Translating Ethnonyms in Inuit Bibles

Reviewed by: La Biblia Escorial I.I.6 by Enrique-Arias, Andrés Steven N. Dworkin Enrique-Arias, Andrés, ed. La Biblia Escorial I.I.6. Transcripción y estudios. Logroño: CiLengua Fundación San Millán de la Cogolla, 2010. 98 pp +1 CDROM. ISBN 978-84-937654-6-0. A rich tradition of vernacular renderings (romanceamientos) of the Bible flourished in medieval Spain. At least a dozen different manuscripts have preserved Romance versions of the Bible, the largest number in any medieval European vernacular. All but two of these translations are based on the Hebrew Bible and thus exclude the New Testament. In some of the versions derived from the Hebrew text, the Deuterocanonical books follow the text of the Vulgate. These texts were prepared by Jews for the use of both their co-religionists, and for Christian patrons who commissioned and sponsored some of these translations. Although some may reflect earlier originals, the majority of these versions date from the fifteenth century, a time when the Church was not strictly enforcing its prohibition on private ownership of vernacular Bibles. The negative attitude of the Church in the Iberian Peninsula toward vernacular Bibles may explain in part the paucity of Romance Bibles based on the Latin Vulgate. The surviving manuscripts may be but the remnants of a much richer tradition of Romance Bibles in medieval Spain. In addition, vernacular Bible texts constitute lengthy sections of such works as the early thirteenth-century Fazienda de ultra Mar and the Alfonsine General estoria (the latter based on the Vulgate). Romance biblical fragments also turn up in several fifteenth-century texts. Three recent studies by Gemma Avenoza provide an informative description and analysis of the manuscripts that have preserved medieval Spanish Bibles. The Biblical text contained in Escorial Manuscript I.I.6 (also known as I-J-6 and E6; hereafter E6) is one of the two medieval Spanish vernacular Bibles translated directly from the Vulgate (the other being Escorial MS I.I.8 or E8) and is the oldest Castilian vernacular Bible. This copy was executed ca. 1250 and, consequently, is the longest extant pre-Alfonsine Castilian prose text. It is a treasure trove of early Castilian linguistic forms. Its 358 double-columned [End Page 291] folios contain the Old Testament starting from Proverbs, and the entire New Testament. Escorial Manuscript I.I.8 (E8) contains most of the Old Testament material missing from E6, a situation which has led some experts to suspect that both go back to a common Vulgate-based original. The Gospel of St. Matthew as transcribed in E6 was edited by Thomas Montgomery, who subsequently joined forces with Spurgeon Baldwin to publish a well-received edition of the remainder of the New Testament. Over the years various scholars have edited individual Old Testament books from E6, often in journals of difficult access or as unpublished dissertations. Enrique-Arias identifies these editions at page 16 of his Introduction to the book under review, which offers its readers the first edition of the entire Biblical text preserved in E6. Andrés Enrique-Arias is one of the leading specialists in the study of medieval vernacular Spanish Bibles. He is the creator of the website Biblia medieval (www.bibliamedieval.es), which offers, among other features, a transcription of all extant medieval Spanish Bible manuscripts as well as those portions of Biblical books reproduced in other texts, accompanied by the text of the Vulgate and the Hebrew Bible (the latter both in Hebrew script and in transliteration). Enrique-Arias has designed a parallel corpus, which allows the researcher to compare at one glance how a given Biblical passage is rendered in all the relevant Romance versions. Such a tool is invaluable to the textual critic and to the historical linguist who wishes to compare the choice of, say, orthographical and morphological variants, syntactic constructions, or lexical items. Enrique-Arias himself has authored a number of studies of Spanish morphosyntax based on the data found in the Biblia medieval corpus (e.g., Biblias romanceadas, Lingua eorum). In addition to a Prologue by Claudio García Turza and a brief Introduction by the editor, four studies accompany the transcription...

Among the many Syriac manuscripts that have come down to us are types of companion volumes known in Syriac as a ‘booklet’ (kurrāsā) of ‘terms’ (shmāhe), used as guides to the Syriac biblical versions and the Greek Fathers. Modern scholars sometimes refer to these volumes as the Syriac ‘Masora.’ The largest category of these ‘shmāhe booklets’ are large codices that constitute something akin to a shared ‘curriculum’ of excerpted biblical sample texts, in addition to an assortment of tracts. As it turns out, a central part of this ‘curriculum’ included reminders of how to read and interpret certain biblical passages. This article will present the first survey of these hundreds of glosses as they appear across every known model ‘shmāhe booklet.’ The resulting survey helps us better envision what the compilers of these intriguing volumes hoped to pass down and how their work relates to that of later biblical commentators such as Bar ʿEbroyo.

