Please let me know if I've posted this in the wrong board, I wasn't sure.
So... is it just that the content of the Quran is considered so sensitive to interpretation that it can be considered to be taken out of its original context (Late Antique Arabic), or is the Arabic of the time just so unique that nothing that's said in it can be reliably translated into another language?
This seems a bit absurd to me. Not at all?
Its translatable, they say that to add mystique to it
t. native arab
no language is so unique that it's in translatable. you can translate ooga booka click clock percussive languages in Africa. you can translate sign language. it's just a Muslim cope whenever someone criticizes the inerrancy of the Quran due to weird passages and nonsense. the word of God existed in God's mind before anyone ever wrote it down. this same Word which preexisted scripture was not in any particular language. it is the Divine Reason or Logos.
untranslatable***
Muslims believe the Quran can't be imitated not that it can't be translated. Ask any translator and they'll tell you that its always best to read a book in the original language and that translations are second best. When you translate from Chinese to English, the visual aspect of the hanzi end up lost. You miss out on all kinds of things. Arabic to English is a pain because the two languages have very different scripts, syntax, and morphology. English has a smaller vocabulary than Arabic and its a lot less poetic and concise and huge amounts of the Quran is rhymed prose which is rare in English. The Quran has always been notoriously difficult to translate.
Languages aren't just a bunch of name tags for abstractions and all we need to do is just switch the name tags and then we'll get translation. There are concepts in some languages that have no equivalent in others. Babylonian had only around like 5 colors, Incan Quechua didn't have words for wheel or cattle. Arabic has a ton of words with no English equivalant. Then there's the issue of making your translation something actually readable to your target audience e.g. the word "Rabb" in Arabic meant the breadwinner of a homer or someone who provides capital for a business venture or the owner of a property but its usually translated as "Lord" because it makes more sense to the average English speaker.
>English has a smaller vocab than Arabic
Not true.
>Less poetic
Subjective
>Rhymed
Irrelevant
>Rabb can mean many things
So can Lord mean the same things you mentioned
t. Arabic Native
To the native Arab speakers ITT: how do you find reading real classical Arabic texts from, let's say 700-1400? I know several non-native speakers who learned the language to work with Muslim philosophy and they say it stays difficult for many years even after you theoretically "know" the language, and I have seen word by word translations that made it seem like the original is very "dense" conceptually in a way that (say) Latin isn't. I've also read very literal translations of a few major philosophers like Avicenna and Averroes, and I do feel like the prose must be very "condensed" in the Latin original. Some authors in Latin are like that, especially in highly formalized contexts, but it's not the norm.
What do you think as native readers? How much of a jump was it from your modern dialect to classical?
Also to clarify, I am not doing that "mysticizing" of the language or implying it has special properties. I am genuinely just interested in whether it happened to be written that way, back then.
>I have seen word by word translations that made it seem like the original is very "dense" conceptually in a way that (say) Latin isn't.
Mightn't that be partially a matter of English mostly belonging to a common intellectual tradition with Latin and therefore being more likely to have single words that map decently well conceptually to Latin terms/concepts, while Arabic is from a more foreign intellectual tradition and therefore more likely to have words that don't have any straightforward English equivalent and require a multi-word explanation to fully express in English?
If you were a native French speaker, how relevant would your opinion be to a thread about Latin? Like, Classical Arabic and the modern dialects are visibly related, but it seems a stretch to call them the same language.
>Like, Classical Arabic and the modern dialects are visibly related, but it seems a stretch to call them the same language.
This is what the entire Arab world does.
The only reason MSA exists is so that they can call the various Arab languages "Arabic" and project some superficial unity linked back to the time of the Caliphate.
>but it seems a stretch to call them the same language
They are. Its comprehensible to me and others, the writing isn't as esoteric and difficult as you imagine.
See the above. I just downloaded metaphysics of healing in Arabic, reporting back in a few
Yeah, totally comprehensible as expected. Also void of interest to me
>Averroes
Same as Avicenna
>They are. Its comprehensible to me and others, the writing isn't as esoteric and difficult as you imagine.
But to what extent is that because you've learned Classical Arabic as, effectively, a second language? If someone grew up without any exposure to Classical Arabic, only dialect, how much Classical would they understand? From what I've heard, when that happens (e.g. among diaspora) they often have difficulty understanding it.
>If someone grew up without any exposure to Classical Arabic, only dialect, how much Classical would they understand?
Depends on the dialect but I assume they'd understand a good portion minus a few odd words
The true barrier for me while reading the metaphysics of healing was the foreign style, you wouldn't encounter such prose today (not saying it was impressive, but people generally type as if they are speaking now, or maybe because I haven't read much Arabic before)
>bunch of name tags
not what I'm arguing bro. I'm saying that you can (and we do) translate any language. Arabic is no exception.
