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I ran a little experiment the other day, it is horribly non-scientific but I did it to
prove a point. I went to babble fish and I typed in the following phrase. Then I translated it into greek since much
of the bible was written in greek. Then since I didn't have any other translation option
I then converted that sentence into french. Then I converted it to italian since it is
the child of latin and the KJV of the bible was translated from Latin. Then I translated
that back into english. Now compare the two. You can sort of get the meaning that the original
translation had, but at the same time the precision and intensity of what you were originally
trying to say is completely lost. This is because words themselves have differing and
multiple meanings depending on the area, people or point in time. Therefore a direct translation
is pretty much useless when it comes to language. This is why I have to laugh at King James
only christians, their book is translated from old Hebrew, greek and aramaic then translated into Latin
then into middle english. Forget what you may miss from the movement of middle to modern
english, the translation jumps across 2 languages has been proven to have very harsh effects
on the meaning from the origional text. KJV is one of the most inaccurate versions of
the bible, very pretty to read, but sorely lacking in context and clarity. The most accurate
is probably the American standard version, world english bible or the revised standard
edition. KJV only people claim that these other versions are frauds made by the catholic
church to suppress the truth of the real bible. If you cross enough languages and enough time
the original meaning could be completely lost or be interpreted to mean something entirely
different. Many times just to catch a meaning in a text or movie you have to actually live
in the area to get the meaning. I knew a girl from the UK who loved American movies, and
visited the US. Upon arriving here she was ridiculously disappointed. All of our movies
show American as being glamorous, and almost futuristic with amazing architecture. Upon
her arrival she was shocked to find out just how cookie cutter all of our architecture
is. In the US we don't preserve our old buildings, we knock them down so we can build a mall
that looks just like every other mall. Our movies fill that gaps for us in some ways
so we can enjoy good architecture without actually having much. This gives a false impression
to people abroad and we don't even think about it here. One of my bosses is Mexican and uses
the phrase “Best regards” ending all of her emails. This isnt exactly inaccurate,
but it appears stuffy as the word is usually used when either you are sending a business
letter to someone you will never meet or as something you say to someone who is going
away and you will probably never see or here form again. There is an implied meaning that
will not be picked up unless you live in the thick of it Crossing cultures and languages
will awaken just how fluid and imprecise a language is without actually living in the
culture. It is when I went to the middle east and europe that I began to question my faith
in the absolute truth of the bible. I began reading it in the middle east the area where
it was written, and all of the nice happiness and hopefulness it always gave me, drained
out, it became a rather dark and cynical book, one written not for people of luxury but of
a people who had survival on their minds. Even if it was absolute truth there was no
way I could get the exact meaning of what was being said unless I traveled back in time
Even if you can comprehend language differences you now have to think 4th dimensionally about
it. Look at any book from just 100 years ago and
many words will not have the same meaning. ***, *** and gay in those days mean completely
different things today. Oral tradition without literacy fluctuates with even more volatility.
One of the reasons why Ebonics is not considered a real language is because it fluctuates and
changes way too fast to set any established rules. Ebonics and slang are many times used
as a way to challenge the ruling power, and as the Hebrews were quite often not the ruling
power, who knows how ridden the bible is with slang even when a good scribe will try their
best not to use it. If you try to translate a bible passage from the wrong era, the meaning
could be completely different. Just take the Gettysburg address, To a person of the future
who didn't understand the change in language and tried to do a direct literal translation
“Four score and 7 years ago” may be interpreted as a game was being played 7 years ago with
a scoring of 4 points. Quite a lot different from just being a fancy way of saying 87 years
ago. Language mutates and have a quantifiable and
predictable mutation rate just like genes do. They can't predict what changes are going
to occur, but they can predict the rate of change with an extremely close accuracy. This
is why we can link english as being a distant ancestor of indian sanskrit which evolved
from another language that developed around the Iranian Kazakh regions which is how we
can trace probabilities of certainty of history of human migration. It is also why English
is considered an Indo-*** language as opposed to a Semitic language. Language evolution
also goes against the bible as all language were created at the tower of Bable, but you
never hear a creationist railing against this theory However now that I brought it up and
made them aware of the evidence they may rail against it as well Just like with species,
language evolution is dependent on terrain, environment, neighboring languages, invasive
languages. We borrow and exchanges words with other languages and if social or political
pressures call for it, or new discoveries occurs we will invent a new word or reinvent
an old word and give it the new meaning. This is called Jargon, every field or job you have
ever worked has jargon, the military is especially rife with it. If you tried to directly translate
military words to regular English you would be lost as it is filled with slang, tradition
and large quantities of acronyms. In their field these are time savers and everyone knows
what you are talking about, but to an outsider it would sound confusing and crazy. Science
is nothing but jargon, one of the reasons it is confusing and hard to understand, why
trick was so easily spun against the scientific community in the terms of the hacked climate
change letters. Trick is a mathematical term for a creative way to approach a problem,
it has nothing to do with dishonesty or level of accuracy. Theory is another of these words
that confuse the public and because of it, I have had to make 2 videos on the subject
and I still get that evolution is “JUST A THEORY”. Anyone who can base their entire
future on an ancient book that has been mistranslated over and over again, much of which was originally
written at the beginning of that language's literacy causing ridiculous ambiguity, such
as the fact that ancient hebrew doesn't have vowels, without full understanding or the
eras, cultures and languages is living in a world no different from someone who makes
up their own imaginary world to live in. They both have equal evidence for their belief
one just does not have an ancient book to back it up. However because we are prone to
blind faith and belief, as well as the parochial effect where we assume that because the world
is a certain way where we are then the entire world must be that way. Only through travel,
experiencing diversity and study of our vast world and knowledge can we begin to destroy
our own delusions based on ignorance, none of which was our fault, but it kept us trapped
nonetheless.