"phute'okicu" and other new animals

Sat Jan 26 00:06:15 UTC 2008

In my opinion, it would be very surprising indeed, if Fr. Eugene  
Buechel S.J., (b.1873) as a member of the Society of Jesus who had  
been trained in Germany & the Netherlands in the 1890's & early  
1900's,, was NOT thoroughly versed at least in the canonical  
scriptural languages of Hebrew, Greek & Latin, (if not in Aramaic &  
Syriac also, and perhaps even some Coptic). As people here will know,  
the Jesuits have always been renowned for being the Catholic Church's  
elite scholarly order.

By the same token, I reckon there is also a reasonable likelihood  
that Stephen Return Riggs & Thomas S. Williamson would also have  
acquired the standard XIXc. missionary's equipment of at least some  
acquaintance with those languages also, and perhaps even had  
scholarly in-depth knowledge of the Hebrew OT, the Greek NT, and the  
Latin Vulgate.

At the risk of seeming to be doing a reprise of Herman Melville's  
learned treatise on Cetology in the wonderful "Moby Dick", perhaps it  
may be of relevance & interest to explore in some detail the original  
scriptural texts of GENESIS 1:21, which the translators of the Dakota  
Bible (1879) evidently based their translations on :

'Hecen Wakantanka hog^an tankinkinyan oicah^ye... "So God created  
great fishes..."

Now, our member Alfred is the Hebrew scholar par-excellence amongst  
us, but by his leave & subject to his correction, I will first cite  
the Hebrew OT. Here goes :
The text of Hebrew Bible for GEN 1:21 reads :         
וַיִּבְרָ֣א אֱלֹהִ֔ים  
אֶת־הַתַּנִּינִ֖ם הַגְּדֹלִ֑ים

in which the words used for the object of the verb : (ha)tanni:nim  
(ha)gedoli:m 'the great dragons/sea-monsters' were rendered :

  "And God created great whales.." (King James Version 1611),

"And God created the great whales..."[Douai Rheims (-R.Catholic tr.  
NT 1582; OT 1609) ] are :

That interesting word tanniynim/tanni:nim (Pl.)<tanniyn/tanni:n (with  
an 'erroneous' by-form tanni:m)[cf. Modern Written Arabic tinniyn/ 
tinni:n; Pl. tana:ni:n; - which, as Bruce will know, signifies : "sea  
monster; Draco (astron.); waterspout (meteor.) [Arab.-Engl.Dict..  
Hans Wehr, ed. J.M.Cowan, NY, 1976];  also occurs in Syriac & Ethiopic).
This word is said by Gesenius' Hebrew-Engl. Lexicon of O.T. (ed. &  
rev. by Brown, Briggs & Driver, Clarendon Pr, Oxf.,1951)  to be a  
loan-word from Aramaic tanniyna', and appears to have had a somewhat  
indeterminate meaning
(much like that other Hebrew word leviathan/livya:tha:n, and the  
Ancient Greek/Latin cetos/cetus ) :

"serpent (venomous) [Dt 32:33]; dragon (as devourer)[Jer 51:24]; sea-  
(or river-) monster [Gn 1:21]."

At Psalms 74:13, the same word is even used, figuratively, of the  
Egyptian oppressors, and is rendered in the KJV as 'dragons', while  
at Isaiah 51:9, it is used of the mythological personification of  
Chaos 'Rahab/Rahav', and once again translated by the King James  
version as ' the dragon',

Another Hebrew-Engl. lexicon (Samuel Bagster & sons, 1911) glosses  
the word thus :

"1) a serpent; 2) any large marine animal; 3) a crocodile."

(Incidentally, there was another word : tan/ta:n with whose Pl. forms  
tanni:m/tanni:n our word just discussed appears to have been  
sometimes conflated. Its meaning appears to have been 'howling thing;  
jackal; wolf; other wild animals of the desert; "precise meaning  
unknown"[Op.cit., s.v.] '.)

