Of ðæm or bi him – on the scribal repertoire of Latin-English pronominal equivalents in the Lindisfarne Gospels (original) (raw)
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Languages in Contact , 2010
This paper examines English equivalents for Latin pronouns offered by the gloss translator of the Lindisfarne Gospels. In particular, we are interested in the types of correspondence attested in the glosses, i.e., whether one Latin pronoun is glossed with the same Old English equivalent consistently throughout the text, or whether the choice of form is context- or language-structure dependent. If no such dependence can be identified in the case of numerous OE elements for a Latin form, the analysis focuses on the reasoning behind the scribal interpretation.
Translating and Glossing Nouns in the Old English Gospels: A Contrastive Study
Nordic Journal of English Studies, 2014
The translation of the Gospels into Old English has been a text edited on several occasions since the sixteenth century, from Parker's edition (1571) to that by Skeat at the end of the nineteenth century (1871-1887) and, more recently, the one carried out by Liuzza in the second half of the twentieth century. 1 The Old English Gospels have received attention from many scholars working in the field of English historical linguistics. Although the lexical level has been partially analysed (see for instance Liuzza 1994-2000), it is still an under-researched area. This article aims to examine three versions of the Gospels, namely West Saxon, Lindisfarne and Rushworth, in order to analyse the various mechanisms used by the translator(s) and glossators 2 when rendering lexical items from the original Latin text into the different dialects. The analysis focuses on the study of nouns from an interdialectal perspective, since they are collated in the three different versions, so as to establish dialectal changes. A cross-linguistic approach is also pursued by assessing how the translator(s)/glossators interpreted nouns from Latin.
Pronominal theology in translating the Gospels
Bible Translator, 2002
In many of the languages into which the New Testament is being translated or retranslated today, there exists a grammatical distinction between the so-called T and V pronouns (and corresponding verbal and affix forms) of second person address. A simplified description of the difference in social connotation signaled by these pronouns can be given in terms of two main contrasting features: a) the V form (from French vous) signals inequality or distance between the speaker and addressee in terms of social hierarchy or power (and thus is the form used for polite address), while the T form (from French tu) indicates social/power equality. b) the V form signals personal distance (unfamiliarity or coldness), while the T form indicates greater closeness (familiarity or intimacy) between speaker and addressee.
The theological controversies that arose within the Christian Church of Late Antiquity resulted in the convocation of several Ecumenical Councils, where bishops gathered from the whole Christian world to discuss matters of faith and Church politics. The Acts of these Councils include letters, documents relevant to the debates, and most interestingly the allegedly verbatim transcripts of the discussions held there. Bishops from both the Latin and Greek speaking world attended the Councils: the Western representatives normally spoke in Latin, the Eastern ones in Greek, with the mediation of interpreters. A crucial Council was held at Chalcedon in 451, where most participants spoke Greek and the Latin speakers were assisted by interpreters. The original proceedings of this assembly are lost, but we possess a later Greek version, where the Latin utterances have been suppressed, and a Latin version, which is a translation of the original Greek version and occasionally preserves original Latin utterances. Inasmuch as most of the Acts profess to be verbatim transcriptions of actual debates, this extremely long text represents the richest evidence for the spoken Greek and Latin of more or less educated men in antiquity, although the processes of editing and translation must have obscured to some extent the features of spoken language. My research question, in focusing on the Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, is manifold: first, I shall attempt to pinpoint traces of spoken Latin as they emerge from the few original Latin utterances preserved and the sometimes over-literal Greek translations and Latin re-translations; second, I shall investigate the very phenomena of translation and re-translation, comparing the Greek and the Latin version where both are available; related to this, I shall try to work out if and to what extent Greek and Latin bureaucratic prose have influenced each other in this text. The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, just like those of the other Ecumenical Councils, have been so far ignored by linguists. A few remarks on the language and the translations are to be found in an article of the editor of the Acts, Eduard Schwartz (1933), and in the introduction to the recent English translation by Price and Gaddis (2005). In addressing issues of spoken language, I follow the syntax- and discourse-based approach to spontaneous spoken language of Miller and Weinert (1998). As for linguistic aspects of translation, I mainly rely on the contrastive linguistic and stylistic approach of Vinay and Darbelnet (1995). References: Miller, J. and Weinert, R. (1998), Spontaneous Spoken Language. Syntax and Discourse (Oxford). Price, R. and Gaddis, M. (2005), The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon (Liverpool). Schwartz, E. (1933), ‘Zweisprachigkeit in den Konzilsakten’, Philologus 88: 245-53. Vinay, J.-P. and Darbelnet, J. (1995), Comparative Stylistics of French and English: A Methodology for Translation, trans. by J.C. Sager and M.-J. Hamel (Amsterdam and Philadelphia).
