10-12-2003, 10:48 PM
Although I didn't bring up neutral gender, that was an interesting point of grammar.
I just want to be sure I understood you. In Aramaic, if Jesus gave a command using masculine pronouns, the command didn't apply to women, because Aramaic doesn't use masculine pronouns generically. There's no word for "human being" in Aramaic, as rendered by the Greek anthrwpos (mankind, man), so if you meant men, you had to say "men," and if you meant to include women, you had to say "men and women." If you gave any command to your "brothers/brethren," that command was not binding on your sisters because you didn't mention them. Have I got it?
If so, then just how much paraphrasing did Zorba have to do to decide to use "man" as in "mankind," if Aramaic has no word for "man" that isn't exclusively male? I can see how Zorba could have just translated masculine pronouns like "he," "him" and "his" into their Greek counterparts, along with "brothers," and Greek speakers would on their own automatically assume the pronouns and adelphoi were generic where context dictated, because like English, that's how Greek worked. So that would mean that every time an indefinite use of male pronouns appeared in Aramaic, Zorba could have accurately translated them, but practically every one of Zorba's readers would have subsequently misunderstood compared to what the Aramaic originally said.
Wow.
There's really no generic masculine in Aramaic?
Wow.
Thanks,
Tauf
I just want to be sure I understood you. In Aramaic, if Jesus gave a command using masculine pronouns, the command didn't apply to women, because Aramaic doesn't use masculine pronouns generically. There's no word for "human being" in Aramaic, as rendered by the Greek anthrwpos (mankind, man), so if you meant men, you had to say "men," and if you meant to include women, you had to say "men and women." If you gave any command to your "brothers/brethren," that command was not binding on your sisters because you didn't mention them. Have I got it?
If so, then just how much paraphrasing did Zorba have to do to decide to use "man" as in "mankind," if Aramaic has no word for "man" that isn't exclusively male? I can see how Zorba could have just translated masculine pronouns like "he," "him" and "his" into their Greek counterparts, along with "brothers," and Greek speakers would on their own automatically assume the pronouns and adelphoi were generic where context dictated, because like English, that's how Greek worked. So that would mean that every time an indefinite use of male pronouns appeared in Aramaic, Zorba could have accurately translated them, but practically every one of Zorba's readers would have subsequently misunderstood compared to what the Aramaic originally said.
Wow.
There's really no generic masculine in Aramaic?
Wow.
Thanks,
Tauf