a given regional Romance L1 and the Latin pronunciation used by those local clergy rather than some other clergy elsewhere.

  33. J.W. Brewer says

    Just re the Slavic context, I don’t know any details but I am given to understand there is some tradition of Russian ecclesiastical humor involving anecdotes in which pious-old-lady parishioners seriously misinterpret such-and-such prayer or hymn because some key archaic Slavonic word sounds very much like a false-friend modern Russian word with a totally different meaning which of course is comically incongruous and/or vulgar when read into the prayer/hymn. Whether these anecdotes are based on genuine found-in-the-wild misunderstandings or simply concocted by bored clergy who know both languages well enough to come up with plausible instances of the requisite confusion is not clear to me.

  34. David Eddyshaw says

    Harold be thy name …

  35. …and his friend Round John Virgin.

    Straying further from the point: For a class of seven-year-old anglophones learning the Hall Mary in Irish, “guigh orainn na peacaigh” [pray for us sinners] became “we are in the packet”

  36. J.W. Brewer says

    I expect that late 19th-century Ireland was not the only place in the mostly-Anglophone world where youngish boys learning Latin via the works of J. Caesar misheard or pretended to mishear Gallico Belli (or Bello?) as “calico belly.” I picked that up from somewhere in James Joyce but I doubt he had invented it himself.

  37. David Eddyshaw says

    My hen laid a haddock on top of a tree,
    Glad barks and centurions throw dogs in the sea,
    My guru asked Elvis and brandished Dan’s flan,
    Don’s muddy bog’s blocked up with sand.

    Dad, Dad! Why don’t you oil Aunty Glad?
    When oars appear, on beer bottle pies,
    Oh butter the hens as they fly.

  38. David Marjanović says

    …for the Republican Richard Sands one vegetable…

    the well-documented findings at post-mortem

    Is this a case of:

    “Surgeons do everything and know nothing.
    Internists know everything and do nothing.
    Pathologists know everything and do everything – just too late.”

  39. Alternate (unbowdlerized) version:

    My hen laid a haddock, one hand oiled a flea,
    Glad farts and centurions threw dogs in the sea,
    I could stew a hare here and brandish Dan’s flan,
    Don’s ruddy bog’s blocked up with sand.

    Dad! Dad! Why don’t you oil Auntie Glad?
    Can’t whores appear in beer bottle pies?
    Oh butter the hens as they fly!

  40. David Eddyshaw says

    Talking (as van Putten does) of cross-linguistic typological rarities, van Putten’s analysis implies that his Old Hijazi regularly marked case in the dual and plural but not in the singular (with a few exceptions.) “The only other parallel that comes to mind” … actually, no parallel comes to mind at all. Though, by my own strictures, I should not be concluding anything much from the emptiness of my mind. Other Hatters may perhaps readily supply examples …

  41. David Eddyshaw says

    “Surgeons do everything and know nothing.
    Internists know everything and do nothing.
    Pathologists know everything and do everything – just too late.”

    An orthopaedic surgeon and an ENT surgeon were taking a trip in a hot-air balloon, when a storm arose. They successfully stabilised the balloon, but were blown miles away over open countryside and were completely lost.

    Hundreds of feet below, they saw a lone figure striding across a field.

    “Let’s lower the balloon to within hailing distance and ask him where we are”, said the orthopaedic surgeon; and they do.

    “Where are we?” they shout.

    “You’re in a balloon!”

    “Extraordinary bad luck”, says the ENT surgeon to the orthopaedic surgeon, “that of all the people we might have encountered, we came upon a physician!”

    “How do you know he’s a physician?”

    “Well, what he told us was absolutely correct – and it didn’t help us at all.”

    (Traditional.)

  42. I was familiar with the factoid that translations of the Koran were (according to followers of orthodox Islam) not supposed to be called “translations” but rather “interpretations”. It seems that this may be even less true than I thought.

    But, The Meaning of the Glorious Koran: An Explanatory Translation, the title chosen by Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall, strikes me as a very strange choice. Surely claiming to accurately know and relay the meaning of the Koran is a much bolder and more presumptuous claim than merely claiming to translate it.

    With a sentence like “When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw”, there seems to be no obstacle to an accurate translation, and yet an honest translator would probably claim to be totally ignorant of the meaning.

