No Traditional Catholic I know says "Noe" instead of "Noah" or "Josue" instead of "Joshua".
Here we are
yet again on
CathInfo debating words used in traditional Catholicism, in this instance names of Biblical people, without referring to the "authentical
Latin" of St. Jerome's
Vulgate Bible. I'm surprised to see Ladislaus participating [×] but not setting the members straight on this point.
So first of all, off to the Vulgate [
*]:
[ix] Hae sunt generationes Noe : Noe vir justus atque perfectus fuit in generationibus suis; cuм Deo ambulavit.
[9] These are the generations of Noe: Noe was a just and perfect man in his generations, he walked with God.
St. Jerome did
not impose a grammatical
inflection on
"Noe", i.e., he did not change its ending to signify different grammatical uses (e.g.,
genitive case, corresponding to English possessive using "of", above) [**]. Then the
Doway Testament (1609--1610) apparently just used St. Jerome's names without change. Why not? He's a saint and a doctor of the Church.
Recall that when St. Jerome performed his major editing (including retranslation) of the Latin Bible
ca. A.D. 400, he had access to
ancient manuscripts that didn't survive to modern times [†]. And he cultivated experts on Hebrew when he was out in the Holy Land. Consider that otherwise uneducated Muslims claim to have memorized their
Quran. The Roman destruction of the Temple had occurred more than 3 centuries before A.D. 400, but surviving Jєωιѕн scholars reportedly gathered in Tiberias, a Roman city near the western shore of the Sea of Galilee. I assume that even then, there were educated Jєωs who had memorized the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible with the proper 2nd-Temple pronunciations, and St. Jerome learned where to find them.
I've made my peace with the unexpected spelling of the patriarch's name with a
final ‘e’: Not as the ‘silent-e’ so common as a vowel-lengthener in English, but instead as practically the same as the modern
standard German ‘-e’ grammatical ending, loosely a clipped nonCanadian "eh?". Readers who can easily distinguish that sound from a clipped "ah!" or "uh?" (all 3 vowels being short), maybe simply haven't clipped it enough. See, e.g., a rather famous music-title in German:
"Eine Kleine Nachtmusik" ("A Little Nightmusic").
So using a Germanicized pronunciation of the "Doway" spelling "No
e" gets the reader a pronunciation practically indistinguishable from the conventional "No
ah". When considering that English is a
West Germanic language, I just can't see any reason to get uptight about the "Doway" spelling.
Realizing further that "-ah" is uncommon or nonexistent as an inflectional ending in modern German, I wonder how Martin
Luther spelled the patriarch's name in his translation of the
Vulgate into the German of his time,
hmmm?-------
Note ×: I have no reason to doubt the academic qualifications that L. has claimed for himself in
C.I. postings over the years; prudence would prevent me from arguing Biblical Greek with him. So I wish he'd elaborated on spellings in the Biblical Greek
Septuagint.
Note
*: E.g.: <
http://www.drbo.org/cgi-bin/d?b=drl&bk=1&ch=6&l=9-#x>, excerpted from <
http://www.drbo.org/drl/chapter/01006.htm>
Note **: Jerome could've imposed the
3rd-declension of
"mar·e, -is" (Eng. "sea"), but perhaps he considered its
neuter gender to be an intolerable insult to a Biblical patriarch.
Note †: Major opportunities for manuscripts not to survive Jerome might be said to begin with the ransacking of Rome by the Visigoths of Alaric I in A.D. 410, then in 455 by the Vandals of Genseric, even tho' the nominal collapse of the Western Empire was still 2 decades into the future (476). The Byzantine Emperor Heraclius reconquered Jerusalem from a Neopersian-Jєωιѕн alliance in 629. The Romans and Neopersians (Sassanids) had militarily exhausted each other, when the Islamic "Religion of Peace" hordes captured Jerusalem from Byzantine control in 638.