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Hamilton also revised the word order of the original text to conform to the word order of modern languages, overcoming perhaps the greatest difficulty for moder
by adrianratnapala 10y ago
Hamilton also revised the word order of the original text to conform to the word order of modern languages, overcoming perhaps the greatest difficulty for modern students of classics.
Well now that's just silly.
It gives you have a book written in English, with some incorrect, or at best stilted, Greek written above it. OK can you with vocab -- if you don't fall into just reading the English.
Surely it is better to have word-by-word English transliterations as cribs for an untampered Greek sentence.
- jhbadger 10y agoThe idea is that you would graduate to full unaltered Greek after mastering the easier more natural word ordering, much as the point of learning to ride a bicycle with training wheels is to graduate to leaving them off.
- vorg 10y agoYou'd need two editions of the translation, the training one and the unaltered, which seems like wasted effort when having one translation with Yoda-style English would be adequate for both groups of readers. It's easy enough for a native English speaker to read a jumbled sentence when it has enough punctuation. Your sentence above, for example, could be "The easier ordering of words, more naturale; master them so after, graduate, the idea is, you would to Greek, unaltered and full -- (just as) learn-ride a bicycle with wheels-training, then graduate to no-wheels, is the point" if that's the word order of the original language. It would also cause the reader to think in the word order of the translated language, to discern its thematic structure as well as its semantic structure.