    As I understand it (though I do not read Greek or Hebrew), there are many such cases (where the translation is clear enough, but the meaning is obscure) in the New Testament (camel/eye of needle comes to mind) and the Hebrew scriptures (this is not deny that there also other cases where the translation itself is difficult or impossible). Perhaps the Koran is much clearer and it’s meaning is always apparent.

  43. Christopher Culver says

    I am given to understand there is some tradition of Russian ecclesiastical humor involving anecdotes in which pious-old-lady parishioners seriously misinterpret such-and-such prayer or hymn because some key archaic Slavonic word sounds very much like a false-friend modern Russian word with a totally different meaning which of course is comically incongruous and/or vulgar when read into the prayer/hymn.

    I don’t know how much of a wider tradition there is, but there is one common joke I have heard time and time again: at the point in the liturgy where the priest intones “Да исправится молитва моя, яко кадило пред Тобою”, i.e. “Let my prayers arise before Thee as incense”, supposedly old babushki have heard that as “я крокодило пред Тобою” [= I am a crocodile before Thee] and try to derive some spiritual lesson from that depiction.

  44. “Harold be thy name …”
    “…and his friend Round John Virgin.”

    From some Anglicans online I learned that the line “most highly favoured lady” from the carol “The Angel Gabriel from Heaven Came” became “most highly flavoured gravy.”

    “For a class of seven-year-old anglophones learning the Hall Mary in Irish, “guigh orainn na peacaigh” [pray for us sinners] became “we are in the packet”

    This reminds me of a playground rhyme that I know taken from the Our Father in Spanish. Instead of “Padre nuestro que estás en los cielos” (Our Father who art in heaven), it’s “Padre nuestro que estás en los cerros, Tú cuidas las vacas y yo los becerros” (Our Father who art in the hills, Thou lookest after the cows and I the calfs.)

  45. there are many such cases (where the translation is clear enough, but the meaning is obscure) in the New Testament (camel/eye of needle comes to mind)

    It seems to me the meaning of the camel and the eye of the needle is obvious, especially in the context of Jesus‘s other teachings. The controversy in that case just seems to be generated by willful denial from people who find that message inconvenient.

  46. there is one common joke I have heard time and time again

    Seen here in 2017.

  47. David Eddyshaw says

    @Vanya:

    Yup.

  48. Gladly, the Cross-Eyed Bear.

  49. Myself, I find Mishnaic Hebrew easily readable, and Biblical Hebrew mostly readable (except when it utterly isn’t). But Medieval Piyyutim are often completely opaque to me, because they are so packed with direct and indirect references that I don’t get, not having studied the OT and the Mishna in depth.

  50. David Eddyshaw says

    I have an excellent heuristic for telling Biblical Hebrew prose from poetry: when you suddenly find you can’t understand the text any more, that’s because it’s changed to poetry.

    While I agree with Vanya re camels and eyes of needles, I must admit that with several Dominical utterances recorded in the New Testament, I understand all the words and constructions perfectly well but am still not altogether clear as to what they mean.

    F F Bruce produced a popular (in my circles) book called The Hard Sayings of Jesus. It’s quite long … and divides fairly evenly into (a) I don’t know what that even means and (b) I really don’t want to do that. The trick is to move Group (b) into Group (a).

  51. Truly, only willful blindness can make the pronouncement about the camel and the eye of the needle unclear. We call that kind of denial the “prosperity gospel” now, but it’s definitely not new. The rich have always been with us.

  52. van Putten’s analysis implies that his Old Hijazi regularly marked case in the dual and plural but not in the singular (with a few exceptions.

    Worse than that, really: most plurals don’t mark case either. (“Sound” masculine plurals do, but those are a rather small minority.) I find it hard to imagine such a system having existed anywhere except maybe as a brief and unstable transitional stage en route to full case loss. But who knows.

