tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19505042.post292960888108988414..comments2024-01-29T06:02:39.583-08:00Comments on Suzanne's Bookshelf: babble from Babel 3Suzanne McCarthyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07033350578895908993noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19505042.post-74039777430423390192009-01-14T23:37:00.000-08:002009-01-14T23:37:00.000-08:00You were clear before but I was just thinking of s...You were clear before but I was just thinking of something else. Thanks for rephrasing it and repeating. <BR/><BR/>Here is Julia Smith's version for this verse. <BR/><BR/><BR/>"And they shall say a man to his neighbor,<BR/>Come, we will make bricks,<BR/>and we shall burn to a burning,<BR/>and brick shall be to them for stone,<BR/>and potter's clay shall be to them for potter's clay.Suzanne McCarthyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07033350578895908993noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19505042.post-34370295316106526462009-01-14T06:47:00.000-08:002009-01-14T06:47:00.000-08:00I did not make myself clear, so let me try again:E...I did not make myself clear, so let me try again:<BR/><BR/>Even if we were to maintain that women are <I>not</I> in view in our verse, we would <I>still</I> need to render it via <I>gender-neutral</I> English.<BR/><BR/>(That is why I claimed that concern for whether ancient Near Eastern women were brickmakers is misplaced. The answer makes no difference.)<BR/><BR/>The point holds to the extent that one is committed to producing a <I>dynamic-equivalence translation</I>. <BR/><BR/>Conversely, when translators render this verse using male terms, such wording does not necessarily mean that the translator believes that <I>only men are in view</I>. Consider:<BR/><BR/><I>Young’s Literal Translation:</I> and they say each one to his neighbour<BR/><BR/><I>Everett Fox:</I> each man to his neighbor<BR/><BR/><I>Mary Phil Korsak:</I> each to his companion<BR/><BR/>Arguably the male terms “man” and “his” are being employed in their gender-neutral sense.David E. S. Steinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05768085146463083062noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19505042.post-88861805003262845652009-01-13T20:07:00.000-08:002009-01-13T20:07:00.000-08:00Thank you very much for this. I was careful not to...Thank you very much for this. I was careful not to say that women were necessarily included in this conversation. That is, as you note, not relevant.<BR/><BR/>I wrote, <BR/><BR/><I>We don't know who spoke in this line, but we do know that women made bricks.</I><BR/><BR/>because I wanted to say that women are not necessarily excluded from being participants in the conversation. Maybe they were and maybe not, but it is not relevant. Brick-making is not necessarily restricted to men only so we don't need to keep this in mind. <BR/><BR/>On another note, I was reading a book on African-Americans with a grade 4 class. In the book, one man said to another "Hello, Brother."<BR/><BR/>Once they realized that the two were not actually brothers I asked them what it meant. They all said that it meant "another black person." I even suggested the phrase "he is also a black man, right." But they all rejected "black man" and said that "brother" meant "another black person." Clearly because racial and cultural identity was involved, it felt ungrammatical for them to use a gendered term to explain it. They needed the word "person." <BR/><BR/>So I asked what he would say if it were a black woman, and they said "sister" of course. <BR/><BR/>But the word "person" plays an important and necessary role in English.Suzanne McCarthyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07033350578895908993noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19505042.post-52077852351456264992009-01-12T23:55:00.000-08:002009-01-12T23:55:00.000-08:00Suzanne—Thank you for spelling out your thought pr...Suzanne—<BR/>Thank you for spelling out your thought process. My analysis of this verse turns out to be very close to yours. More important, you prompt me to make explicit a few important distinctions between various logical elements in the analysis: the Hebrew wording used to refer to humans; the referential force of that wording’s grammatical gender; the gender of the humans being referred to; and how to translate all that stuff into English.<BR/><BR/>In our verse, the Hebrew text uses impersonal and non-specific language. In other words, it is <B>not concerned about the speakers’ gender.</B> Therefore, whether or not women in the ancient Near East regularly made bricks is (in my view) an interesting question, but for the purposes of translating the Hebrew into English, such societal realia turns out to be <B>beside the point.</B> <BR/><BR/>It has taken me several years to realize that in such situations, dynamic-equivalence translators do not need to be certain as to how the ancient audience would have construed the referents’ gender. For with regard to the gender of persons being referred to, <B>English is significantly less specific than Hebrew</B>. So all that we need to establish is that the Hebrew text is employing Hebrew’s version of <B>generic language</B>, without regard to the referents’ identity as men or women.<BR/><BR/>(This is a good opportunity to note that in many such circumstances, the Hebrew text nevertheless employs the noun <I>ish</I> in equally non-specifically ways to denote members of a male-only or typically male group, such as military troops or a named set of tribal elders. When referring to such a category, a grammatically masculine noun does not specify the referent’s gender, but the situation does. <B>When the referents’ gender is already understood from the context, it seems to be normal in Hebrew to employ a general-category noun.</B> (I am reminded of the term “basic-level noun” as it is used in cognitive linguistics or psychology; such a noun conveys the largest amount of information via the least amount of effort. Generally it is not the most precise possible categorization.)<BR/><BR/>In English, too, when the referent’s gender is understood, the same recourse to generic terms is common. For example, those who follow sports often use the term "athletes" or "players" to refer to team members who play in all-male or all-female leagues. Once every participant in the conversation understands which league is in view, <B>the referents’ gender goes without saying.</B>)<BR/><BR/>By the way, in my view, the best single-word gloss for the relational noun <I>ish</I> is "participant." Here it denotes a participant in the conversation.<BR/><BR/>As for the translation step, Bible translators too often forget a basic fact about English idiom: <B>gender is specified only where germane and not already known.</B> If rendering a grammatically masculine Hebrew category reference into normal English idiom, the translation should mention the referent’s gender <B>only when 2 conditions are met:</B> (1) either the terminology (such as the word <I>zakhar</I>) or context unequivocally requires the exclusion of women, <I>and</I> (2) the contemporary reader would not recognize that fact (due to contemporary cultural assumptions about gender roles that differ from ancient assumptions). In the case of our verse, the germaneness test is not met. Therefore the rendering should be in generic terms.<BR/><BR/>Some readers may look at the resulting "gender-neutral" rendering and conclude that you mean to say that the speakers in the story include women. Even though that is in fact what you believe, <B>such a conclusion by the reader does not logically follow!</B> For gender-neutral English wording means only that <B>the referent’s gender is not at issue in the utterance.</B> (The referent’s gender may actually be unknown, or known yet taken for granted. In this case, the gender is simply incidental.)<BR/><BR/>Anyway, so it seems to me.David E. S. Steinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05768085146463083062noreply@blogger.com