Why Fallacies are False -- 11, translation

So now you understand why MAGA and non-MAGA can’t communicate in general; they are different cultural subsets. They speak differently and they think differently. Coming to agreement only works one on one, with pushback on every false fact and every fallacy involved in a MAGA conspiracy theory. It’s time-consuming and exhausting. And once your MAGA goes back into their subculture, they forget everything you told them. It’s not how their culture thinks.

But, back to my language geekiness. The science behind this goes back to the 1950s. It’s called Sapir-Whorf Linguistic Theory, and some people may try to convince you it’s outdated.

It can’t be outdated. Its two canonical rules address the things that ruin translations, which I discussed last week. I read a paper that complained that SWLT makes translation impossible. That’s a case of the ambiguity fallacy and how you define “translation”: if you expect a translation to be a word-for-word substitution, yes it does, but I showed last week that word substitution will always produce a bad translation anyway.

The complaint also ignores history. The Septuagint was known to be a bad translation within a hundred years of its publication, based on what Greek words and grammar it used, and that was nearly two thousand years before SWLT came out.

The corollary is that every translation that relies on the Septuagint, is a bad translation.

How do you know if a translation of the Bible relies on the Septuagint?

Look at Isaiah 7:14. If it uses the word “virgin”, that comes from the Septuagint.

It does not come from the Biblical Hebrew. It is a misrepresentation of the source document, and that fails the Test of Occam’s Razor, data portion. This is a case of SWLT Rule 1.

Another indicator is if it uses “and” all the time. The Septuagint uses kai almost every place the Biblical Hebrew has the vav prefix, and English translations that rely on the Septuagint turn kai into “and”.

In 21^st century Biblical Hebrew, that vav means something other than “and” ohhhh I think 90% of the time. With nouns, it means “but” some of the time. With verbs, it’s what Dr. John Cook labeled a “narrative past”, or it marks a verb as part of an oblique structure. I found out that it may be the “then” clause in an “if-then” involving a promise to do something. (Dr. Cook disagrees strictly on the basis of morphology but I talk about that on the blog.) Grammar is the subject of SWLT Rule 2.

Since translations are strawman arguments, misrepresenting what the source says, any claims or conclusions based on translations fail the Test of Occam’s Razor for the data portion of the test.

This includes DH. The earliest writer accepted into the canon is Jean Astruc. He admits that he used the Neuchatel French translation done by and for French Calvinists. DH is founded upon a strawman argument, a fallacy that makes its probability of truth zero percent. I have four or five posts about Astruc on my blog.

The strawman argument of a translation also affects claims that Talmud refers to Jesus. The first such claim came out in the 1700s CE; it is available on Internet Archive in both German and English. The author did not know Aramaic, making it impossible for him to know what the Talmud says. He had to rely on translations and….

Anybody who cites to him, or repeats his arguments, also fails. There is a standard set of citations that show up in the articles I’ve seen arguing the “Jesus in Talmud” claim. I know where all of them are – except for the ones that don’t actually exist. If you cite to something that doesn’t actually exist, you have a zero probability of truth.

This is a case of a true argument from silence; the claims are based solely on the surviving texts of both Talmuds, which thus represent complete datasets. The “censorship” thing is a red herring fallacy; for Babylonian Talmud, the surviving text has all the citations in the 1342 Munich manuscript (available free online), which pre-dates the 1555 cum nimis absurdum bull that led to (temporary) censorship.

I have studied the existing citations in the source documents. I have four or five blog posts about this. I told readers to submit new supposed citations and haven’t gotten any comments on my blog with a new citation. If you submit one to me, either I’ll show you that I already knew about that one, or we’ll both learn something.

All of this is why Descartes said language is the beginning of knowledge, as an introduction to his argument that language cannot be all of knowledge. But the textbook of a language’s grammar can also be a strawman argument. If you study Modern Standard Arabic or a Slavic language like Polish, and your teacher or text don’t deal with aspect (but use tense instead), you are being ripped off.

I have two examples on my blog, Biblical Hebrew, which I referred to above, and Classical Greek. Until the sack of Constantinople in the 1400s CE, the west knew Greek writings only in Latin translation.

When westerners started reading the Greek manuscripts brought to Europe by refugees from Constantinople, they learned the grammar from Armenian and Syriac (Aramaic) translations of a Greek work that discussed the verbs in terms of tenses. The author of this original grammar book, Thrax, was teaching Greek to a Latin-speaking audience, and he said that the verbs used a system of tenses, the way Latin does. Maybe he couldn’t make them understand it any other way. Maybe he didn’t see a difference. He even copied the Latin labels. And in that lies the problem, which I discuss on my blog thread about Classical Greek.

Am I saying that we have to go back and re-evaluate everything that has ever been said about Greek classics? No. When we know that translations are probably strawman arguments, there’s no sense in worrying about commentaries, a further step away from the source, or interpretations, a still further step away. Let’s go straight back to the source documents, study them in terms of a modern understanding of grammar and in their cultural context. (This is the same thing I said a couple of posts ago about reading the actual NIH documents.) On my Greek thread I made a start with Thucydides, and threw in a little Xenophon and Herodotus. You have a hundred years to roll your own.