www.byzcath.org Forums Mysteries: The Life of Worship Vespers, Matins & the Divine Liturgy The Revised Divine Liturgy Website Article on Revised Liturgy

Lazareno,

Thank you for the better/more accurate translation. But I gave the Church's 1971 English translation.

Joe

An excellent point relevant to Apotheoun's link. The author develops a fantastically strong case against the staw man that "man" is understood exclusively exclusively, including evidence drawn from prisonyard language, schoolyard language, and excited utterances. Others have made this same type of argument here. But the issue is not about the comprehensibility of what is heard (with catechesis), but about the style of the written language is a different matter. And I think we would all be apalled by prisonyard conversational English for the liturgy or scripture.

What about style? It is considered as taboo or mere etiquette in the article but it is really about good writing.

The author gives a terrific example in the realm of marked and unmarked terms. "The farmer had a pig and five piglets." Is the meaning unambiguous? Yes, but only because 1<5. What about "the farmer had four pigs and one piglet"? Perhaps unambiguous. But even the first sentence is problematic. Give it on a reading comprehension test then ask: How many pigs does the farmer have? There will be howls from the test-takers about so naughty a question. The problem is solved by avoiding words whose generic or exclusive use is potentially unclear and totally unnecessary. "The farmer had a total of six pigs: one adult and five piglets." "The farmer had one adult pig and five piglets."

Here are a few other points Apotheoun:

I think the author has it backwards about gender inclusivity in English versus, say French. In our language gender is about sex, which enables a sexist usage. In French gender extends to asexual nouns, thus decoupling gender and sex and mitigating sexist usage.

I thinking he is unconvincing about the obvious and untainted use of "man" in the generic. First I would say the usage IS obvious when used without an article (which is why I like "Lover of man"). But his reaching back to Anglo-Saxon days should have commented on the often cited fact that in old English "man" was strictly generic and "wer-man" exclusively male. Moreover, he clearly points to the distinction between unambiguous genery and the more subtle problem faced in English with "man": One can literally refer to a buck or a doe as a deer, but a woman just are almost never referred to in a literal sense as a man.

The author devotes a great deal of the essay to &#8220;man&#8221; and argues mainly by extension to &#8220;he&#8221;. But the case here is much less clear cut, the potential for sexist usage much greater (Doctors he?/ nurses, she?). And when the author takes up this point in examples, in the case of gender of the psalmist, which is interesting. There is a fundamental question to be addressed &#8211; are the psalms nice literature or are they guidebook for people in the church. If the former, then certainly leave the author's gender explicit; if the latter the case is less compelling. No contemporary organization would write its guidebook arbitrarily in an masculine voice. If the answer is both, then there is an antagonism to be worked out.

Finally, there is some movement toward the British manner of handling collective nouns are plurals that the author might have considered in one of the examples.

That's all I remember without a re-read.
I think the author is right, btw, on "man" versus "mankind" or its synonyms. And will you give me your answer to "brothers and sisters"?

djs asks: "And will you give me your answer to "brothers and sisters"?"

Certainly. The phrase "brothers and sisters" is, horror of horrors, OUT OF DATE! The latest demand from the sort of people who makes such demands is that we must all say "sisters and brothers" - presumably because they find the present alphabetical order oppressive.

Incognitus

The point of Fr. Mankowski's article is not that "man" lacks a socalled "exclusive" (or better a "specific") meaning and use, but that it also has a generic meaning and use. The reasoning in your post is specious and shows that you didn't get the point of the article, I suggest you re-read it with an open mind. One that is less motivated by political correctness and the taboos that feminist language engineers promote.

An ideologically motivated form of the English language, which clearly is divisive (based on the responses in the various threads on this website), should not be used in a translation of the Divine Liturgy. You have not proved that the word "man," which has both a specific and a generic meaning and use, no longer has a generic meaning and use.

The reference you gave above proves Fr. Mankowski's point, "pig" has both a specific and a generic meaning, in other words it includes both adult and new born pigs, while "piglet" is a specific term, in that it only applies to "baby" pigs. The same holds for the word "man," which can be both inclusive of all human beings, or which can mean males, depending upon the case. The fact that some people have an aversion to the use of "man" as a generic term, does not mean that the term may no longer be used in that way. I have used "man" as a generic term in the papers I've written for school, but at FUS and SFSU, and no one ever said that I was excluding women.

The burden of proof is upon those who argue that standard English is no longer used.

An interesting assertion, but where is your proof?

Adelphos (and adelphoi) should be translated into English as "brother(s)." If this is confusing to some people, then as Liturgiam Authenticam indicates, proper catechesis should be done in order to explain the "inclusive" nature of the term.

Dr. Vall (of Ave Maria University) had an excellent article about this very issue in The Thomist magazine about a year ago. I suggest you get a copy of it, because it answers your concerns, and moreover, he explains the theological reasons why terms like "brothers" (and not "brothers and sisters") and "sons" (and not "children") should not be changed in modern English translations.

