HOW DIFFERENT LANGUAGES DO 
AND DO NOT ORGANIZE OUR 
THOUGHTS IN DIFFERENT
CATEGORIES    

© 2000 by Orchid Land Publications

[10-25-00, enlarged on 10-27-00, updated 11-9-00]

     Consider the English pairings:

It requires no great acumen or insight to see the single relation exhibited in  the formally different examples.  One could make a much longer list of different ways of pairing active deverbative nouns (derived from causative verbs ending in Greek-derived -ize or Latin-derived -ify or verbs formed with specially accented "-ate" [as in affiliàte]) with a correlative noun denoting the result of the activity in question. The mind of an English-speaker is quite capable of organizing one's thinking in terms of *active : result* pairings.  But, unlike one Western language, English does not formally organize the same relationship for a speaker or writer in a way that one can hardly ignore.  That language is Greek.   In Greek, the first part of the energy-result relation is a feminine noun ending in -sis (or -tis; see below); the other part is a (neuter) noun ending in -ma naming the result of the energization in question:

Instead of  -ma, -sma occurs after  roots ending in a vowel, though not following lost *w, which drops out between vowels but is preserved as "u"  before -sis and -ma).  The accent of nouns in -sis and -ma is recessive (even to the point of breaking the accent rules before in  pólews (where "w" stands for omega) "city's" and is thereby predictable.  Many forms exhibit -efsis  ("-eusis") : -evma ("-euma"); they are often related to feminines ending in -éia and having a more abstract or general meaning than either of the related -sis : -ma words.  Take for example the verb paidévein ("paideuein") "teach, cause to learn" with paidefsis ("paideusis") : paédevma ("paideuma")--and even paidé(w)ia (whose "w" had dropped out between vowels by the Classical Age of ancient Greek, while surviving as "u" before a consonant.)  Greek had masculine parallels to -iz- and -az- causative verbs:  These ended in -ismós and -asmós (English -ism and -asm).  Cf. metabolize : metabolism : metabolite : metabolic and thinkable metabolist and metabolistic in English.  

     Standing to the side of some of the -sis : -ma pairs is a third partner, a paroxytone ending in -ia (earlier *-ya or rather -y- plus shwa) that is more abstract and general than the -sis : -ma pairings.  

(Note that dóxa comes from *dok-ya; ky combined as "x," which was pronounced as a long "sh"--as in this shipment, Miss Universe, misuse, etc.  See Ch. 9 of Essays on time-based linguistic analysis [Oxford University Press, 1996].)  There is no enéryesis, and enéryema and enéryeia covers its semantic field as well as that of enéryema.  Paidéia refers to child-rearing in general, while the senses of the other two forms are predictable--"educating" (or even "scholar") and "learning." Paideutés is a teacher, and paideutikon has to do with teaching, as any     trained Greek scholar would predict.  Douléia is "bondage" or "slaves" collectively (in Orthodoxy, "reverence"), while the other two forms are connected are, respectively, "practising slavery" and "servitude" or even "[being a] slave."  The two main senses of dóxa are "opinion" and "glory"; it is the former that turns up in dókesis "opining, appearing as an apparition."  (In "spazz out" in some kinds of English, spazz is back-formed from spasm : spastic; cf. plasm : plastic.) 
      Those who fail to see systems and just learn things like languages as lists of things to learn miss the fine points that a translator should be aware of.  The meaning of hamartia can overlap the semantic domain of hamártema; but the translator should be wary.  The word  should not be translated like hamártema "a sin" as a matter of course.   Patristic experts tell me that it mainly refers to what I will conceptualize as "a sin-conducive condition caused by death and deprivation of the divine energies or energizations."  
     But let's focus on the way Aristotle's sense of the -sis : -ma pairing led him to relate the -ma neuters to a potential force of an essence--i.e. a  dýnamis--which becomes real when its energy (enéryeia) energizes it and actuates it, causing it to become real and  actual.  He made formalized dynamis and energy as technical terms in his Physics and Metaphysics.  In the centuries between Aristotle, the technical distinction became as much a part of ordinary Greek as various Freudian and Jungian and many items of scientific jargon have become part of cotidian English.   Sometimes, the verb eneryeïn can be rendered simply as "cause," the noun enéryeia as "causation," and the adjectives ending in -es, -on, and -etikón as "energetic" or "causative."  