Glossing the Unfamiliar in the Lindisfarne Gospels
2021
Although interlinear glosses theoretically involve providing the most exact native equivalent for each foreign item in the text (cf., e.g. Nida 2004: 161), they often prove to be much more than a mechanical process of creating lexical correspondences. One of the best examples of glossing which is a “conscious, occasionally very careful “interpretative translation”” (Nagucka 1997: 180), is the collection of 10 th century glosses added by Aldred to the Latin text of the Lindisfarne Gospels . This oldest existing translation of the Gospels into English consists not only of a word‑for‑word renderings, since Aldred also used multiple glosses, marginal notes, and occasionally left the words unglossed. Thus, particular Latin words are often translated in several different ways. The present study focuses on words denoting objects and phenomena which were presumably unfamiliar or obscure to the Anglo‑Saxon audience. Those include items specific to the society, culture, as well as fauna and f...
Between the Literal and the Literary: Social Background, Linguistic Competence, and the Bible in the Late-antique Latin Translations of the Vita Antonii, 2021
The present study explores verbatim biblical quotations in the two fourth-century translations of the Greek Life of Antony into Latin produced by an anonymous translator and Evagrius of Antioch, respectively. Careful comparison of these translations of the biblical material that was clearly identified as the word of God and thus unlikely to be the subject of a free and creative approach on the part of the translators, yields new insights, not only about the contrasting approaches taken by the two translators but also about their respective literary, linguistic, and theological backgrounds. By offering evidence that the anonymous translator was familiar with the Greek Bible but unacquainted with contemporary Latin versions of the Bible, this study demonstrates that the text of the Bible regarded as authoritative by him was not in Latin but in Greek. Moreover, the study further argues that the anonymous translator’s mechanical and mirror renderings of several specifically Greek syntactical structures suggest that he was not a native speaker of Latin. His word-for-word approach was thus not the result of his conscious decision to be ‘accurate,’ but rather a reflection of his insufficient command of the language into which he was translating. In addition, this study shows that, unlike his anonymous counterpart, Evagrius used for his translation a Latin version of the Bible for which textual parallels can be found in other late antique Latin works, and that he rhetorically embellished and stylistically upgraded the language of the Bible in Latin available to him at the time. This study also provides evidence that Evagrius made use of the older, anonymous translation of the Life in producing his own version.
A Study of Aldred’s Multiple Glosses to the Lindisfarne Gospels
Language, Author and Context, 2000
Aldred, the glossator of the Lindisfarne Gospels, presents himself as carefully rendering the Latin lemmata in front of him, in terms of both their internal structure and meaning. His work includes a very high number of multiple glosses, which often attempt to clarify the polysemous character of a lemma or to provide additional information. This paper explores the multiple glosses including different lexemes which Aldred added to lexical lemmata in Mark's Gospel in an attempt to establish whether there is any correlation between Aldred's ordering practices and the frequency with which he used the interpretamenta to render those lemmata. The results of the study show some preference for placing the interpretamentum which most commonly renders the Latin lemma in first position, although Aldred's practice is not fully consistent.
A Source of Variation: A Corpus-Based Study of the Choice between απο and εκ in the NT Greek Gospels
Journal of Greek Linguistics, 2012
Using a quantitative methodology based on extensively annotated corpus data from the PROIEL corpus, we examine the distribution of απο and εκ in the NT Greek Gospels. The original semantic opposition between these two prepositions in terms of an ablative-elative distinction started fading during the historical development of Greek and has been argued to be already much weaker at the time of the New Testament. To explore this we generate a semantic map without semantic pre-analysis on the basis of four parallel language samples. We then use statistical techniques to interpret this map. We ind that there is still a fairly clean separation between εκ and απο largely based on semantic role. However, απο is quite frequently used in elative contexts. A lexical analysis clarifies that the use of απο in this environment amounts to the preposition specialising with certain lexical items, some of them with variable interpretations, as seen in the case of toponyms.