The sacral stamp of Greek: Periphrastic constructions in New Testament translations of Latin, Gothic, and Old Church Slavonic

Abstract

Among the sociolinguistc forces at work in the languages of the world, religious affiliation and the accompanying reverence for the symbols of that affiliation must rank among the most powerful. Religious texts serve as repositories of cultural tradition and become, for their followers, reliquaries of the very word of God. Besides the conservatizing, archaizing pressures which often grow up within a religious tradition, these texts also act as conduits for cultural and linguistic innovation as they spread, through transmission and translation, to surrounding populations. The New Testament (NT) represents just such a cultural conduit, providing not only a blueprint for Christian social behavior but also a pattern for Christian linguistic expression, providing a new lexicon, a special syntax, a style of its own, simple and spare. It was this style, these lexical and syntactic patterns, which came to be imbued with social value to connote membership in the Christian community, and which came to be imitated, sometimes subtly, sometimes blatantly, by translators of the New Testament.

The Greek Perfect through Gothic Eyes: Evidence for the Existence of a Unitary Semantic for the Greek Perfect in New Testament Greek

“…Given that this is the only example found in this investigation, however, establishing the place of this construction in the Gothic verb system will require a dedicated study. On periphrastic perfects in Gothic focusing on the 'have' type see Drinka (2011). So far the picture is consistent with both hypotheses a) and b), and indeed the traditional picture of the perfect system in Greek.…”

Evangelization and Language Change: A Transition from the Progressive Aspect to the Future Tense in Two Mayan Languages

“…A rapid series of changes in Old Irish is considered to be related to the introduction of Christianity in Ireland (Dixon 1997). The impact of authoritative translations of sacral texts on vernacular languages, and specifically on verbal grammar, is well known in the Indo‐European context (Amenta 2003; Drinka 2011, 2017). Heine and Kuteva (2005: 250) also provided several examples of contact situations in which “the replication of grammatical categories starts out with written discourse before it extends to spoken discourse.” The intrusion of Christianity into the Americas also changed the linguistic attitudes of the indigenous people (Hanks 2010).…”

Morphosyntactic Contact in Translation: Greek ídios and Latin proprius in the Bible

“…In the Latin versions, both of the Old and of the New Testament, proprius may translateas an alternative to (classical) suus -Greek ıdios. 2 (1) a. Greek: ho aph' heautoũ lalôn tḕn d oksan ART-NOM.SG from himself-GEN speak-PRS.PTCP.NOM.SG the-ACC.SG glory-ACC.SG tḕn id ıan z eteĩ the-ACC.SG own-ACC.SG seek-PRS.3SG b. Latin: qui a se-met ipso loquitur who-NOM.SG from he-ABL.SG-PTCL himself-ABL.SG speak-PRS.3SG gloriam propriam quaerit glory-ACC.SG own-ACC.SG seek-PRS.3SG 'He who speaks from himself seeks his own glory' (Jn 7.18) The role of translation for the rise and spread of grammatical change is widely acknowledged in the literature, as well as the particular status of translated sacred texts, on which see the contributions in Cornillie & Drinka (2019), Lavidas & Bergs (2020), Bianconi (2021), Drinka (2011), Gianollo (2011Gianollo ( , 2014 and van der Louw (2007).…”

“…The role of translation for the rise and spread of grammatical change is widely acknowledged in the literature, as well as the particular status of translated sacred texts, on which see the contributions in Cornillie & Drinka (2019), Lavidas & Bergs (2020), Bianconi (2021), Drinka (2011), Gianollo (2011, 2014) and van der Louw (2007).…”