Saturday, October 18, 2008

Pronouns and tense?

And speaking of the Unbound Bible, I just spotted this puzzling statement at the end of a search result:
Pronouns referring to God are not capitalized in the ASV, as they are not in the NIV and some others, breaking the tradition of the KJV. Since Hebrew has no such thing as tense, and the oldest Greek manuscripts are all upper case, anyway, this tradition was based only on English usage around 1600, anyway. Not capitalizing these pronouns solves some translational problems, such as the coronation psalms, which refer equally well to an earthly king and to God.
In the first place, Hebrew most certainly has tense (past, present, and future). All languages have some way to indicate tense; even non-inflectional ones like Chinese use particles to show if the action already happened or not. But Hebrew inflects its verbs (boy, does it inflect its verbs.)

But even if it didn't, what on earth would that have to do with whether or not the ASV chose to capitalize a pronoun?

Somebody needed to edit that paragraph.

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5 Comments:

At 8:05 PM, October 18, 2008 Blogger AbbotOfUnreason had this to say...

Huh. I assume Hebrew has gender? What the heck is the word they were looking for?

 
At 9:30 PM, October 18, 2008 Blogger The Ridger, FCD had this to say...

Yes, Hebrew has gender. It's really quite a heavily inflected language.

The term they were looking for is "letter case" - Hebrew doesn't have different upper and lower case letters.

 
At 8:15 AM, October 19, 2008 Blogger sy had this to say...

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At 8:53 AM, October 19, 2008 Blogger fev had this to say...

Hebrew even has words for snow!

Agree with your last guest there. This is one of the nice writtenest blobs I read.

 
At 8:35 AM, October 20, 2008 Anonymous Anonymous had this to say...

Following on from Fev, my sources tell me that Hebrew has three words for cockroach: jook (slang), makak, and tikan. This is just one of the many little bits of trivia I've picked up.

 

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