  53. PlasticPaddy says

    @hat, cc,, jwb
    Here is another example:
    Подарил племянник своей тёте на Рождество открытку с молитвой Оптинских старцев. Она читает ее без очков:

    — Молитва оптимистическая. О! Оптимистическая молитва!!! Это хорошо, а то я унылые молитвы не люблю…
    GT:
    The nephew gave his aunt a postcard with a prayer of the Optina Elders for Christmas. She reads it without glasses: — The prayer is optimistic. About![Oh!] Optimistic prayer!! It’s good, because I don’t like dull prayers…

  54. David Eddyshaw says

    @Lameen:

    I may well have got the wrong end of the stick (I know nothing about this), but I get the impression from what van Putten says that the identification of many presumed features of Qur’anic Arabic as being specifically Hijazi dates from later grammarians, and is not there in Sibawayh or the generation after him. Given that presumably later grammarians would naturally think that the language of the Qur’an ought to be Hijazi if it’s regional at all, this made me wonder about circularity and a kind of confirmation bias.

  55. January First-of-May says

    In tsarist Russia, they heard the scriptures read in Church Slavic, which (as our friend Veltman pointed out) was an impressive but only occasionally comprehensible experience.

    The relevant term indeed literally translates to Church Slavic, but is usually rendered as Church Slavonic; I’m not very confident of the exact implication of the distinction between “Slavic” and “Slavonic” here, or in general for that matter.

    “Only occasionally comprehensible” sounds about right; Church Slavonic is a (basal) Eastern South Slavic language, which puts it in a different branch from the East Slavic languages spoken by laity in the Russias.

    Just re the Slavic context, I don’t know any details but I am given to understand there is some tradition of Russian ecclesiastical humor involving anecdotes in which pious-old-lady parishioners seriously misinterpret such-and-such prayer or hymn because some key archaic Slavonic word sounds very much like a false-friend modern Russian word with a totally different meaning which of course is comically incongruous and/or vulgar when read into the prayer/hymn.

    Previously on LH. (The thread contains a bunch of examples.)

    [EDIT: already posted while I was drafting the comment.]

    My hen laid a haddock on top of a tree

    A different version previously on LH [EDIT: also already posted now, though without the link], complete with phonetic comparisons. I’m not sure whether your version is closer in the phonetics.

  56. The relevant term indeed literally translates to Church Slavic, but is usually rendered as Church Slavonic; I’m not very confident of the exact implication of the distinction between “Slavic” and “Slavonic” here, or in general for that matter.

    Same here, so in practice I do it sometimes one way and sometimes the other, without any particular reason.

  57. Christopher Culver says

    The relevant term indeed literally translates to Church Slavic, but is usually rendered as Church Slavonic; I’m not very confident of the exact implication of the distinction between “Slavic” and “Slavonic” here, or in general for that matter.

    IIRC, “Slavic” versus “Slavonic” for the whole family was originally a UK academia versus US academia thing. For example, the entry for the Slavic languages in Routledge’s Language Family Surveys series got the title The Slavonic Languages because both of its editors were trained in the UK in the 1960s. In the case of the artificial church language and the language of Ss. Cyril and Methodius that preceded it, however, the form “Slavonic” did find wide use also in US scholarship.

  58. David Marjanović says

    On camel & eye of the needle, the only controversies I know of is whether the “camel” was actually a tow, and whether “the eye of the needle” was the name of the smallest gate in the city wall of Jerusalem. Both options (as long as they’re not taken together) would merely make the metaphor less abstruse instead of changing the obvious meaning.

    Worse than that, really: most plurals don’t mark case either. (“Sound” masculine plurals do, but those are a rather small minority.)

    That actually makes it less egregiously unrealistic: witness the dat. pl. -n of most masculines and neuters in German, while the other cases are not distinguished in the plural (and in the singular only the genitive, which is rare at best, gets its own ending).

    German cheats, however, in outsourcing declension to the articles; and it is worth mention that the dat. pl. as a category is absent from e.g. the Bavarian dialects, replaced in form by the acc. pl. …

  59. David Eddyshaw says

    In Pahlavi, now I think of it, regular nouns take the ending -ān for plural oblique, but are otherwise not inflected for case or number. There are also a handful of “relationship” nouns like pid “father”, oblique sg/direct pl pidar, oblique plural pidarān.

    However, inflecting for case in the dual but not the singular strikes me as a bit beyond …

    Given that the unvowelled orthography of the original Qur’an text makes it perfectly easy to explain the extant forms within invoking any typological extreme weirdness at all, and that such a sg system is actually known to have existed in early Arabic anyway, it really seems to me to be pushing it to come to these conclusions about “Old Hijazi.”

