Words, Words, Words 16: In the Beginning Was the...What??

Young Heretics

Spencer Klavan

Society & Culture, Education

4.9 • 4.5K Ratings

🗓️ 26 June 2024

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Untranslatable...that's what you are...and forevermore...that's how you'll...stay? This week, prompted by a listener who's working on a very cool coding project, I'm talking a little bit about famously untranslatable words like logos, ruach, and my personal favorite, aphiēmi. It's an ancient problem, debated and fussed over basicaly since the Bible was written...can it be solved? Where to begin? I'll crack open the question today, and try to answer it next week.

Check out our sponsor, the Ancient Language Institute (now offering Old English instruction!): https://ancientlanguage.com/youngheretics/

Pre-order my new book, Light of the Mind, Light of the World: https://a.co/d/2QccOfM

Subscribe to my new joint Substack with Andrew Klavan (no relation): https://thenewjerusalem.substack.com

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Famously the Red Queen from Alice in Wonderland used to believe six impossible things before breakfast every day when she was a little girl
0:08.6	And I don't know if we're quite gonna get up to six but here today on young heretics we are going to
0:14.7	translate at least three untranslatable and if you've been
0:30.0	following this words words words series on translation and the difficulties the translators
0:35.0	face, you will probably be able to guess why.
0:38.6	One thing I've said before on this show is that there are no synonyms. There's no two words in any one language, let
0:45.7	alone any two languages, that really mean exactly the same thing. Every word is a
0:51.1	kind of vessel for holding the fluid reality of human experience.
0:57.0	Reality in our experience is continuous, moment to moment, thing to thing, and we break it up into little parcels with our words to carve out the things we experience.
1:08.0	And that's not to say that those things don't have identity of their own, just that there is fuzziness around the edges of a lot of the categories we apply in language and different languages break up reality into different kinds of segments and vessels and some words reveal connections between things in one language
1:28.0	that another language just hasn't recorded or captured or maybe those connections in one language have been lost over time
1:35.4	whereas they've been preserved or revived in another language and this is part of
1:40.4	the glory and the mystery and the beauty of working through translation is coming to understand that not all of the
1:47.6	categories you use to break up your experience of reality are actually hard-coded into reality without your experience.
1:57.8	So it's your experience of the world that helps to give it that final form and shape and each culture, each mind, each person gives the world
2:07.7	a slightly distinct form and shape.
2:10.4	So the world viewed from a million, million vantage points is the totality of what God creates
2:15.5	when he creates us and when we help him
2:18.2	to create the world in his image, right?
2:20.2	So that's what's going on when we do translation and why translation is so hard,
2:24.8	why you can't just pick up one word and replace it with another in another language.
2:29.9	And this in antiquity was one of the big debates about translation.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Spencer Klavan, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Spencer Klavan and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.