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Author Topic: Preferred way of rendering Old Testament names (Douay vs post-V2 usage)?  (Read 403 times)

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Offline SimpleMan

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As anyone knows who has more than a passing acquaintance with the Douay Old Testament, and vernacular readings in the Traditional Latin Mass, many of the Hebrew names in the Old Testament, and even the names of books of the Bible, appear differently than people outside of traditional Catholicism are used to seeing them.  Examples (modern usage - traditional Catholic usage):

Noah - Noe
Joshua - Josue
Haggai - Aggeus

Chronicles - Paralipomenon
Revelation - Apocalypse

Which is preferred in TradCath circles, and which one do you use?  I do not come from a lifelong TradCath background, and I do have to confess that the Douay-derived names sound kind of "weird".  Are they used very much anymore?


Offline Stanley N

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  • Chronicles - Paralipomenon
    Revelation - Apocalypse
    The latter two come from the Greek names for these books. They are the norm in my experience with Western trads as well as Eastern Catholics.

    I think non-trad Westerns would still use or at least recognize "Apocalypse".

    The Greek names were used in the Confraternity version, which was used in most US Catholic schools as late as the 1960s.


    Offline TKGS

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  • I think the preferred rendering in Traditional circles would be the traditional rendering.

    I do not remember ever hearing a traditional priest pronounce the terms using the modern rendering.  The new spellings/pronunciations were adopted in the English speaking, post Vatican 2 world for ecuмenical reasons as they are how the the Protestants use them in the King James Bible.  

    While both renderings are valid, I think that using the traditional rendering can be considered to be "political" usage--it identifies the speaker or writer as a traditional Catholic while use of the new spellings and pronunciations identify the speaker or writer as a Novus Ordo Catholic or a Protestant.

    This is not dissimilar to the reason why traditional Catholics call the Paraclete the Holy Ghost while Novus Ordo Catholics and Protestants refer to Him as the Holy Spirit.

    In any event, the reason people are considered traditional Catholics is because they have not changed their practices and beliefs from what was the practice and belief before Vatican 2.  So why should they adopt new practices in regards to how they spell and pronounce these terms?

    Offline Miseremini

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  • Here on CI most people use Revelation  instead of  Apocalypse.  In this week's SSPX bulletin the last book was referred to as Revelation.
    Sad to see how much the young people have absorbed.  :'(
    "Let God arise, and let His enemies be scattered: and them that hate Him flee from before His Holy Face"  Psalm 67:2[/b]


    Offline SimpleMan

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  • Here on CI most people use Revelation  instead of  Apocalypse.  In this week's SSPX bulletin the last book was referred to as Revelation.
    Sad to see how much the young people have absorbed.  :'(
    There is nothing intrinsically evil about the Protestant/post-V2 Catholic rendering of these names.  If you say "Aggeus" or "Paralipomenon", nobody outside of TradCath circles is going to understand what in the world you are talking about.  (However, the name "Josue" is a fairly common Hispanic given name.)
    The old Latinate names have a venerable history of usage, but I think this is one time, that it wouldn't hurt us to adopt the usages that most people are familiar with.
    As a side note, many Protestants and evangelicals say "Holy Ghost".  I say HG in prayer, but in theological discussion, I will use either one, HG or HS, interchangeably.  HG is consistently Germanic, whereas HS is a mash-up of Germanic and Latinate.


    Offline Miseremini

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  • There is nothing intrinsically evil about the Protestant/post-V2 Catholic rendering of these names.  If you say "Aggeus" or "Paralipomenon", nobody outside of TradCath circles is going to understand what in the world you are talking about.  (However, the name "Josue" is a fairly common Hispanic given name.)
    The old Latinate names have a venerable history of usage, but I think this is one time, that it wouldn't hurt us to adopt the usages that most people are familiar with.
    As a side note, many Protestants and evangelicals say "Holy Ghost".  I say HG in prayer, but in theological discussion, I will use either one, HG or HS, interchangeably.  HG is consistently Germanic, whereas HS is a mash-up of Germanic and Latinate.
    I never implied nor meant to imply there was anything evil about it.  I was just lamenting the slow chipping away of tradition.  Of course if we don't continue to speak traditionally, people will not be familiar with it and won't know what we're talking about.  Keeping traditional speech affords us the opportunity to educate those that don't understand.   Chip by chip it gets lost.
    "Let God arise, and let His enemies be scattered: and them that hate Him flee from before His Holy Face"  Psalm 67:2[/b]


    Offline SimpleMan

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  • I never implied nor meant to imply there was anything evil about it.  I was just lamenting the slow chipping away of tradition.  Of course if we don't continue to speak traditionally, people will not be familiar with it and won't know what we're talking about.  Keeping traditional speech affords us the opportunity to educate those that don't understand.   Chip by chip it gets lost.
    I didn't say you did, sorry for any misunderstanding.  I was simply trying to clarify the discussion, and to point out that adopting the Protestant terminology, distasteful though it may be on one level, does no per se violence to Catholic tradition.  I lean towards using traditional terminology (e.g., Extreme Unction, "assist at" Mass, and so on) but it feels kind of bizarre to talk about Abdias, Aggeus, Nabuchodonosar, and so on.

    Offline Ladislaus

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  • As anyone knows who has more than a passing acquaintance with the Douay Old Testament, and vernacular readings in the Traditional Latin Mass, many of the Hebrew names in the Old Testament, and even the names of books of the Bible, appear differently than people outside of traditional Catholicism are used to seeing them.  Examples (modern usage - traditional Catholic usage):

    Noah - Noe
    Joshua - Josue
    Haggai - Aggeus

    Chronicles - Paralipomenon
    Revelation - Apocalypse

    Which is preferred in TradCath circles, and which one do you use?  I do not come from a lifelong TradCath background, and I do have to confess that the Douay-derived names sound kind of "weird".  Are they used very much anymore?

    No Traditional Catholic I know says "Noe" instead of "Noah" or "Josue" instead of "Joshua".  Basically, the Hebrew had an "ah" at the end, but there's no real way to translate that into Greek ... so the Greek (Septuagint translation) replaced it with a long a or ETA.  But ETA later turned into being read more like a long e.  Even in the English, the final "h" is silent.  So, for instance, "Noah" is pronounced "Noa", because it's hard to put an H at the end.  In Hebrew, "H" was more of a soft breath or a breathing rather than a real letter.


    Offline AlligatorDicax

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  • 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 [*]:
    Quote from: Genesis 6:9

    [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:
    Quote from: Mozart

    "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik" ("A Little Nightmusic").

    So using a Germanicized pronunciation of the "Doway" spelling "Noe" gets the reader a pronunciation practically indistinguishable from the conventional "Noah".  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.

    Offline Ladislaus

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  • I'm not sure what you're arguing with me about.  St. Jerome consulted both the Greek and the Hebrew when rendering into Latin.  So I was explaining why I believe neither he nor the Greeks transliterate the Hebrew name into Latin with a final H (whether it's a mere breathing or a hard breathing, a "ch" like in "Bach").  I believe that the letter was originally just a soft breathing but turned by modern Jєωs into that hard "ch" sound.  In the Greek (Septuagint), there's no way to render a breathing anywhere other than at the beginning of a word that starts with a vowel.  If it actually had been pronounced the way modern Jєωs pronounce it, the Greeks could have transliterated it with a "chi" at the end.

    Yes, it was common to apply no inflection to words transliterated from another language, so Noe is not inflected.