September 22, 2008
New Language
Lately I’ve been reading about Bible translations. It hadn’t occurred to me that, similar to the way today’s churches target their audience, publishers of Bibles are also targeting their audience. Until the mid-twentieth century the preferred name for new translations was revised. In 1970 everything became new – New American Standard Bible, New Century Version, New English Bible, New International Version, New King James Version, New Living Translation, New Revised Standard Version. I see why Scripture memorization is neither emphasized or encouraged in today’s church…we no longer have the same vocabulary.
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Gail;
-----We often marvel at the ancients’ knowledge of the stellar and planetary motions. They did not have our telescopes, calculus, or trigonometry. Yet they could accurately predict eclipses far into the future, as well as other alignments of these little points of light in the sky. But the one thing they gave to the stars that the most of us do not is copious amounts of time and attention, and an almost religious passing of acquired knowledge from fathers to sons.
-----Until we enter our later years we seem to take language as much for granted as we do the stars. Our lives are so bustling in fast motion while we are younger that the slow motion of linguistic change goes by hardly noticed. But after a generation or two has come of age behind us, it becomes painfully obvious how much change happens to language because of the individuality of those goofy kids.
-----In the past, linguistic change was even slower than it is today, not because new generations came more slowly, but because the concept of tradition was much stronger. Everything that happened more than two centuries ago happened closer to the earth and its nature. People were more involved in hewing out their own tools, processing their own foods, and basically stretching their own piece of safe space out of the larger chaotic stock of nature. The rules were more at hand, more functional, and the reduction of risk they brought was more apparent. Tradition was less kicked.
-----Today, Wal-Mart, City Market, JC Penney, and Ford Motor Company stand solidly between us and much necessity to personally hew anything out of the fabric of nature. Tradition, therefore, has come to deal less with physical survival and more with social interaction. Social interaction seems to have far fewer basic laws than does physics, and consequently the mold growing in place of social tradition has been personal relativism. And thus we are experiencing even swifter change than did our forebears. So “New” is ok in place of “Revised.” Maybe someday the terminology may sink to the casual queasiness of something like “Revamped.” But when it reaches the more descriptive “Modified” is when I will want off the bus.
Love,
Steve Corey
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