tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Jul 22 19:20:14 1996
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Re: God's name
- From: "Mark E. Shoulson" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: God's name
- Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1996 22:20:12 -0400 (EDT)
- In-reply-to: <[email protected]> (message from Roger Cheesbroon Fri, 19 Jul 1996 21:23:01 -0700)
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>Date: Fri, 19 Jul 1996 21:23:01 -0700
>From: Roger Cheesbro <[email protected]>
>All this discussion about God's name... You need to remember that there is a
>difference between god and God. <god> with a small 'g' is the word that
>pertains to any god figure. <God> with a capital 'G' is the proper name of
>the entity of christian religion.
[and thus should be transliterated ghoD, as we do with other proper
names.]
I don't think this works. "God" is not a proper noun in English; it is a
common noun used as a title, like "I got this letter from Father."
Translating that sentence, I certainly wouldn't transliterate "Father"! I
would translate it into some analogous title in the target language, or
fall back on "my father" or something if I could do no better. "God" is a
noun with its own meaning, just like "Father" is. That's why Christians
all over the world don't refer to God as "God"; some use "Dieu," some
"Bog," and so on. Not to mention the Jews of the world, who arguably are
referring to the same entity, or the Muslims, who might also be said to do
the same.
As I said once before, I sometimes wish that translators hadn't used "God"
or "The LORD" so much in their translations, but rather kept YHWH as a
proper noun, as it seems to be in the Hebrew Bible (though note that
'elohim is a common noun used as a title there too). But that opens
another separate can of worms.
Besides, "ghoD" is a really unfortunate name in Klingon, having the
meanings it has ("to stuff"? Does it also mean "prey" or is that
"?gheD"?). A Klingon missionary, I'd expect, would do exactly what
missionaries have done on Earth: translate the *word* "god" into the target
language as best he could and use the meaning associated with it. I don't
know of any language in which Christians call God "God" except for English
and other languages in which that's the word for "god."
~mark
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