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I wonder why it is that, over time, a lot of words take on a meaning that is pretty much the opposite of their original meaning. 

two of my favourite examples are 'fantastic' and 'nice'. 'fantastic', like the word 'fantasy', used to denote something that isn't true - a product of the imagination. So, it's actually an insult when something good happens or someone does something good and you say, that's fantastic! You're actually saying, that's ridiculous - it couldn't possibly be true. According to the online etymological dictionary, 'fantastic' began to be used in its new sense from 1938. 

'nice' has changed even more than I thought. I knew that, a couple of hundred years ago or more, it related to precision and intellectual penetration. Like, a nice point or argument would be one that uses some kind of fine distinction to good effect. Now, 'nice' is quite a vague term of praise or approval. but there's way more, as I found out from the online etymological dictionary ￫￫ 

definitions of 'nice':

12th century ||| "careless, clumsy; weak; poor, needy; simple, stupid, silly, foolish," 

Late 14th century ||| "fussy, fastidious"

1400 ||| "dainty, delicate"

1500s ||| "precise, careful" (this is the one I mentioned)

1769 ||| "agreeable, delightful" 

1830 ||| "kind, thoughtful" 

Another interesting one that I found when I was looking up 'nice' is 'pretty' - In old English it meant cunning and skilful. Then, by 1400, it meant 'manly and gallant' (amazing, eh?), which is kind of the opposite of what it means now. 

This relates in an interesting way to issues of translation. I've been thinking and researching a lot lately about Bible translation, and I've been adding to my collection of different translations and reading and comparing them. 

There are two general approaches to translating the Bible from the original Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek into English or other languages: formal equivalence or 'word for word' translation, which prioritises the individual words and grammatical structures, and dynamic equivalence or 'thought for thought' translation, which focuses more on the overall meaning. No translation is fully one or the other. It's like a spectrum. At the very far extreme of 'thought for thought', the edition ceases to be a translation and becomes a paraphrase. 

For purposes of study and teaching, there's no doubt (I think) that it's better to use a translation that sits more on the 'word for word' side of the spectrum. But then, the examples I gave above about how the meaning of words changes so drastically over time, represents a good argument for the use of translations that are more on the dynamic equivalence side of the spectrum because a strongly literal translation could actually convey the opposite meaning of what was originally intended. There's also idiom to take into account. An example I heard is, imagine if I said or wrote, 'it's raining cats and dogs' (meaning that it's raining heavily). In 200 years, that idiom may have fallen out of fashion, so someone who translated my statement in a literal way is going to be saying that dogs and cats were falling from the sky, which has nothing at all to do with the meaning of the original statement. So, I like the idea of using a variety of translations of the Bible. 

what's surprising and interesting to me as a student of literature in general as well as the Bible, is the way that, despite the inherent instability of language, meaning is communicated very effectively through written texts. The world of the past, including its use of language, is, in so many ways, a foreign place - a different place - to the modern world. And yet, the profoundest of meanings is communicated between those different worlds. 

It's something truly extraordinary - the way that great literature can speak to us so personally. 

John Macarthur said something interesting in a youtube video I watched recently - something that relates to the debate about critical theory, post-modernism, cultural marxism, social justice - all that stuff. I've been really interested in a lot of what John Macarthur has been saying lately. He strongly believes in just using one translation of the Bible for everything - reading, writing, studying, preaching, teaching, counselling - and he uses the NASB (New American Standard Bible), which is very much on the 'word for word' side of the spectrum. He made a really good point that, as a minister and a leader in the church, but also just as a Christian, he wants the language of the Bible to be his language and he wants it to be consistent. That's why, as he is assured that the NASB is a very good translation, he wants to use it for everything. He wants to really get to know it and make it part of him and using a single translation better facilitates that kind of deep engagement than reading from lots of different versions.  But the interesting thing that he said was that he, and others in his circles, rejected the Revised Standard Version (RSV) and Today's New International Version (TNIV) because those translations had been influenced by liberal ideology. I have no idea what he means here about the RSV, but I have some idea about what he means with the TNIV, and it's actually a feature that I really like. I actually prefer the TNIV to the NIV because of this change. There are probably other changes that John Macarthur has in mind, but the one I'm aware of is that they've made the Bible less patriarchal. Like, for example, it's common in the Bible, when someone is addressing a group, to just refer to the males in the group....so, someone will say or write something like 'brothers, don't worship idols'. It's understood that women are being addressed as well, because the writer or speaker will be addressing a church or other group, but older translations just translate it as 'brothers.....'. But the TNIV will translate that as 'brothers and sisters'. So, to me, that's a very good example of dynamic equivalence. It was culturally appropriate to address groups by just referring to the males, at the time when the Bible was written, but it's no longer appropriate. What worries John Macarthur though is that this could be a slippery slope.....we start adjusting the Bible more and more to suit our culture and we end up losing the rich and central message of the Bible. The way John Macarthur, very eloquently, put it is that we ought to be adjusting ourselves and our culture to suit the Bible - because of its authority as God's word - rather than adjusting the Bible to suit our culture. 

And it's true, I think, that we need to be careful with this. Like, for example, both Peter and Paul, in their letters in the New Testament, talked about braided hair as being something unseemly and worldly. By the standards of modern culture that makes no sense. If anything, braided hair is conservative. But when we read those passages, we realise that and we do a kind of mental dynamic equivalence translation. We figure out what they are getting at by reading the whole sentence and the whole paragraph. It's not hard to do that. 

.....I was going to say that we wouldn't want Bible translators to be thinking, OK,what is the modern equivalent of braided hair? and then putting that in the passage, but when I looked at a couple of the Bibles that are more on the side of dynamic equivalence (the NIV and NLT), that is kind of what they do. They talk about not having elaborate hairstyles (NIV) or not 'fixing' your hair as a way of attracting attention. (NLT) The idea is that the kind of attractiveness we should aspire to is attractiveness of the soul and the character. The translations that are more on the literal/ formal equivalence side, like the New English Translation (NET Bible) and the NASB still have 'braided hair'. Interestingly, out of all of those translations, the NET Bible is the most recent - it came out in 2005 - but it's because it's a more literal translation that it has the 'older' wording. 

To be honest, my personal preference is definitely for the more literal translations. The text just seems richer and more meaningful. It allows for a deeper engagement and study. 

These translation issues remind me of the dilemma faced when editing the juvenilia of famous authors. A lot of the charm of the original text - a lot of its character and verve - comes from roughness of style within which the treasure of precocious talent resides. So, the question is always how much you should 'correct' the text to make it readable and worthy of publication.