    However, van Putten also has arguments based on rhyme that I am in no wise competent to judge. (But that seems to involve an assumption that words in rhyming position can be used as a guide to how words were pronounced in the middle of phrases, and what little I know about Arabic verse suggests that this is not a very safe thing to assume at all …)

    Might be a better argument for the absence of nunation in “Old Hijazi”, though.

    Does that old Arabic psalm in Greek characters have any instances of sound plurals in it?

  60. David Marjanović says

    pid “father”, oblique sg/direct pl pidar, oblique plural pidarān

    Like Old French: ber, obl sg/nom pl baron, obl pl barons

  61. David Eddyshaw says

    Old French also has some nouns like pere “father” (sg direct/oblique, pl direct), peres (pl oblique), but that is a small subgroup of nouns, not the pattern for all of declension. (Old French masculine sg artlcles mark case, too, as with DM’s German example.)

  62. For the Damascus Psalm fragment, see Al-Jallad’s monograph here. The only sound plural in the fragment is βη•μεν•χου•τέ•τη•ὑμ• *bi-menḥūt-ēt-ihum “with their graven images”, but that’s a sound feminine; there are no sound masculine plurals in it.

    The arguments for the absence of nunnation do seem stronger than those for the partial absence of case.

  63. Peter Grubtal says

    @David Marjanović

    the dat. pl. -n of most masculines and neuters in German, while the other cases are not distinguished in the plural

    ….not to mention the feminines. I’ve then long laboured under the misapprehension that dative-plural -n in German is the only grammatical “rule” I know of of which has no exceptions.

  64. Giacomo Ponzetto says

    @Vanya, @J.W. Brewer:

    I have no clue how your Italian lets you parse “Gratias agimus tibi propter magnam gloriam tuam.” My own Italian only suffices for “Grazia smurf smurf smurf smurf gloria tua.” And that’s because I’m from sufficiently far north I can resist “Grazia smurf smurf smurf mangia gloria tua.” I suspect it takes more effort not to associate magnam with eating if you’re from Rome.

    Nonetheless I believe there’s a consensus that among Romance languages with an army and a navy Italian is indeed the closest to Latin. I’ve encountered several times the claim that Sardinian, or at least some Sardinian dialect, is even closer, but I cannot judge. Of course, that would give you the region between Florence and Rome, plus Sardinia: an area hosting just 23% of Italians today, and I’d guess a considerably lower share before 1870, though I haven’t checked historical statistics.

    The more relevant consideration, however, is the one J.W. Brewer made: we’re reading texts that illiterate parishioners were hearing. I’ll add another equally important difference. Even before studying Latin, we know it’s a much more inflected language than Italian and we adjust our guesses accordingly. If you don’t know, you’ll quickly and predictably go awry.

    Two nice examples of how the parishioners were not thinking like us.

    Surely we agree that “Venite, adoremus!” transparently means “Venite, adoriamo!” But that hasn’t prevented Italians from adopting instead the obvious parsing of what they were hearing: “Venite a doremus!” Hence, venire a doremus is attested in Friuli for “coming within reach.”

    Surely we also agree that “Laudate Dominum quoniam bonus est” is easy to parse. What could “Praise the Lord smurf good is” mean if not “Praise the Lord because He is good?” And yet a wide arch of Romance languages from Barcelona to Bologna has taken the Psalmist’s inscrutable quoniam and turned it into a noun meaning “dumb, imbecile.”

    These examples, and many more, are in a book of obvious Hattic interest: Beccaria’s (1999) Sicuterat. Il latino di chi non lo sa: Bibbia e liturgia nell’italiano e nei dialetti, which traces the many ways in which church Latin ended up in the everyday language of Italians (mainly of bygone generations and speaking so-called dialects). It’s the best scholarly treatment of the issue I know of. His summary take is the following

    Gli incolti, si sa, hanno sempre inteso malamente il latino della messa. Preti compresi. Sono note le novelle del Sacchetti (Trecentonovelle, XI, XXXV, ecc.) a proposito di preti ignoranti che non sanno il latino. Sul latino di chiesa incompreso e storpiato il Belli ha giocato ripetutamente.

