20 May, 2008
I’ve comes across a new blog via - Nathan’s comments:Compliant Subversity. The author has some excellent thoughts on language and translation. Particularly this post about “Sins and Errors of Language and Translation Thinking.”
If that title interests you, be sure to give it a read. Its an excellent post. There are a number of other good ones. Hopefully we’ll see more posting from him in the days to come!
28 April, 2008
One of the many Biblica/theo blogging Brijyanns has finally switched to WordPress. When will the rest of you????
He’s definitely going on my blog roll now!
20 April, 2008
Eric, over at Archaic Christianity, has written an interesting couple posts about learning Greek or Hebrew and what it means to know a language.
I’d like to throw my two cents in on the second post. Doug Chaplin’s comments on the topic are also interesting.
Eric covers three languages that he “knows” in some way, English, Greek, & German.
I’d like to look at the first two.
For English, he means that he is fluent in the language. “Sure, I make a grammatical mistakes and do speling erors. But I am fluent.” For one, that’s a very clever little sentence. But also these are not the kind of errors that we who are fluent would make while speaking - probably just writing. And even when we do make mistakes speaking, we can recognize pretty quickly that what we said was awkward or ungrammatical.
But even still, in a sense, Eric probably knows Greek better than he does English. The fact is, being fluent in language doesn’t mean you understand how it functions. One of the first rules we learned in our grammatical analysis and field methods courses in linguistics is to never ask the native speaking the significance of any grammatical issue. They probably don’t know. They probably haven’t thought about it. Describing a language grammatically, syntactically or even semantically is very different than being fluent in the language.
And that is why in a sense, Eric (and others such as Peter Kirk, David Ker, Kurk, John Hobbins - though he may very well be fluent in Hebrew too! - and plenty of others I have not named) actually know the languages of the Bible potentially better than than their first languages.
They are able to answer the question, “Why?” Why does this occur in the language? And even when they don’t have an answer to “why” they generally do know how to go about figuring it out.
Knowing a language as in fluency and knowing a language as in linguistic description are very different.
But in either case, the best case scenario is having both fluency and linguistic description. It is the person who has both in both the receptor and source languages that will make the best translator.
And that is why translations are so often done by committees. Nobody has completely mastered both.
9 April, 2008
Rick, over at the Logos Bible Software blog, has written a very interesting post about searching the Lexham Syntactic Greek New Testament. Apparently, its possible to search it using the Bible Speed Search window - which is significantly faster than doing a regular syntax search.
Go give it a read - there’s a video and a couple of helpful files, too!
8 April, 2008
After taking a break, Josh is finally back with us in the blogosphere! Its good to see him back. We both began blogging around the same time a little over a year ago.
Welcome back, Josh!
5 April, 2008
Following in the steps of Nick Norelli, here is a list of books I’ve started and intend to finish - and no, I’m not limiting it to ten (but neither am I listing everything!). So these are the top twenty books I want to finish this year! In no particular order…
15 January, 2008
I don’t know if it was Darrell Bock’s influence or not, but W. Hall Harris now has a blog entitled NET Bible Revolutions. If you don’t know who Harris is, then you should go probably read his about page.
I think I’ve leave the very first comment!
13 January, 2008
I haven’t added any blogs to my sidebar lately. Part of that has to do with the fact that I follow about 100 blogs on Google reader.
But since this is another blog focusing on a book of the Bible, I think its worth adding, since that is mostly what I try to do. And yes, my series on Ephesians will continue. I’m slowly working my way through. And yes, I will have my post for the Trinity Blogging Summit ready on time.
ΑΓΑΠΗΣΕΙΣ is written by an anonymous linguist/Bible scholar (student?) in Papua New Guinea. His focus is on James. There’s a lot of Greek, which I like and he reads on many of the same topics I do. I like to see that others have an interest in Textual Criticism. I won’t say more than that. Go read for yourself.
6 January, 2008
Its catch up time! This is for you Nick! What’s in/on my:
Right now, I have a CD I made in my player:
But it has on it:
There’s nothing in my DVD player right now, but on Friday night I watched the Bourne Identity and the night before I watched Good Will Hunting
My “To Read List”:
On my “To see” list, I don’t know, I haven’t been paying attention to movies right now. Any suggestions? I like action and complex plots.
Finances. If anyone would like to support my wife and I as missionaries, we’d appreciate it. But there’s also school and work as well. I’m in the process of looking for a second job.
19 November, 2007
I’m beginning to feel as if I link to Parchment and Pen every week when Dr. Daniel Wallace writes his post. But once again, this weeks post is an excellent discussion and response to a story Bart Ehrman told about Metzger in order to make a point about the Historical Jesus. The post is entitled, “The Historical Metzger.”
Its well worth the read:
There’s an excellent interchange between Wallace and James McGrath of Exploring Our Matrix in the comments that is definitely worth reading.
 | Bill Ross on Anchor Yale Bible |
 | Mike on Naming in the Bible |
 | Sandra Klyn on Naming in the Bible |
 | David A Young on A Minor Criticism of Talb… |
 | AlexM on NIV & TNIV |
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