30 March, 2006

About the Greek

For those of you who wish you could look under the hood of the translation process, The Better Bibles Blog is a good place to hang out.

Out there, Right Now, AS I TYPE!....

...Suzanne McCarthy is looking at 2 Tim. 2:15: Orthotomeo. This is the word the KJV guys decided to translate "rightly dividing" the Word of Truth. She just posted the fifth article in the series, and there's no sign of it getting boring yet! She's taken us to Thucydides, Herodotus, Plato, Plutarch, Proverbs, lexicons, and all sorts of cool stuff. There's been talk of war and road building. There have been translations to German and Latin, and even unicode has played a part.

Mostly, it's just cool hearing how little about our translations is really known. We know that 1+1=2, and we know that a "shortcut" in english can be a bad thing as easily as a good one. But when Paul wrote orthotomeo, it is really not plain what he meant. An awful lot of research goes into taking your best guess.

Thanks, Suzanne.


(Here is an experiment with their trackback doohickey.)

7 comments:

Suzanne McCarthy said...

Thanks Codepoke,

I had a lot of fun with that series. The most important thing is that I learned that 'rightly dividing the word of truth' isn't 'About the Greek', it is about preparing a straight path for the gospel. I work all day with disadvantaged children. How much more important they are than Greek, but we are all entitled to our hobbies, I hope.

Suzanne McCarthy said...

PS I did a whole post full of combining diacritics, without even knowing it, shame on me.

Kevin Knox said...

I had a lot of fun reading it, so thank you!

Did you know Ellen does a similar day job?

Now. I will heap shame on you for combing your dying critics. I can hardly believe you would do that!

I had to go research your site to even have a clue what you are talking about. :-D

Post 1
Post 2

I guess it's a font trick that you neglected? Let's just say it didn't reduce my enjoyment, though after your unicode discussions it is good for a retrospective chuckle.

Suzanne McCarthy said...

Thanks for pointing out Ellen's blog. I enjoyed her post of the Deaf.

The reason I despise combining diacritics, (which shall be called CD hereafter) is that at work we have a pared down OS, they don't install the whole thing, and all I see is mojibake on my Greek posts with CD's. The computers are frozen and I don't have the guts to ask the tech to fix things so I can read polytonic Greek at work, on my lunch break.

Kevin Knox said...

That article on the deaf was shocking to me! I had never thought of that, but since reading it I have come across independent confirmation somewhere. Wow.

Thanks for the link on Mojibake.

Anonymous said...

Hi there...I went to the "better bible blog" and I've been enjoying it - my daughter and I took a "Greek for Lay-people" class last summer.

and thanks for the referral! For a little peek into what I do when I'm not "roiling" on other blogs...

Here is a photo essay. The kid getting fed and the kid getting squeezed are in my class.

(I've been working on another project: the history of Christian music. My daughter and I are a group. She said that working with her brother would be way more fun...but she'd get a better grade with me.)

(I can be fun, too)

;-)

Kevin Knox said...

Brilliant photo essay, Ellen. I left comments over there, but I recommend it to everyone.

She said that working with her brother would be way more fun...but she'd get a better grade with me.

You go, Mom! :-)

I can be fun, too

I bet you proved her wrong on the fun thing. The munchins forget that the "fun" is always blended with forgettable fights. We haven't forgotten how to laugh!