    The point of this exercise is that English does not force us to think in the Greek manner.  We can do it, but we are not dragged (or lured) into it by our language.  To understand Greek-language Christianity and to translate its New Testament into a Western language requires more mental flexibility and adaptability than most Westerners were wont to exhibit in the last millennium.  (The first-millennium Tertullian knew and mentioned the Greek term, but, after all, he spoke and wrote in Greek in addition to his native Latin.)  Fundamental terms and concepts like energy do not show up in Latin and German and English renderings of the Bible.  Indeed, how many Biblical literalists have the concept at all?  But how can one understand the Bible literally when one does not have the energy concept embedded in one's thinking?  It's time for Westerners to step into the energetic thought world of the early Christians, whose Greek language took energy for granted and would have had no way of imagining virtual reality in connection with divine things?   It's time for translators to stop rendering Greek concepts into the concepts of a thought world alien to the early Christians in Antioch, Ephesos, Smyrna, Philippi, Corinth, Colossos, and Galatia--and Rome too, where Christians spoke Greek into the third century. The point of Philp. 2:13 and Gal. 5:6 is lost in current English versions of the Bible.  A well-known three-volume Catholic study of Biblical Greek words does not even list the energy words.  The Western paradigms have created a grave scotosis for their understanding of Greek. For the way the distinction resolves problems not amenable to reasonable resolution in the West, CLICK HERE.

    By now, a reader should have more than a hint of the difference between the Greek understanding of reality and of Christianity and the two Western frameworks--one based on the intellectual aspects of the Cordovan Aristotle, and the other even more Islamicized in its elevating will above reason in the traditional Semitic way?  One important factor has to do with language differences.  While any language can express the same thoughts and categories as another--it may take awhile when the cultural gap is wide, as when Pacific Islanders receive the New Testament--different languages do not necessarily view parallel distinctions in the same manner.  Even more cogently, one language will force people to categorize reality  in ways that are simply one of several options in another language.  While speakers of both Greek and Western languages can organize reality in similar categories, Western languages do not automatically funnel one's thinking into the same categories that the Greek language does.  English can make a gerund out of a verb fairly easily:  The verb "sin" adds "-ing" to become "sinning."  Greek forms referring to causation--or, as a Greek might more fluently put it, to an energization--replaces the equivalent of English -tize with an original -tis that changed to -sis  except after -s-.  (A few ancient forms that do not fit the developed semantic pattern under scrutiny have -tis after -n-; e.g. mántis.)  These forms are like English gerunds except that they cannot be passivized or temporalized the way "having been energized" and "being about to energize" can.  

     The long and short of this is that when a speaker of Greek is thinking, s/he more or less automatically tends to think of the result when using an energetic feminine deverbative noun and of the causation or energization when using the resultive neuter.   There is an unconscious link there between them that is absent in the form of English and other Western European language.
     Enéryeia itself is not paired in a triad with -sis and -ma formations; the energetic slot for enérgesis is not filled in Greek, and enéryeia can represent a result as well as an activization.  It thus overlaps the territory of the existing enéryema.  As seen earlier, hamartía is part of a triad but is semantically discrete from the pair hamártesis and hamártema.   It's ontological-separation connotations do not involve the moral concept of guilt or assume penal presuppositions.  If hamartía  can be thought of ontologically as a consequence of the Fall in the East, n the West, it refers to a juridical condition involving punishment.  What East and West have in common is that the Fall, however envisioned by either side, resulted from the disobedience of our first ancestors.  It is paradoxical that the Latins teach that a moral trait is  physically (by natural generation) inherited from Adam by all his descendents.  The Reformers solved that by holding that God imputes Adam's sin to every newborn as a punishment embracing the entire human race. 

    To understand the way in which the (usually unconscious) thought world of a person determines the sense of a term, consider pístis "faith" and cháris "Grace" or the phrase eph w in Rom. 5:12.  These could have divergent senses in Greek (as could fides "faith" in Latin);  One's cognitive paradigm influences which sense one adopts in translating a Bible passage:

pístis "belief" (standard of belief [creed] is sýmvolon písteos) or a
will-based  "trust, loyalty"--Luther's choice

cháris "free gift" or
will-based "favor"--the Reformers' choice

héws  (traditionally in Mat. 1:25) "by" a certain time, and also not afterwards, or else "until" a certain time but not necessarily later (Luther)

eph w "because (all have sinned)" or (the substitutionary sense of  Evangelicals) "in Whom (all have sinned)" 

The moral is that one ignores one underlying paradigms--Greek or second-millennium (Muslim-derived) Western though worlds--at the cost of not really understanding why one thinks or acts thus and so, or at least why other people don't think and act in a given cognitive discipline like oneself.  The only people who can easily cross paradigm boundaries are those who have invented new paradigms, say Copernicus (the classical example) or Einstein, or any of a number of physics, astrophysicists, biologists, psychologists, and even theologians since Einstein's heyday.

