July 01, 2005

Needed: Protestant Latinists The vast majority of the church fathers and the Reformation’s writers have not been translated into English. Most of the history of the church remains a closed book to the modern world because that book is in Latin or Greek. There is a solution. The question is: Will anyone adopt the solution?
posted by dt118 18 years ago
  • Nemo.
  • That's a trifle pessimistic, languagehat? Surely some universities can be persuaded that this is worthier work to set their students and research assistants than going over the minutiae of established (and repeatedly translated) texts?
  • WTF? Didn't we already have this shit with Gutenberg? Stop this pointless arguing about vicious, iron-age mythology and dead languages and let the stupidity die the death it needed in the 18thC for Bog's sake. (waits, expecting languagehat to come back at him with a good sharp tonguelashing)
  • If the goal is to have a corpus of incoherent, inconsistent, historically inaccurate, and dubious translations of texts with questionable relevance to modern thought, then I encourage this experiment. However, surely French would be a far more suitable target language than English!
  • It's kind of funny. When I was in college a good half of the kids in my Latin class were in it to translate religous texts (them Korean Presbys are hard core, yo). Of course, they didn't much care for that revisionist crap like The Reformation. They wanted to head back to as close to "the source" as they could. I dunno how well any of them fared (I was just in it for the language requirement). I'm suprised I passed at all.
  • I usually start looking at Internet Medieval Source Book. Dr. Hallsal has some good agrregate links for reformation source documents.
  • No, no, I was talking about this Nemo. *lashes Chyren sharply*
  • However, surely French would be a far more suitable target language than English! *asks nicely to borrow lash*
  • *hands lash to Wolof, warns tensor to brace himself*
  • *suggests tensor might like to think about kittens and chocolate and ickle ickle duckies*
  • *doesn't know what hit him*
  • French is just stoopid. I asked this French guy what "rien" was and he was all like "it means nothing" and I was all like "well then why say it?" IDIOTS.
  • I actually find this a bit hard to believe. I don't know who Migne's Latin Fathers are, but surely Melancthon and Zwingli were translated into English ages ago. You can find English e-texts of Calvin on-line without much trouble. Does he mean something else?
  • Dear old Migne! I spent many happy hours browsing about in him while I was researching my dissertation. He actually tells a pretty good tale, but it helps if you read Latin.
  • No, no, I was talking about this Nemo. Languagehat, always nice to meet another Jules Verne enthusiast. Of course you are onto the Annotated Edition of TTLUTS? (The party who translated the "standard" version was a soulmate of Pedro Carolino.) I would hope for another film version, but I don't think anything running around Hollywood today could top James Mason and Kirk Douglas.