Strange accent marks in my Bible

  • Thread starter Thread starter Garyjohn2
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
G

Garyjohn2

Guest
Just got a new Bible (The Ignatius Bible: Revised Standard Version - Second Catholic Edition) and it has these confusing accent marks for a lot of the names of people and places in it. I’m wondering, what are these? One example is “Ra’phael” for the angel Raphael. They are all over the place though.

Are these to help with pronunciation? Are they something left over from the translation from Hebrew? What’s going on here? I’ve never seen these marks before.
 
I think they are to aid pronunciation of transliterated names. They likely indicate emphasized syllables.
 
It’s called “self-pronouncing text”. Look in the introductory material at the front of the book for a list of what the marks mean.
 
Interesting…

Is this generally considered a favorable thing to have in a translation/transliteration? I find it a bit distracting, but perhaps I’ll get used to it.
 
Garyjohn2 said:
Is this generally considered a favorable thing to have in a translation/transliteration? I find it a bit distracting, but perhaps I’ll get used to it.
Click to expand...
Well they wouldn’t do it unless there were a demand for it.
  • The English forms of many names are quite different from the way the names sound in the underlying languages. “Adam” is “Adam” in every Bible, but “Eve” in Hebrew is “Havva” with a hard h; in Latin there is no hard h so it gets rendered “Hava”, “Heva”, or “Eva” depending on which Latin translation or edition you’re using.
  • “Job” in Hebrew is “Iyyov”, two syllables.
  • “Ezekiel” is “Ye-Hez-Kel”, only three.
  • The Douay-Rheims is notorious for unrecognizable Latin-based versions of familiar names like “Josue” which is Joshua but pronounced “Yoh-Soo-Uh” and mispronounced all the time as “Joe-Sue”, like a double name.
  • Can you guess Esdras, Osee, Abdias, Sophonias, and Aggaeus?
I find self-pronouncing text intrusive and annoying. But it’s even more annoying when an improperly trained or ill-prepared lector mispronounces names or other words, in church or in a bible study.

How would you pronounce the name *Mahershalalhashbaz *(Isaiah 8:1) on your first try in front of a congregation on you first day of being a lector? LOL
 
DianaCC said:
Well they wouldn’t do it unless there were a demand for it.
  • The English forms of many names are quite different from the way the names sound in the underlying languages. “Adam” is “Adam” in every Bible, but “Eve” in Hebrew is “Havva” with a hard h; in Latin there is no hard h so it gets rendered “Hava”, “Heva”, or “Eva” depending on which Latin translation or edition you’re using.
  • “Job” in Hebrew is “Iyyov”, two syllables.
  • “Ezekiel” is “Ye-Hez-Kel”, only three.
  • The Douay-Rheims is notorious for unrecognizable Latin-based versions of familiar names like “Josue” which is Joshua but pronounced “Yoh-Soo-Uh” and mispronounced all the time as “Joe-Sue”, like a double name.
  • Can you guess Esdras, Osee, Abdias, Sophonias, and Aggaeus?
I find self-pronouncing text intrusive and annoying. But it’s even more annoying when an improperly trained or ill-prepared lector mispronounces names or other words, in church or in a bible study.

How would you pronounce the name *Mahershalalhashbaz *(Isaiah 8:1) on your first try in front of a congregation on you first day of being a lector? LOL
Click to expand...
That is fascinating! It seems so much is lost in translation, so to speak. “Hevva” to “Eve” is quite a leap. The name Eve even has a double-meaning in English, but that double-meaning is essentially moot because that wasn’t even her name! So interesting.

I wonder what else is lost when the pronunciations change thus. Job = Iyyov? How strange…you’d think we can do better than that…
 
Garyjohn2 said:
That is fascinating! It seems so much is lost in translation, so to speak. “Hevva” to “Eve” is quite a leap. The name Eve even has a double-meaning in English, but that double-meaning is essentially moot because that wasn’t even her name! So interesting.

I wonder what else is lost when the pronunciations change thus. Job = Iyyov? How strange…you’d think we can do better than that…
Click to expand...
That’s what happens when you shuttle names from one language to another and the new language doesn’t work that way soundwise.

