Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2012 July 11

Language desk
< July 10	<< Jun | July | Aug >>	July 12 >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Language Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

July 11

Chinese

Does Ba Sing Se really mean Impenetrable City like Avatar says? Google Translate says that it should be 坚不可摧的城市 (jiānbùkěcuī de chéngshì). --108.225.117.142 (talk) 03:42, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

Shi (市) on its own can mean city, so depending on how loose your original version's transcription is, possibly. Nothing springs to mind for the Ba Sing part though. Which avatar are you referring to?Henry^Flower 08:58, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

Avatar: The Last Airbender. Rmhermen (talk) 15:03, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

Does anyone have any idea what Ba Sing Se actually means, if anything? --146.7.96.200 (talk) 21:48, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

Probably nothing. On Chinese wikipedia the name is translated as 霸新塞, which doesn't really mean anything (霸 = tyrant, 新 = new, 塞 = stuff something into something else, but together they're just a phonetic transcription - 塞 could also be "a place of strategic importance", but in that case it's pronounced sai not se) 59.108.42.46 (talk) 04:15, 12 July 2012 (UTC)

塞 in the sense of "stuffing something into something" is also pronounced "sai" but with a different tone. It is only pronounced "se" when used as part of a compound that means "blocked". Which, ironically, does in a sense mean "impenetrable", but only in the way that your toilet is impenetrable when it's blocked and overflowing, not "impenetrable" in the sense that "our defence lines are so strong, they are impenetrable".

霸 does not generally mean "tyrant", but rather "hegemony", in the classical political sense, or "domination".

So you could say that the Chinese wikipedia translation could mean something like "The hegemonic new impenetrability due to a blockage". I presume that's not the kind of impenetrability the authors were thinking of, but who knows? --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 12:30, 12 July 2012 (UTC)

Based on a Google search, another translation used in Chinese for "Ba Sing Se" seems to be 永固城, literally something like "the [walled] city of permanent solidity", but a more idiomatic way of saying "city of indestructibility". It sounds nothing like "Ba Sing Se" though, it's pronounced "Yong Gu Cheng". According to some internet commentary, this is the name that actually appears in Chinese characters in the cartoon when some characters enter the city.

I also found some discussions on Chinese language internet forums discussing how "Ba Sing Se" could possibly mean anything similar to "City of Impenetrability". Some suggestions are that "Ba Sing Se" is an inaccurate transliteration of "不碎城" in some dialectical variety of Cantonese, that name means literally "City of Non-Shattering". --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 09:29, 13 July 2012 (UTC)

Reference for Greek vs Aramaic as original language of New Testament

Could anybody provide me with a scholarly reference that gives the arguments for why the New Testament was originally written in Greek, and not in Aramaic, as the alternative view says? Or, a response to the theories of a Hebrew original for the Gospel of Matthew? I don't doubt that they were originally in Greek, but I would just like to see, in detail, what the reasons for concluding that are. Thanks. Cevlakohn (talk) 03:50, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

A N Wilson argues in Jesus, a Life that the gospel use of the technical word opsarion to refer to cooked fish for sale rather than ichthys shows the genuinety of the greek text. μηδείς (talk) 04:46, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

I enjoyed this book too but it's held in very poor regard by scholars.. Itsmejudith (talk) 06:41, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

It's not necessarily true that all of what we now refer to as the new testaments occurred first in Greek, only that the physical evidence that we have that dates back earliest is in greek (and these Ante-Nicene Period texts are far from complete themselves). Christianity did spread very quickly to greek-speaking people. Bear in mind we are speaking of Hellenistic peoples here, not Hellenic, at least at first. These people, widely dispersed in the middle east at the time (as indeed many of their descendants still are today) as the result of early greek colonialism and Alexander the Great's brief stint as King of everything. Point of all being that Greek became a kind of hegemonical language, and one of scholarship throughout the region as well as in the Mediterranean -- so even if ethnically Greek people hadn't been amongst the first people to be converted to the young religion, you'd still probably expect the early scriptures to be written in greek. And it is my understanding that this is exactly what happened on both counts. But there was a very narrow span of time where it remained essentially a small Hebrew community that could feasibly have penned texts at this time. Whether this happened or whether the Apostolic Age transitioned cleanly into greek texts as a result of the rapid conversions in the first century I expect would be a matter of some debate amongst scholars, since the era is poorly understood in general and separating fact from cannon is difficult in some cases and even the learned members of the early Christian community disagreed strongly on what actual was cannon and even on how much cannon should frame the texts going forward (should dubious but inspiration text be included, for example). As such, even assuming an original hebrew version of the new testament, knowing how much of that relates to the text we know today and how much was embellishment that got added in as the greek versions quickly took predominance is an open question -- and that's putting aside for the moment that we know that these texts were further tailored in the following centuries. In any event, the sources you asked for can be found here. You might also be interested in History of early Christianity and Early centers of Christianity. Snow (talk) 05:23, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

Oh and btw, as regards the RefDesk, it's preferred that you don't post the same question on multiple pages, at least not at the same time. It's probably more appropriate here, than at the Humanities desk, imo. Snow (talk) 05:25, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

