Shulem wrote: ↑Sat Apr 16, 2022 10:31 pm
malkie wrote: ↑Sat Apr 16, 2022 9:58 pm
But we have only the "translation" into English to go on when determining how these hypothetical people referred to anything. And we will never (hah!) have another translation from the plates. How could we ever effectively question a putative "feminine connotation" in a non-existent source language with no hope of another translation?
Well, when referencing a ship, it seems there are a few choices available:
Understanding how the Jews actually referred to ships will help put things in better perspective when comparing that to Smith's novel.
Drat!
I hate how quickly I give up my intentions to
let it go.
In case my point was not clear, many of us are biased by being really familiar with only one language - English. English has 3 ordinary genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter.
But there are other languages with more or fewer genders, only some of which are related to the masculinity, femininity, or inanimacy of the nouns assigned to them. Someone who is better versed in linguistics, and in practical pursuits like actual translation between languages can talk more convincingly than I, a complete amateur and almost completely ignorant of the subject matter.
French and Spanish, for example, currently each have two genders, corresponding, but only roughly, to the English masculine and feminine.
Of course, translation amongst French, Spanish, English, and German (Also with 3 genders like English) is well established, and comprehensive dictionaries are available to resolve any little doubts that may arise.
But imagine the first time someone had to translate from English to French, and is faced with the fact that every neuter word in English has been assigned to masculine or feminine in French - it probably seemed quite illogical to not be able to distinguish inanimate objects as neuter. When told that "boat" in English is "bateau" in French, the translator has, initially, no idea if it is considered m or f, and has to be told the gender assigned in French. (sorry, I'm using a chromebook and am not familiar with how to easily type accented characters.)
I know some nouns in Spanish that I have difficulty deciding on whether to use 'el' or 'la' with because I want to use a neuter definite article for the inanimate object, but no such article exists in Spanish. If it's a noun I don't use much, I may forget from one use to the next whether it is m or f, and have to depend on my wife to correct me. Somehow it seems that I guess correctly less than 50% of the time, which I suspect may be the result of some sort of brain pathology.
Two common words in German for "girl" are both neuter gender. This doesn't cause native German speakers any problem at all, and 2nd language German speakers have only to learn a simple rule and a list of endings considered as diminutives to lose any initial difficulty they may have had. But it can still be considered an idiosyncrasy of the language that a feminine person is called by a neuter noun.
This is why I believe that the characteristics of RE, if it existed, would be significant in helping to explain where "she" may have come from in talking about a boat in the Book of Mormon. In translations, the idiosyncrasies of both the source and the target language my cause some strange results. If the Book of Mormon had been "translated" from Hebrew, or from whatever dialect Lehi's family supposedly spoke, then we would be looking at a much simpler issue.
Without a Rosetta Stone that includes a good sample of RE plus some known language(s) I believe we are left with some insoluble issues - perhaps including the origin of the feminine pronoun used in English to refer to the Book of Mormon boat.
Of course, I may also be completely out to sea on this issue.