I’m sure you’ve heard of the medieval king Charlemagne. His name was really Karl, it means “guy” as in “a man”. When that gets exported to other languages is becomes Carl, Carlos, Carol (as in Carroll O’Connor who played Archie Bunker; Karol Wojtyla the last pope - did you know it was originally a boy’s name?), Charles; in Latin, Carolus … Karl the Great is Carolus Magnus, Frenchified to Charlemagne.

There was another king, Xerxes of Persia, mentioned in the Bible; his real name was Hshayarsha, in Hebrew Ahashverosh, in Greek Xerxes, the Douay renders it Ahasuerus. If that were my name I would have Americans just call me Shy-Arsha because English can’t handle that hard-h plus sh at the beginning.

When Alexander the Great conquered Persia, the crowds were happy to have done with their old rulers but they couldn’t pronounce Alexander’s name so they cheered him “Sikandar”. And to this day Sikandar is still a boy’s name in that part of the world.

Native American names are almost always translated rather than just imported into English. Crazy Horse’s name in Lakota was Tashunca Uitco, which means Crazy Horse. It’s a shame we don’t learn this in third grade because of its maximum coolness factor.

In Chinese it gets really interesting because they can either translate the meaning of the name or put together syllables that sound like the name. When they put together something that sounds like the name, the individual syllables still have separate meanings on their own, and the characters have parts that have meanings on their own, so it’s like the name has hidden meanings. “Joseph” is Yue-Se-Fu. What does that really mean? Idunno.
 
One of the most frequent mispronunciations I hear in church is that of

Capernaum

Some say ‘kap er naum’ three syllables

but, it seems that four syllables is better:

KAP PER NAY UM or some say KAP PER NEE UM.

As the RSV-2CE is derived from the KJV, it carries along this feature of a pronunciation aid.
 
I think these books are going to be escape from these confusions. These confusion may be removed by care reading of bible edition now. That’s the main reason which can be helpful th erase this confusion.
 
This makes me wish I studied more linguistics in college. So interesting!
 
DianaCC said:
In Chinese it gets really interesting because they can either translate the meaning of the name or put together syllables that sound like the name. When they put together something that sounds like the name, the individual syllables still have separate meanings on their own, and the characters have parts that have meanings on their own, so it’s like the name has hidden meanings. “Joseph” is Yue-Se-Fu. What does that really mean? Idunno.
Click to expand...
Only the characters are chosen because of the sound and not because of the meaning. Buddhists in China, Korea and Japan have been doing it since ancient times with their transliteration of Sanskrit or Pali in things such as loanwords, proper names, mantras, dharanis, and whatnot: fidelity to the original was of utmost importance to them because of the belief that for the mantras and dharanis to work properly, you’ve got to accurately pronounce them, and so they poured their efforts into ensuring that words are transliterated close enough (an effort which IMHO was made quite unfortunately moot with the changes in pronunciation since then :D).

In fact, there was this whole issue during the Qing Dynasty, when some Chinese scholars were unhappy to find China was located on a continent called 亞細亞 (yàxìyà), i.e. Asia, as 亞 means “secondary” and 細 “small”. They aregued that that the Europeans were deliberately belittling the East! 😃
 
Crumpy said:
One of the most frequent mispronunciations I hear in church is that of

Capernaum

Some say ‘kap er naum’ three syllables

but, it seems that four syllables is better:

KAP PER NAY UM or some say KAP PER NEE UM.

As the RSV-2CE is derived from the KJV, it carries along this feature of a pronunciation aid.
Click to expand...
And if you want something more authentic, read it like Ka-per-nah-oom or Ka-far-nah-oom (Kαπερναούμ, Kαφαρναούμ). Or just go to the Hebrew: Kfar Nahum. 😃

For the record, it actually annoys me actually when people pronounce sabachthani as sabachtha-NIGH (rhymes with thigh and fly) instead of sabachtha-KNEE. 😛
 
If you find that the accent marks are that disturbing, you could always find an edition without them. Just be sure it has the Imprimatur that marks it as authentically Catholic in translation and notes.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top