Comments on: A Bit of English Irony

By: jimgetz

jimgetz — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 15:33:59 +0000

Oooh, it pains me! Actually, the HCSB seems to have had that motto as well, as evidenced by their translation of Josh 1:7

Above all, be strong and very courageous to carefully observe the whole instruction My servant Moses commanded you.

By: N. T. Wrong

N. T. Wrong — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 19:54:39 +0000

I heard somewhere that the motto of the translators of the ESV was: “To boldly go where no man has gone before.”

By: jimgetz

jimgetz — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 16:02:44 +0000

Wayne,

I’m well aware of the age old prescriptive/descriptive grammar debate. But, I’ve also taught writing classes at university for years. A scientific observation of the language that most of my students speak and write would show that they know an entirely different dialect of English. Not something I’d was to use as a model of proper English.

Regardless, I think the series is great. There’s plenty of room to clean up all of the major translation projects, and it’s good to get this information out to an audience wider than ETS.

By: Wayne Leman

Wayne Leman — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 17:59:21 +0000

Jim, there is nothing wrong with splitting English infinitives. That prescriptivist rule was apparently created by English teachers who thought that English infinitives acted like Latin infinitives, which, obviously, could not be split because they are single words. But English infinitives are separate words and, for millions of English speakers, splitting them with adverbs sounds like good English. And it is good English because the adverbial modifier can be closer to the word it modifies, which makes good logical and literary sense.

We need to move away from prescriptivist rules which have little to do with proper English and, instead, follow descriptive rules, which result from scientific observation of the language patters which speakers of a language actually practice.

Thanks for the link to our ESV series. We hope that it has benefitted a number of readers.