"phute'okicu" and other new animals

[shokooh Ingham]

Interesting about the tinniin word.  Nowadays in general usage in Arabic it is used for  'dragon'.
Bruce

Clive Bloomfield <cbloom at ozemail.com.au> wrote:   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 : Â 


'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 ×Ö¶×ªÖ¾×”Ö·×ªÖ¼Ö·× Ö¼Ö´×™× Ö´Ö–× 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]."Â 


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]Â 


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. Â 
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 κήτοÏ
ς 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-×™×•Ö¹× Ö¸×”
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)Â 
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. Â 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'.

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