    A translation into English made with an understanding of the structures of the source and target systems--say, respectively of Greek and English--can do an adequate job, given a modicum of literary talent.  If  English doesn't have a unified structure for distinguish energizations and their results, one stands on the brink of failure if one doesn't educate oneself to avoid "image and likeness" for"icon and (energetic) Assimilation--to take an obvious example. "Assimilation to God" was a run-of-the-mill notion in early first-millennium Greek-language culture, as also was thinking of the Creator as the "Reason (LOGOS) and Wisdom (SOPHIA) of God."   St. Paul's "new creating" is not the "new creature" of the KJV Bible. 

   While one cannot psychoanalyse the noûs or preterrational mind of God, one can deem that the Incarnation was delayed till it was, i.e. until the culture of a cognitively suitable language crossed with a culture whose content could be validated and enhanced with that other cognitive framework.  The Orthodox took Hebrew respect for the rôle of matter and time (tradition) in religion and "formed" it, or expressed it, with Greek conceptuology--including the ontological idea of energy (and process).  (The Reformers did the converse, imposing a Semitic [Islamic-Jewish] juridical form on the content of Hellenistic Gnosticism with a prominent focus on "the Book" and "word" rather than on created things and time; the Semitic conceptuology stemmed lineally from the highly Shari'a-ized/Torahized Muslim Aristotle of Cordova.  Like Byzantion, Cordova was a cultural oasis on the fringes of the  barbaric, illiterate Europe of the Dark Ages. On the Western fringe, Irish scholars like John Duns Scotus were translating the Greek of St. Maximos and Dionysios (Duns Scotus even got "Maximos's" lóyoi correct--as "rationes").  To the North, the people whose warriors were called Vikings (or, later, in Constantinople, Varangians) formed a trading zone extending from Newfoundland to Baghdad.  One of them, Waldemar, St. Olaf's cousin, brought Orthodox Christianity to the Russians after his emissaries had looked at Judaism (the Kazars or one of the groups in what is now Russia converted to Judaism), the Germans' version of Latin Christianity, and Islam and then reported back to him on what they had seen and heard.  We call him Prince Waldemar of Kiyev St. Vladimir (stressing the middle syllable). 
      Making the switch-over from Orthodoxy to its mirror-image in Reformation Christianity or the switch  from that mirror-image of Orthodoxy to Orthodoxy requires a considerable wrenching of one's thinking, behavior, and so on.  Anyone who thinks that such a leap is just adopting a list of new interpretations of the Greek New Testament or embracing a list of alien practices is missing the point--that one is moving into different thought world, one whose presuppositions and assumptions are different.  Putting it this way may come across as too abstract to describe what can be a rather concrete undertaking or pilgrimage; but we must not forget that our thought world is what gives meaning to our actions--include acts of translating Scripture into a Western language that has been formed in a very different cognitive climate.

FOCUSING IN GREEK, LATIN, AND GERMAN 
VS. FOCUSING IN ENGLISH AND FRENCH:
TRANSLATING MARK 2:28 AND 15:39

     These verses have the article-free predicates Kýrios and in the "marked" (non-default) position before the subject.  This is the way language like Greek, Latin, and Hebrew focus or highlight a grammatical form.  English and French do the same thing with various kinds of cleft-sentences--also without the normal article.  I would offer these alternative cleft renderings of the verses under scrutiny:

"and so it is Lord God that the Son of humanity . . . is" or
"and so what the Son of humanity . . . is is Lord God."

"Truly it was Son of God that that Person was." 
"Truly what that Person was was Son of God."

Notice that in the first of these verses, Greek drops the article before Kýrios "Lord" more or less like the English translation.  Greek does this for predicate complements quite often:  English does it frequently in cleft-sentences.  Schwyzer (II, p. 25) also notes that names are article-free at first mention but have the definite article at later mentionings.  In the second example, Théos "God" lacks the definite article--as a predicate would; but in fact, Greek often dropped the article before this word, as Schwyzer says. 

CLICK HERE ON TRANSLATING 
ORTHODOX TERMINOLOGY 

     Translations that do not take this fact into consideration are missing the boat.  I must admit, though, that I just recognized the relevance of this consideration when I was asked about the verses in question.