[The Gesenius Hebr. Lexicon also gives a rare Arabic cognate ti:na:n 
(un), (which I am unable to locate in Wehr). Perhaps it was an  
ancient word??
Gesenius glosses tan/ta:n evocatively as "jackal, howling mournfully  
in waste places", (Op.Cit., s.v.)]

Yet another respected standard dictionary of Biblical Hebrew (Dr.  
Karl Feyerabend, Langenscheidt, n.d.) supplies the following meanings  
for tanni:n/tanni:m , which reveal rather succinctly the word's wide  
semantic range  :

"great water-animal; whale; shark; crocodile; serpent; sea-monster"

The Hellenistic Greek version of the OT, the Septuagint (LXX), at  
Genesis 1:21, reads :

Καὶ ἐποίησεν ὀ Θεός τὰ κήτη τὰ  
μεγάλα... [Kai epoiesen ho Theos ta kete ta megala..."And God  
created the great sea-monsters/whales..."] ,

using the accusative plural of the Ancient Greek word ketos  
[κήτος] (neuter singular) :

"any sea-monster, or huge fish" [Liddell, Scott & Jones ("LSJ"),  
Greek-Engl. Lexicon, 9th Rev. Ed.];

  "Orig. sense 'gulf' ...a sea-monster, also applied to seals" [A  
Lexicon of Homeric Dialect, R.J.Cunliffe, London&Glasgow; 1924];

"sea-monster, e.g. sharks & seals" [A Homeric Dictionary, Georg  
Autentrieth, (tr. R.P.Keep), 1876, 1901]

According to LSJ (s.v.), the word had long been used by Homer  
[Odyssey 12.97; Iliad 20.147], and also occurs in the Histories of  
Herodotus [Bk IV.53]. Ketos could also, we are told by LSJ, have the  
meaning of "seal; sea-calf", and was evidently used in this sense at  
Odyssey 4.446 & 452.
The tragedian Euripides [fragment 121], and the comedian Aristophanes  
[Nubes, 556] employed the word to refer to monster to which Andromeda  
was exposed.
Later on, Aristotle used ketos in his treatises Historia Animalium  
(HA) [VI.12.1], and De Partibus Animalium(PA) [III.6.2] in the sense  
of :
"any animal of the whale kind; a cetacean".
 From there on, it went into Latin, (which also, incidentally, had  
another word balaena, from which stemmed many derivatives in mod.  
European languages).

In the so-called Clementine Vulgate 1592 (named after Pope Clement  
VIII 1592-1605), the standard RC Counter-Reformation revision/ 
rescension of St. Jerome's well-known Latin rendering, the  text of  
Genesis 1:21 reads :

"Creavitque Deus cete grandia...", where kete [κήτη] is the Greek  
neuter accusative plural of ketus just adopted wholesale into Latin  
(spelled cetus; Pl. cete), as the neuter acc. pl. of the adjective  
'grandis'  demonstrates by concord. (Latin often just adopts Greek  
words holus-bolus, and uses the Greek declensional case-endings on  
Greek words, rather than the Latin ones - most well-educated Romans  
had a fluent command of Hellenistic, if not Classical, Greek, having  
in very many cases studied philosophy/literature/natural-science (or  
attended 'finishing school' , as it were) in Athens, or some other  
Greek city, perhaps in Ionia, the stamping-ground of early western  
science. A cursory glance at Cicero's numerous very entertaining  
letters will reveal many Greek words, freq. left in the original  
script. A command of Greek, for cultivated Romans, was regarded much  
like a knowledge of French & Latin used to be considered in Europe &  
America, as a mark of breeding & superior education. What a falling- 
off there has been, eh? Just kidding, folks. ;) )

Finally, in the other Biblical passage for which I have the Dakota  
translation, Matthew 12:40, the following are original texts for  
comparison :

"Anpetu yamni qa hanyetu yamni hehanyan Jonas hogan tanka tezi kin  
ohna un qon he iyecen..."