>When you translate from Chinese to English, the visual aspect of the hanzi end up lost.
The same holds if you read it aloud, but surely hearing a Chinese book out loud is a much closer approach to the original text than reading an English translation? Fundamentally, scripts are just clothing, not the essence of a language. If you wrote English in Cyrillic, it would still be English.
>the word of God existed in God's mind before anyone ever wrote it down. this same Word which preexisted scripture was not in any particular language. it is the Divine Reason or Logos
Explain how I'm wrong then, you absolute homosexual. Read chapter one of John's Gospel.
Linguist and polyglot here. It's a cope - beware of religious people making linguistic claims - especially of Arabic, Tamil, Sanskrit, Hebrew, and to a lesser extent, Tibetan, Classical Chinese, Avestan, etc. 99.4% of the time, it's bullshit, and I say this as a deep appreciator of comparative theology.
Same guy. I'll further break it down - unless one can prove that the children natively acquiring this language were somehow biologically and neurologically wired differently from other human speakers, your claim about some sort of deep untranslatability or inherent incomprehensibility must be bullshit.
Was this language natively acquired? Yes? OK, by human children? Yes? Then it's a regular language. Unique, yes, but not utterly different in its basic grammar.
>why is x untranslateable
The answer is always that the mentality of the people (and by extension their biology) was extremely alien to the recipient language. Don't listen to academic blank slate theorist morons like who don't realise that children born contemporarily in neighbouring countries are "biologically and neurologically wired differently" let alone desert people from 1500 years ago.
If it's a matter of biology then English should make no sense to me, whose ancestors were mostly Irish. (That's not to deny the possibility of neurological/psychological differences between human populations, but it's on the order of statistical aggregate-level tweaks to variables in the same basic system, not entire complex adaptations, which are necessarily universal within a sexually reproducing population.)
No, that doesn't follow. I never said it's unlearnable. My assertion was that human groups construct languages and cultures - at least in their nascent stages - in accordance with genetic expression. You spoke English from a young age and as such know it inside out. I'm not saying that can't be done with any other language (I believe it can), but that's not what *translation* is. However well you know English, it does NOT mean you can translate it perfectly to even a close language like German, let alone Swahili, which is what many in this thread are implying.
If it's based on genes then shouldn't I speak English weird since I'm not genetically English mostly?
Anyone can learn any language or anything coherent. But I would say if you were to construct a language from scratch, and assuming you were not imprinted upon by Anglo culture at all whatsoever, then you would construct a relatively different language. But even that is divorced from reality because languages aren't individually *constructed* but arise directly from a people interacting with their environment, including friends and adversaries, in a Viconian sense. Hence not everything is translateable.
I understand not everything is translatable, I just don't quite get how genetics comes into it.
Not to get too metaphysical but there is always an element of arbitrariness and lack of deliberation to the individual in any set that doesn't exist at the level of the whole. But every whole is also an element in a larger set.
Other than religious reasons - the main thing is that Quran is really meant to be spoken aloud, that’s what makes it so special, it is truly beautiful when recited more so than most works in English. Everyone should be able to admit that even if you hate Islam.
I don’t think it sounds particularly beautiful. Not that it sounds bad, but it’s just long drawn out sylables uttered in a vaguely singsong way. To mea, propely recited Shakespeare sounds far better, which is of course subjective. Of course, the fact that I can understand Shakespeare is a big plus - I’ve never umderstood why some people shit on their own language, but when contronted with something in foreignese, they imbue it with some mystical power.
The Quran is filled with double meanings and its rhyme schemes keep changing. Muslims think that these two qualities make the Quran the absolute best text to ever be written. The translations transfer the meaning of the text, but not its literary value, which is the only miracle left for Muslims after the death of Mohammed.
Also, Allah spoke every word in the Quran in Arabic.
It is also riddled with contradictions, tiresome repetitions, spelling errors, copy-paste segments from other texts, no chronology or context and the problem of multiple variants even after Uthman. The Sana'a Manuscript is the oldest quranic manuscript and it differs to an alarming degree to what Muslims read today.
holy gets
>What is it about Late Antique Arabic that makes it so untranslateable?
Nothing. It's perfectly translateable. Muslims just hate when you do it because it exposes their religion to be a bloody, superstitious, 10th century barbarism it truly is.
No language can be fully and completely translated to another language, especially not one that existed in a very different time and cultural context. But it's not particularly more inherently untranslatable than any other.