Let me ask you this: Do women become "sons of God in the only begotten Son of God," or are women configured to the "only begotten daughter of God"? If they are configured to the "only begotten daughter of God," who is she?

My concern in the translation of texts is focused upon theological issues (after all, I am a theologian), and so translations must convey the faith of the Church, and not some modern political or ideological perspective, no matter how powerful that political movement may be in secular society.

Until the theological issues are taken seriously by those doing the work of translation, I see only division and discord in the Church in the future. As a new member of the Byzantine Ruthenian Church, I have no desire to see this sui juris Church die as people look for a liturgy that is faithful to the tradition of the Fathers (sorry, I suppose you would prefer the word "ancestors").

Apotheoun,

First, I would ask you to re-read my comments here and to Lorenzo. You assume and discuss far too much about my motives and desires. And a fair reading of what I have posted would make that clear.

First, as I have mentioned a couple of times already, I don't think that the issue is fairly framed as whether or not man has an inclusive meaning. You may be able to dig someone up who holds that view, but it is not me, and my posts reflect that without ambiguity. Note: I even referred to this argument as a straw man.

The issue begins with the fact that in contemporary English writing, people avoid purposeless use of language that could be constrewn exclusively, when they mean to be inclusive. The intersting questions is: what are the criteria and norms of "purposeful". It is uninteresting to argue at length that there is a generic meaning to "man" or that that is a default usage in prisonyard speech. (I am fairly sure that "none" takes a plural verb (if the bverb is inflected at all) in such speech, but don't exp3ct to see such stuff in formal written English.)

That the pig sentence is not unintelligible linguistically, I have already said. The sentence could, however, be written better to eliminate ambiguity. The ambiguity is obvious when the question "how many pigs..." is asked after the sentence. It is better to write with precision.

I wish that we could agree that precise writing does not ipso facto indicate porklitical correctnes, or piginist agenda. To assert such ulterior motives without evidence - let alone in contradiction to evidence - widely misses that mark. And you should realize that it will inevitably diminishes the force of the cogent things that you say when also include such stuff. I will add that I don't like when it's done the other way either: Fr. Taft took a swipe at those eschewing (horizontal) inclusive language in his talk reported in the Touchstone article that I linked to previously.

I have no proof and no systematic study, only anecdote of discussion the sense of the meaning of gender with native speakers of languages use gender inflection with asexual objects.

djs,

Am looking thru the pages of this various threads and can't find what you mention above, can you post it here please?

T

This is a disadvantage with not requiring foreign language study in schools and being a basically monolingual nation, people can't think or understand beyond the way their language expresses things.

For anyone who speaks (and is somewhat educated in) a Romance or Slavic language this is obvious, words have genders, grammatical genders that don't match the gender sense that I bet most English-only speakers would attribute to them. Why is table feminine in Spanish and Portuguese? Why is milk masculine in Portuguese yet feminine in Spanish? Why is grass feminine in Slovak yet house masculine? Why are some things neuter?

Tony

Dear Apotheoun,
Thanks for your answer. I will try to track down the Vall article. What Iam missing in your response is any sense that brother-1 is not brother-2 (to paraphrase Hayakawa). I think that mechanical substitution, as Liturgiam Authenticam phrases it, of brother for "adelphos" MAY be inaccurate in translation - just as "brothers and sisters" for "adlephoi" would. What is the context. If I understand you, you are asserting that those who first initiated epistle readings with "Adelphoi!" intedend not just a greeting to all homo sapiens present, but were also making a specific allusion to the male types of hte scripture. That adelphos not only carries the same nuance of generic with overtones of the individual in Greek, but that that overtone is specifically inteded in the initiation of hte reading. Interesting assertion... I think that fidelity to the meaning of the original is the crucial point. I lack the fluence in the Greek to discern it. And to be frank, Apotheoun, you have clouded your post with enough tangential political material (and flase assetrtion) that I am skeptical enough of your assertion to also ask you: where's the proof?

And what of your daughter/ancestor questions to me? I have already saif that my personal preference for philanthropos is Lover of man. So what do you think?

That is interesting. If by this you mean to make alteration in translation to improve the text and its conveyance of the faith, I disagree. Specifically, you may wish type allusions every where - even where not intended in original. I would object to such tampering. (I had assumed that you were still a student, from your web-page. Is it out of date?)

AFAIK you have no place whatsoever to make any suggestion that theological issues are not being taken seriously. Or perhaps you are on the liturgical commission , have been part of their studies and deliberations. And perhaps you also have a studied appreciation of our liturgy and tradition. If not, then please amend this wreckless remark.

Here is an interesting perspective.

from http://orlapubs.com/AR/R56.html

Whatever one mightlike to say about orlapubs, one could not accuse them of modernism or of a lack of devotion to language, in particular Greek.

http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=12-04-110-r

I think that the latter remark is a foolish one to make, and that it detracts from the substace of his talk. I hope that Ko63ar will check again for Tighe's accuracy.

This is reason enough to avoid altering the liturgical language of the Church in order to conform it to a secular idealogically based form of the English language.