"For as Jonah was three days & three nights in the whale's  
belly..." [KJV, 1611];

"For as Jonah was in the whale's belly three days & nights..." [Douai- 
Rheims, NT 1582, OT 1609];

ὦσπερ γὰρ ἦν Ἰωνᾶς ἐν τῇ κοιλίᾳ  
τοῦ κήτους τρεῖς ἠμέρας καὶ τρεῖς  
νύκτας....[Greek NT, echoing the exact words used in the LXX  
Book of Jonas at 2:1; 2:2 ];

  hosper gar en Ionas en tei koiliai tou ketous treis hemeras kai  
treis nyktas...[Above transliterated];

Sicut enim fuit Jonas in ventre ceti tribus diebus et tribus  
noctibus...[Clem. Vulgate 1592].

Here, we can see that the word of our NT Greek orig. ketos has been  
rendered by hogan tanka /hog^a'N tha'Nka/.

It would be fascinating to know the Dakota words used for 'whale/ 
great fish' in the following passages also, if anybody has them at  
their fingertips :

JOB 7:12, and 41:1;

EZEKIEL 32:2;

JONAH 1:17; 2:10

Incidentally, the LXX original of both passages at JOB 7:12, & 40:20  
(numbering of verses in LXX, & Vulgate sometimes differs from KJV)  
uses a different Greek word δράκων /drakon/ dragon,which KJV  
chose to render with whale & leviathan respectively. This is another  
of those words of somewhat vague & wide application, meaning in  
Homeric & Classical Greek : snake; serpent (Autentrieth, Op.cit,  
s.v.); described by Homer as being of huge size, "coiled like a  
snake, of blood-red or dark colour, shot with changeful hues,  
dwelling in mountains, feeding on poisonous herbs, with three  
heads" (Iliad 2.200-208; 11.40; 12.201, 208) . "It appears to have  
been really the python, or boa". [LSJ, s.v.].
Aristotle in HA 8.13.3 used the word to denote a large sea-fish of  
some description : "the great weever" [LSJ].

Kind regards,

Clive.

On 25/01/2008, at 5:16 AM, Alfred W. Tüting wrote:

> (for some reason, this didn't get through)
>
> Let me add this:
>
> this is the original text that actually speaks of a "huge fish" or  
> "dag gadol"  דָּג גָּדוֹל
>
>
> וַיְמַן יְהוָה דָּג גָּדוֹל,  
> לִבְלֹעַ אֶת-יוֹנָה
> And the LORD prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah
>
> Alfred
>
> Am 24.01.2008 um 17:06 schrieb Alfred W. Tüting:
>
>> Consulting my bookshelf, here are my two cents:
>> "whale" in modern Ivrith still is "lifyathan" (lamed - vav - yud -  
>> thet - nun)
>> לויתן
>> Searching my dictionary for Biblical Hebrew for it yielded the  
>> very same word (same, yet vocalized, spelling), translated by  
>> "Riesentier Leviathan, Schlange, Krokodil".
>>
>> I'll be trying to retrieve the Hebrew original of that story  
>> telling of Jona in the whale/fish.
>>
>> Alfred
>>
>>
>> Am 24.01.2008 um 05:50 schrieb Rankin, Robert L:
>>> Not being well versed in matters theological, I may be wrong, but  
>>> I think 'great fish' more closely mirrors the original Hebrew  
>>> text.  I'll have to check into the education of the translator to  
>>> see if this is an accident or a superior translation.
>>>
>>> Bob
>>>
>>> ________________________________
>>>
>>>> As a matter of interest, in the OT story of Jonas & the Whale,  
>>>> Buechel's Bible History Stories (1924) merely uses (p.127) :  
>>>> "HOGAN TANKA" [= big fish] for the famous 'whale'.
>>>
>>> <winmail.dat>
>>
>> ____________________
>>
>> 狄雨亭 (奧龍)
>> 宋詩家選集 - ❮蝶夢痕❯
>>
>> www.fa-kuan.muc.de
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>

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