New Project Examines Foreign Languages Using Bible

A good friend of mine from back in our years at Nova Elementary and High School in the late 1960s to early 1970s, in years past, had his own blog, in which he would rather articulately express his own takes on various subjects...much the way I do on this one...but with his own personal viewpoint.  From time to time, though, he would write an article on some technical, arcane aspect of his career field, which was developing computer software for a major firm.  When I encountered one of these articles, I would recognize it for what it was and leave his blog until another day.  Well, as is probably the case with most of you readers, I have my own relatively esoteric areas of interest that more likely than not won't attract the interest of people at large.  But since these areas are a part of my life, and this blog is all about relating things that are of interest to me in this life, I've decided to devote some blog space to a topic that is of interest to me but possibly not to you: studying foreign languages and learning vocabulary by reading and comparing the same text in different languages.  The text I've chosen is large and easy to obtain: the Bible.  And the languages I've undertaken are Chinese, German, Spanish, and Russian...

The plan is simple: take the sermon I wrote about the previous Thursday and focus on the core Bible passage it was based on...and then write about how it is expressed in one or more of the aforementioned languages.  Let's see...last Thursday's article examined John 1:1-5,10-14.  Let's take the first section of the first verse and how it appears first in English (NIV version), then Chinese (Union version, traditional script), and finally the Chinese pinyin transliteration of that script (all thanks to the WordProject website):

In the beginning was the Word...
太初有道...
Taì chū yǒu dào...

Those diacritics you see on the Chinese pinyin sentence are tonal markers, something I've never been able to adequately master over the years. Also, each character corresponds one-to-one with each pinyin syllable.  And now I'll rearrange the two languages, using pinyin instead of the characters, to give a sense as to what the individual words and phrases mean:

in the beginning... taì chū ("extreme beginning")
was...yǒu ("there was")
the Word...dào ("the path, way")

If you read off the parenthesized English, then you get something like, but not the same, as the original English.  That's always the way it seems to be with these translations...and makes it the more interesting...

Well, that was my introduction to this new project, which I can see will consume quite a bit of my time in the future.  So don't be surprised if some day in the not-to-distant future you see one of these articles focusing on comparing different language translations of Bible passages.  My ultimate goal is to do this on a weekly basis...