Reflections of a language nerd

It's been a while since I formally learnt another language. In fact it was 11 years ago that I studied Latin in my third year of university. Opto, optas, optat, optamus, optatis, optant, and all that.

Now I'm studying Greek - the Greek used in the New Testament - as part of a theological degree. I wasn't sure how I'd go learning Greek, after all I'm 10 years older than I was last time I had to study language and do tests and exams. I've learnt bits of other languages since then (Dutch, Swahili, Luganda) but only piecemeal and through immersion, which is a different kind of learning.

So I've been pleasantly surprised that it's all coming back to me - learning paradigms and vocabulary, and translating sentences that don't always seem to make much sense. Thankfully, many of the grammatical concepts I learnt in Latin (such as noun declensions, noun cases and verb paradigms) carry over into Greek, so I didn't have to start cold as some of my classmates did. Of course, being a linguist doesn't hurt either! Now that we are learning more vocab and more structures, the sentences we have to translate start to be more meaningful and some are even recognisable as particular verses from the Bible.

My understanding of Greek, which is so far limited but growing, is also opening up to me new perspectives on translation of the Bible. I'm very thankful for the hundreds, if not thousands, of years of scholarship on biblical Greek and the careful translation work that has been done over past centuries to give us very good and meaningful translations of the Bible in English as well as many other languages.

The translations we have in English are really very transparent, with any uncertainties or ambiguities footnoted in most versions. So there need be no concern about the reliability of the translation. It is not to be taken for granted that we have the word of God, the Author of Life itself, in a form ordinary people can read and understand for themselves. This is especially so when there are still hundreds of languages around the world that have no translation of the Bible yet. Maybe something I can help with in the future...