This article explores the audio recording of written Scripture as a distinct communication mode where the voice functions not merely as a vehicle of meaning but as a semiotic resource to create meaning. A social-semiotic resource, as developed by Kress and van Leeuwen, is defined by the multimodal nature of communication, integrating linguistic, sensory, and sociocultural dimensions. Bible translation often emphasizes the implementation of linguistic and literary textual analysis of the source text(s) but can benefit from including a greater focus on voice as an expression of social-semiotic identity—culturally specific yet universally significant. Voice elements like tonality, pitch, timbre, volume, and speed serve as semiotic markers in non-written texts, requiring careful consideration during preparation, review, and translation consultation. Translation teams should integrate these aspects into their work to enhance the performative quality and cultural relevance of oral and audio renditions without unduly burdening the project in a minority-language situation. There is a need to work in interdisciplinary teams to produce high-quality multimodal translations.

Hebrew Studies 37 (1996) 135 Reviews WHO'S WHO: THE OLD TESTAMENT, TOGETHER WITH THE APOCRYPHA. By Joan Comay. Pp. xxii + 398. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Paper, $15.95. This recent reprint of Joan Comay's Who's Who: The Old Testament by the Oxford University Press is a helpful addition to the reference materials available for the general public who are interested in the stories of the Old Testament and the Apocrypha. This paperback edition will surely make the biographical data of the biblical characters much more readily accessible to these readers and hence stimulate further interest in the Old Testament as well as the Apocrypha. Taking a straightforward narrative approach, the author provides a complete, handy, and easy-to-use reference to the thousands of characters in the Old Testament. Each of the entries covers biographical infonnation on each character and includes a rather complete, detailed, and comprehensive compilation of passages in the Old Testament concerning a particular character. Though most often highly controversial, the author of this Who's Who manages to provide an easily comprehensible picture of the historical, geographical , and archaeological context of each subject. Moreover, although the author does not mean to set down in her book each character as he or she existed in historical fact, she places each character in a single chronological table and thus provides a convenient, though not always convincing, time-frame for the characters of the narratives. In other words, it gives brief biographical infonnation regarding almost 3,000 characters in the Old Testament. Above all, the greatest advantages of this book are, first, its alphabetically -arranged entries which, again, provide quick and easy reference to the biblical characters listed; and second, its being fully cross-referenced at the end of each entry, enabling those interested to reference the related biblical passages. From the perspective of biblical scholarship, however, there are several shortcomings of this reference book which cannot be overlooked. While, as already noted above, the simplified compilation of the biographical data on each character will help interested persons to find the basic literary references in the Old Testament, the dates and the chronological and geographical references assigned to a particular character can be misleading or most of the time simply irrelevant. Although it brings together a comprehensive picture of a particular biblical character, it does so at the Hebrew Studies 37 (1996) 136 Reviews expense of unjustly compromising the multiple layers and traditions of a particular Old Testament text. I find the preservation of the multi-level readings the only way to retrieve the depth and richness of each biblical text and hence the reconstruction of a particular character. Furthennore. as a scholar sharing the critical perspectives of minority and feminist readings of the Old Testament. I was particularly disappointed to fmd that the entry for Miriam (p. 242). for instance. was missing her very significant role as a prophetess in Exod 15:20 and automatically assumed that she was the "unnamed" sister who approached Pharaoh's daughter in Exod 2:4, 7. Archie C. C. Lee The Chinese University ofHong Kong Shatin. New Territories BIBLICAL HEBREW AND DISCOURSE LINGUISTICS. Robert D. Bergen, ed. Pp. 560. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1994. Paper, $40.00. When linguistics and study of the Bible join. people interested in either of these disciplines benefit: the linguist is satisfied to have been handed a precisely defmed corpus to which he can apply his methodology; the serious student of the Bible is always grateful for further elucidation of the text. If this beneficial partnership needs new proof, such can be found in the book before us. It consists of edited articles based on papers presented at a seminar on the subject stated in the title. The authors, numbering almost two dozen, are either academic specialists in biblical philology or else persons actively engaged in Bible translation projects; many of them combine those two activities. There is too much interesting and valuable material in this book to present a fair summary of all the contributions; naming only some of the authors may create the wrong impression-that others are not worth mentioning. Therefore, it seems preferable just to point out the scope...