Indo-European linguistics and classical philology
M. G. Seleznev The most famous word in the Septuagint (pp. 811–823)
Author
M. G. Seleznev (The Institute of Oriental and Classical Studies, Russian State University for the Humanities)
Pages\n 811–823
Summary\n
The article deals with the “most famous word in the Septuagint” (J. Barr) – παρθένος translating Hebrew עַלְמָה in Isaiah 7:14. The author concurs with those who suggest that the semantic difference between the two words was greatly exaggerated in the two thousand years dispute between Jews and Christians. A model of lexical analysis based on the Prototype theory (Eleanor Rosch and others) is suggested to be more appropriate for studying semantic relationship between an original text and its translation than the traditional one. It is claimed that the prototypical meanings of the words παρθένος and עַלְמָה, as far as we can judge from our corpora, almost coincide. Using the Greek Pentateuch as a kind of “Hebrew-Greek dictionary” the translator of Isaiah had to choose between two possible translations for the Hebrew עַלְמָה: παρθένος and νεᾶνις. The factors that might affect his choice are investigated. Probably, the word νεᾶνις was rejected because of its associations with the concept ‘servant’. The choice of παρθένος may have influenced the rendering of the Hebrew tenses by the Greek in Isaiah 7: 14.
Keywords\n
The Bible, the Septuagint, the Hebrew language, the Greek language, translation, Isaiah, the Gospel of Matthias.
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