Quote:
Originally Posted by VydorScope
and since no one speaks that kind of Greek any more there are cases where we just can not know with a high degree of certainty what it means.
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That's part of what I was getting about needing more than being able to speak the language. It's sounds like it's not a matter of being untranslatable, it's a matter of being incomprehensible in any language, because the knowledge to precisely interpret is lost .
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Πέτρος δὲ πρὸς αὐτούς, Μετανοήσατε, [φησίν,] καὶ βαπτισθήτω...
(I know, I know, it is all Greek to you! Sheesh)
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I think you spelled πρὸς wrong.
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Buy and large dogs are bigger then house cats
"Buy and large" could be a very hard expression to translate 1,000 years after the last American English speaker had died out.
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You spelled "by" wrong.
Yes, if knowledge of the idiom was lost, then full understanding could be impossible regardless of the language.
But didn't the ancient Greeks have, just as we will hopefully have, grammar books, or books on rhetoric, or translations between contemporary languages, a la the Rosetta Stone, that survived to inform this sort of thing?
ApK