    Belli’s best joke at country priests’ expense is arguably an example of knowing a little bit too much Latin, but I share Beccaria’s judgment it’s so good it deserves quoting in full

    In chiesa, doppo er canto der Maggnifica,
    dimannai a un pretozzo de campagna:
    «Quer parolone fescimichimaggna,
    sor arciprete mio, cosa siggnifica?».

    L’abbate je pijjò un tantin de tossa,
    poi disse: «Fescimichimaggna, fijjo,
    vò ddì in vorgare: Me l’ha ffatta grossa».

    Dico: «E ccosa j’ha ffatto, eh sor curato?» –
    «Oh, ccerti tasti», disce, «io ve conzijjo
    de nun toccalli; e cquer ch’è stato è stato».

  65. J.W. Brewer says

    I don’t disagree with anything Giacomo Ponzetto says, but will add only that his most recent post made me curious about the Italian word for “smurf,” which upon inquiry seems to be “puffo.” Apparently a 20th century coinage with no etymon in the Vulgate?

  66. Giacomo Ponzetto: Thanks very much for those pearls from what sounds like a great book!

  67. @Giamcomo Ponzetto: What, um, linguistic variety is that?

    And I got most of it with help from Google Translate (despite its suggestions of “sister archpriest” and “sister curate”), but what are tasti? GT says “keys”.

  68. Giacomo Ponzetto says

    @J.W. Brewer:

    the Italian word for “smurf,” which upon inquiry seems to be “puffo.” Apparently a 20th century coinage with no etymon in the Vulgate?

    Indeed puffo is a twentieth-century coinage with a known author: José Rinaldi Pellegrini. She apparently credited Piedmontese as an inspiration, but I cannot find further information. As far as I can tell (and I don’t speak Piedmontese), a pof (/pʊf/) is a thud or splash, and by extension a debt (originally in the transparently figurative fè ‘n pof = make a thud = get into debt, but now not only: e.g., in the Piedmontese Wikipedia page on Frank Lloyd Wright). Accordingly, the Battaglia dictionary attributes the etymology to onomatopeia, and doesn’t mention Piedmontese (puff exists in Italian too, though not for debt).

  69. Giacomo Ponzetto says

    @Jerry Friedman:

    What, um, linguistic variety is that?

    Sorry! Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli is well known in Italy for his sonnets in the Roman language, Romanesco, so I mistakenly thought that could go without saying more generally.

    Directly translated in Italian prose:

    In chiesa, dopo il canto del Magnificat
    domandai a un pretuccio di campagna:
    «Quel parolone Fecit mihi magna
    signor arciprete mio, cosa significa?»

    All’abate venne un po’ di tosse,
    poi disse: «Fecit mihi magna, figliuolo,
    vuol dire in volgare: Me l’ha fatta grossa».

    Dico: «E che cosa le ha fatto, eh, signor curato?»
    «Oh, certi tasti», dice, «io vi consiglio
    di non toccarli; e quel che è stato è stato».

    The main pun doesn’t translate well into English. In both Roman dialect and Italian, “make a big one” means to screw up royally, and quite naturally takes an ethical dative. But let’s say the English meaning is more or less the following

    In church, after the singing of Magnificat
    I asked a simple country priest:
    “That big word Fecit mihi magna
    my dear vicar, what’s that mean?”

    The rector had a spot of coughing,
    then said: “Fecit mihi magna, son,
    means in our tongue: He did me a bad turn”.

    I said: “And what did He do to her, eh, dear curate?”
    “Oh, some questions,” said he, “I would advise you
    not to touch on; whatever happened, happened.”

    A tasto is indeed a key in a keyboard, but toccare un tasto is an idiomatic metaphor for bringing up an issue, especially an awkward one.

  70. Thanks! I guess I could have looked up Belli. Thanks also for answering my implied question about whether to call that a language or a dialect.

  71. On Church Slav(on)ic vs. Russian versions of the Bible, see this 2004 post.

  72. Giacomo Ponzetto says

    @Jerry Friedman:

    Thanks also for answering my implied question about whether to call that a language or a dialect.

    Did I? Tragic misunderstanding: I didn’t mean to!

    You can safely call all regional languages of Italy “Italian dialects.” That’s what Italians do, because all those languages haven’t had prestige in centuries, if ever. Their speakers had their own armies and navies, but as far as I can tell the governments in charge of those armies and navies (whether in Naples or Venice or certainly Turin) picked literary Italian as the chancery language shortly (if at all) after they abandoned Latin.

