Notice the level of obtuseness we are sinking too: in the matter of a translation of a major liturgical text, a person is more willing to accept the most tortured reasoning possible to defend to the last breath that it’s a POSSIBLE correct translation, even in the face of evidence that they are wrong, than just to admit error and move on.
Sorry Bear, on this issue you were proven wrong, and you should drop the issue and move on…perhaps to quoting Pastor Aeternus (maybe it has a section on pontifical and episcopal rights to reinvent languages).
To repeat, for the forgetful: the Oxford Greek-English Lexicon, 9th Edition, large edition, DOES NOT print “multitude”, “common people”, let alone “ALL” as a possible translation of POLUS. Neither does the Oxford Latin Dictionary (Oxford, 1982) under MULTI. Neither does the 1879 Oxford Dictionary translated into English from the major German lexicon of Latin.
Nowhere. Not anywhere. In the Greek dictionary, we’re talking 2.5 dense pages of meanings that range from the common to the incredibly rare. Yet nowhere are the words all, multitude, or common people.
So sorry, Bear, you’re wrong.
P.S. for the curious: The Patristic Greek-English Lexicon of Lampp, also from Oxford, also does not offer these ICEL translations.
I guess ICEL has their own dictionary.
Remember, Bear, I stand by what is in the STANDARD, SCHOLARLY, BEST Latin and Greek dictionaries available.
Not lists of synonyms from online dictionaries. Because this isn’t a synonym game. It’s a translation question, and ICEL got it wrong. We haven’t even moved on to their next error(s). “Christus innocens Patri” = “Christ who only was sinless.” There, ICEL invented a word that is nowhere in the Latin.
Defend that.
In brief, it is UNACCEPTABLE from a scholarly point of view to look up a Greek or Latin word, take all the dictionary meanings, take those meanings to an English thesaurus, look up synonyms there, pick one at whim, and then claim it’s a valid translation of the original Latin or Greek.
No philological scholar would tolerate that. It’s sloppy, inaccurate work. Latin and Greek are notoriously precise languages. English isn’t. That’s part of the problem here. It’s also why sloppy English translations are major problems.