Friday, July 30, 2010

Triumph of the book.....

Not THE Book, but books in general.  As I consider how many Christians seem to view a Bible translation isn't useful anymore after twenty or thirty years, I consider the Yiddish language.

Why so?  Well, Yiddish is effectively a Hebrew-accented Middle High German.  Not modern high German dating from the 1500s and Luther (and greatly changed since then), but Middle High German--dating really from the 11th Century.  Until about a century ago (when Hebrew became the "lingua Judaica"),virtually all Ashkenazi Jews from Russia to England (and even the United States and Canada) could speak with, and write to, each other in a Yiddish that could have been understood by the original Ashkanzi Jews in the 12th Century along the Rhine.

Anyone who has ever tried to read, say, Chaucer in the original knows that, linguistically speaking, this is an extraordinary accomplishment.  What led to this? 

Very simple; they were literate, and this literacy imposed a benchmark for the understanding of their language.  We ought to consider what our "need" for a new translation every few decades really means, then; I would suggest it indicates that we are becoming a post-literate society.  Given that Christians are, like the Ashkenazi, a "People of the Book," this is not good news for us.

2 comments:

Keith said...

This is also one of the arguments against "modernizing" hymns by taking out the thee's and thou's and altering the poet's phraseology to something more un-poetic - I mean "understandable." We're not translating hymns from Latin to English. We're translating hymns from rich English to weak English. And we're the losers...

Bike Bubba said...

Good point. My favorite example of needless updating is Oswald Chambers' "My utmost for His Highest." If we cannot understand things written in 1914 in our own language, we have some serious problems.

And yet it's darned near impossible to find an unedited version.....