Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
No, I mean it literally. There's a dialogue called the "Euthyphro" in which Socrates is talking about the nature of "holiness". He asks the question "are things holy because the gods love them, or do the gods love them because they are holy?" and goes on to illustrate the point with a whole series of examples of cause and effect. The examples are written using active and passive participles in Greek, and, if translated literally, the result is virtually meaningless in English. It can be paraphrased in English, but it can't be translated - at least not in any literal sense. It all makes perfect sense in Greek, though. That's why I say that I wasn't able to understand what Plato was actually saying until I was able to read the original - it's the literal truth.
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Oh yes. I often find that portions of texts that I am reading in Greek or Latin are untranslatable. Holiness, piety and similar concepts are especially hard to translate. For example, Aeneas is often given the epithet pius, but the roman idea of piety differs greatly from a christian idea of piety.
This small digression on the difficulties of translation has managed to hammer home to me once again the importance of knowing the grammar of your mother tongue well before attempting to learn a foreign language, especially a dead one with complex morphology. Try teaching someone about declensions and cases if they don't know what an object is! (I have. It's not fun.)