"phute'okicu" and other new animals

Sat Jan 26 18:32:22 UTC 2008

Am 26.01.2008 um 01:06 schrieb Clive Bloomfield:

> (...)
>
> '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

Yes, my good old dictionary of Biblical Hebrew lists the word תן   
tha:n also (as referred to by you, below) giving it as "Wüstentier,  
Schakal" respectively. It is noted there that the word exists in  
plural form only. (BTW, it's pretty self-evident that this word  
designating that "monstrous" animal of the desert also is part of the  
compound livya-tha:n !).

In modern Hebrew תנין  sg. תנינם pl. is the designation for  
crocodile (Krokodil), but snake (Schlange) in bibl. sense.

> 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 : (...)

Okay, great job retrieving this, yet, back to our initial point,  
wasn't it just to prove that the original Biblical story of Jonah in  
the "whale" was translated correctly into Laḱota by using the word  
hoġaŋ ṫaŋka? That this term had not just been a circumscriptional  
stopgap (based on the translator's not knowing it better or the  
deficiency of the Laḱota language lacking more adequate a term for  
that "sea monster")?
BTW, I totally do share your view on Father Eugen, in special, and the  
calibre of Jesuits, in general. ;-)

My personal conclusion drawn out of this research is that the biblical  
scribes (etc.) maybe did know what a whale was, yet that they  
obviously (not unlike oyate - who had not even a chance to know the  
beast!) didn't have a word ready to name it, so they attributed the  
monster with the names they had for desert beasts etc..
Actually, the scribe of our Jonah story didn't use one of these handy  
words, conservatively speaking only of a "huge fish". IMVHO, he didn't  
even want to tell us that "the huge fish" actually was a whale (this  
constriction in the sense of specification being the work of  
"successors" in later times).

Thanks a lot for your - as ever - most thoroughly reseached  
contribution, misun, he un lila ṗilamayaye.

Alfred le miye lo.

> 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.
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