I posted it in Humanities, but after a few minutes thought it fit better here so I deleted it there and reposted it here. I never meant for it to be in both places at the same time... sorry if you caught both versions. Cevlakohn (talk) 20:00, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

The scholarly consensus is that none of the books of the New Testament were originally written in a non-Greek language, and if some of them depend on any written Aramaic text, this would have been a "sayings document", or list of direct quotes from Jesus (though the existence of such a "sayings document" written source is disputed and controversial). You could follow some of the references given on Language of the New Testament... AnonMoos (talk) 05:31, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

There is some uncertainty with regard to Matthew. It seems likely that there was indeed a gospel written in Hebrew by a Jewish-Christian author or group of authors ascribed (probably pseudonymously) to Matthew the apostle. Whether or not that document represented an early form of the Koine Greek document known as the Gospel of Matthew, however, is doubtful, for reasons that are too boring for me to recount. At any rate, even the early Jewish converts to Christianity were mostly Hellenized Jews, so Snow is right that Greek would have been the lingua franca in pretty much any period you want to talk about, possibly even as early as the first century. When you get into saying documents and the like, things become a lot more uncertain. I don't know of anyone, for example, who would argue that Q absolutely has to have been written in Koine Greek. For a good book on the subject of the different cultural influences on Early Christianity, I recommend (if you can find it) The Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue, by James Parkes. Evanh2008 ^{(talk|contribs)} 05:37, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

Note also that this is probably where you'd expect the first differentiation of sects within the religion to begin, given the broad cultural differences between the Alexandrian and Palestinian Jews. Snow (talk) 05:43, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

Could people comment on the languages in use in oral transmission of "texts" amongst Jewish, Samaritan and righteous Gentile groups around 1–50 AD in what is now Egypt and Israel/Palestine and Lebanon? Did particular cults, sects or tendencies favour particular languages, to what extent do we have evidence of trans-lingual or interlingual puns? Fifelfoo (talk) 07:11, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

Well, again, records are very spotty during this era, but we do know that the Alexandrian Jews were already well assimilated into the Ptolemaic culture by the first century and had developed a certain amount of the cosmopolitan culture that you might expect from those living in such a place as Alexandria was at the time (a center of scholarship, trade, and multiculturalism) and as such did not rigorously observe all of the traditions of Jews in Judea. As to answering your question more directly as regards linguistic preferences, the issue is muddled, but there are some broad trends that are somewhat evidenced but mostly assumed: Alexandrian Jews seem to have adopted greek for their religious practices well before this point in time (as would be expected as it was the first language for most of them), though Hebrew remained common; it seems likely that early Christian converts did the same. Likewise, in Judea Hebrew would have been the language of religious practice for Jews, Samaritans, and to some extent the early Christians, though greek would have played a role, as could have other languages common in the Levant. Putting a finer point on it than that is beyond the sources that I know, but if I find anything, I'll place it here. Snow (talk) 22:49, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, my assumption was that language use was primarily a spatial rather than a sectarian phenomena as such. Fifelfoo (talk) 01:00, 12 July 2012 (UTC)

I think this is a fair assumption to make, at least "big picture" wise. Note that the case might be a bit more complicated with regard to the fact to Samaritan's, who at some point began using a mix of Samaritan Hebrew (based heavily on traditional Biblical Hebrew owing to their common ancestry and, at one point, unified religion) and Samaritan Aramaic; the situation further complicated by the fact that some of these Samaritans might have been bilingual with regards to the then-contemporaneous Hebrew and/or Greek as they were also themselves divided culturally. Honestly I am unsure which of the above contenders is likely to have been the most predominant for this group, nor how far apart in mutual intelligibility the various Aramaic languages involved had diverged, since several were scriptural languages, which can in rare cases constrain the normally rapid pace of linguistic drift. You'd have to ask an expert in that particular family to get a cogent and useful answer to that, I suspect. Perhaps Medeis or Judith know a bit more about those divides? Snow (talk) 02:19, 12 July 2012 (UTC)

Medeis, not me. Itsmejudith (talk) 19:52, 12 July 2012 (UTC)

I am almost entirely ignorant of Semitic linguistics, but my impression is that most of the Northwest Semitic dialects back then were pretty close. You had better ask someone else. μηδείς (talk) 03:11, 12 July 2012 (UTC)

To ItsmeJudith above, I have read many scholars on the Gospels and they all hold each other in especial disregard. Yes, Wilson is writing as a literary critic, but his point on opsarion is not bad or invalid. My favorite scholar is Geza Vermes, who analyzes terms of Jesus such as "The Son of Man" which he treats as glosses from the Aramaic which make no sense in Greek as such. μηδείς (talk) 02:04, 12 July 2012 (UTC)

Fair enough. It was Wilson, wasn't it, who said that Joseph's occupation, derived from tekhne, should not be translated carpenter, but rather denoted someone of quite high social status. I found that interesting. Itsmejudith (talk) 19:52, 12 July 2012 (UTC)

Yes, technically the word simply means skilled, and he said it could be taken to imply rabbi, which is very plausible. Even explains the "about my Father's work" comment. μηδείς (talk) 21:13, 12 July 2012 (UTC)