Re: Pater Noster (purely linguistically)

On Wed, Dec 01, 2004 at 11:47:05PM +0100, Henrik Theiling wrote:
>   1) Pater noster qui es in caelis.
>      Our father, which art in heaven.
>
>      - Would it be appropriate to translate 'heaven' with 'divine world'?
>      - Maybe 'divine transcendental world', but that might be redundant?
Well, the words for "heaven" in natlangs - including "heaven" itself -
all originally meant just "sky".  In fact, the reflex of cael- in many
Romance languages is the ordinary unmarked word for sky (e.g. Spanish
"cielo").  The original belief was that the gods, and later God, were
literally in the sky, and if you could only go high enough you would
meet up with them/Him.  Our modern awareness of the nature of space
beyond Earth's atmosphere led to differentiation between the concepts
of "sky" and "God's residence", and "heaven" came to be used solely for
the latter apart from poetic use.  I don't know to what extent you want
to mimic this development in your language, but it is pretty universal
among natlangs.

> And now the main problem:
>
>   2) Sanctificetur nomen tuum.
>      Hallowed be thy name.
[snip definitions of "holy"]

>        I found these quite enlightening, and I think the meaning of
>        the above line would be
>
>          optative(be.reserved.from.profane.use(thy name))
The Latin is expressing a desire, or perhaps a "third person imperative"
. . . is that what an "optative" is?

But if you use "profane", you run into question-begging, since "profane"
is pretty much defined as "the opposite of holy/sacred".  Note that in
many languages the equivalent of both the English words "holy" and
"sacred" is only one word; but that's not much help.  "Sacred" was
originally the past participle of "sacren" which meant the same thing as
modern "to consecrate" - but since that is just "to make holy/sacred",
that way lies only a circle.

-Marcos

that the -ed in "sacred" is no coincidence; it was originally a past
participle, specifically of "sacren", which means "to consecrate"


>
> Thoughts?  Corrections?  Help!
>
> Bye,
>   Henrik

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