    Which Italian dialects count as languages rather than dialects of Italian is up to you and your position on the lumper/splitter spectrum. As the immediacy of translating Belli into standard Italian shows, you need to be an extreme splitter to count Roman dialect as a separate language. Belli himself, at least according to the high-school assessment, viewed it as the language of the Roman lower classes. I suppose we’d say “a sociolect.”

  73. I don’t disagree with Giacomo either, and that Beccaria book sounds like a great find.

    I was originally responding to J.W.s point that “Modern Greek nationalists typically insist in the teeth of the so-called evidence that the antique Greek of the Scriptures as read in church is perfectly comprehensible. From which I infer Church Slavonic is perfectly comprehensible to a speaker of any modern Slavic language, given sufficient nationalistic commitment. ”

    My underlying, if poorly explicated and perhaps mundane, point was that Italian nationalists of the “I think about Rome every day” variety could certainly make a similar claim as Greek nationalists or rabid Slavophiles, given sufficient nationalistic commitment to some basic Latin education. But one rarely if ever finds that attitude among Italians. But I don’t think that is because the distance between Italian and Latin is any greater than Modern Greek and Ancient Greek. I suspect it’s the interplay between nationalism and religion. While the national Orthodox Churches served as an organizing principle for Greek and Russian/South Slavic nationalism, the Catholic Church has a far more ambiguous role in Italian national identity, and has historically often been antagonistic towards pan-Italian sentiment. So it is not perhaps not surprising that Italians attitude to Latin might be more distanced than the way Greeks, Slavs (or Arabic) nationalists feel about their own archaic religious languages.

  74. J.W. Brewer says

    I think this goes here because of the discussion upthread re comical misunderstandings between similar-sounding words in ancestral languages and their descendants, although this is the synchronic sister-language equivalent. I happen to be reading Alexander Theroux’s _Estonia: A Ramble Through the Periphery_ and in talking about the language he gives some mildly amusing examples of “false friend” problems between Estonian lexemes and very similar-sounding Finnish lexemes. I think most of them are likely cognates whose semantics diverged over time but maybe there are some chance resemblances as well.

    Anyway, the perhaps more interesting point is that he refers to both of these tongues, in a book published in 2011 and written/researched not more than three or four years prior to that, as falling within the “Ural-Altaic superfamily” of languages. Which I thought was an interesting example about no matter how many decades it has been since that conjectured superfamily became an “obsolete” (to quote wikipedia) concept within the relevant scholarly community, abandoned scholarly ideas from a century-plus ago that successfully made it into the popularizing non-scholarly literature (which then reproduces itself w/o checking back in with developments in the scholarly literature?) are apparently immortal. Obv both of the languages he had at hand are much more closely related, so the internal coherence of Uralic as a whole much less any larger-scope proposal than that are both irrelevant to their specific connection.

  75. @Giacomo Ponzetto: Thanks again. I did think your Standard Italian version looked a lot like the original.

  76. Giacomo Ponzetto says

    @Vanya:

    I don’t think I disagree with anything in your latest post either. I had misunderstood and thought that earlier you meant to defend as actually plausible the claim that the Latin of the Mass was largely understandable to Italian parishioners. This I very much doubt, though of course definitions of “largely” may vary.

    On the other hand, empirical implausibility doesn’t seem to have ever prevented outlandish nationalist claims. If you can believe that Italians are a pure and superior race — as proper fascists were supposed to — I don’t see why you couldn’t also believe that one manifestation of their superiority is an innate propensity to understand classical Latin, or Hyperborean, or whatever.

    If I had to hazard a guess as to the reason why no Italian nationalists ever tried this line of argument, it wouldn’t be aversion to the Church (neo-Guelphism was a thing) but rather lack of exclusivity. Latin was the language of the West, not of Italy. So the national and nation-defining Italian language had to be something else.

    Perhaps it also helped that Italian intellectuals, including nationalists, overwhelmingly had to study both Italian and Latin as second languages. They couldn’t be unaware of how much harder the latter was. If I understand the official figures correctly (they aren’t exactly designed for this) 35% of high-school students in Italy still study Latin to some extent, but I wouldn’t necessarily say we learn it.

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