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[-] WoodScientist@lemmy.world 19 points 15 hours ago

Reminds me of a story an old friend of mine loved to tell.

In her undergrad, she majored in classics and archaeology. One summer she was working at a dig on the island of Cyprus. One day she needed to go into town for some supplies. She walks into the store, and suddenly she realizes. "Fuck. I don't speak a word of modern Greek. How am I going to talk to the shopkeeper in this tiny town in rural Cyprus?"

She decides to just do the best she can, and she tries to talk to him in the only Greek she knows...Ancient Greek.

The shopkeeper gets befuddled, then looks her dead in the eye and says, in English, "lady, no one has talked like that here in 2000 years!"

[-] TheBlue22@lemmy.blahaj.zone 31 points 21 hours ago

Ah the agenda of checks notes not adding sexist remarks not included in the original text. What an awful agenda that is.

[-] raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world 6 points 16 hours ago

Shawn is a moron.

[-] ytg@sopuli.xyz 16 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago)

Does anyone have a link to her actual findings? I tend to be skeptical of headlines like this.

Also, the first woman? Props to her but I’m quite surprised no one else has done that

[-] antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 15 hours ago

Also, the first woman? Props to her but I’m quite surprised no one else has done that

Yeah, it's indeed false. I didn't even research it actively, but Wilson on her Twitter profile mentioned an Italian translator who translated Homer years before Wilson.

(To be sure, I just checked Italian Wikipedia. It was Giovanna Bemporad, her translation was published in 1970.)

[-] WoahWoah@lemmy.world 5 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

(To be sure, I just checked Italian Wikipedia. It was Giovanna Bemporad, her translation was published in 1970.)

Yes, which she translated into Italian... and the very first paragraph of the article linked in this thread indeed notes Wilson is the first woman to translate it into English, just as the Tweet indicates...

Are you a bot? Or just lazy?

[-] antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 14 hours ago

Are you a bot? Or just lazy?

I am a bot. Beep boop.

[-] WoahWoah@lemmy.world 4 points 14 hours ago

Not the first woman. The first woman to translate it into English, which is still surprising.

[-] nailbar@sopuli.xyz 9 points 21 hours ago

Dunno if she ever published her findings as such, but here's an interview where she talks about it:

https://chireviewofbooks.com/2018/01/16/how-emily-wilson-translated-the-odyssey/

[-] bricklove@midwest.social 47 points 1 day ago

When you're used to seeing the word classist it takes a second to remember a classicist isn't someone who is prejudiced against ancient Greeks and Romans.

[-] Duamerthrax@lemmy.world 2 points 15 hours ago

Even if I don't know what a "classicist", I wouldn't be injecting my two cents into a conversation like this.

[-] Honytawk@lemmy.zip 9 points 1 day ago

They are prejudiced against the working class instead?

[-] prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 points 21 hours ago

No, they despise classic literature.

[-] leisesprecher@feddit.org 92 points 1 day ago

As I recently saw in a video about bible translations: Greek used (uses?) generic masculine forms for plurals. So a mixed group of stewarts and stewardesses would be called "these stewarts". If there's no context added, it's impossible to tell whether the group was actually all male or not.

[-] Capricorn_Geriatric@lemmy.world 83 points 1 day ago

I think that's how a large part of European languages still work.

yup, german for example (and i believe all languages that are closely connected to it) assigns gender per articles: der is the masculinum, die for the femininum and das for the neutrum nominative singular, and just "die" for all nominative plural forms. Since the biological and linguistic gender are conflated in ungendered language, it runs into the same issues as the stewards above: everyone except the males become invisible. Also, in spoken language there is the tendency to use just the singular m. form for many professions: "Ich ging zum Arzt" - "I went to the doctor(m)" is used even if the doctor is a woman (which would be "Ich ging zur Ärztin")

The first form is to just adress both genders: "Die Ärzte und Ärztinnen" translates to "the doctors(m) and doctors(f)". In this form you have still the issue that you name one gender first, which is always the male form - some say this is still discriminatory, and there is no way to adress any other gender.

The second form is the "Binnen-I" to mark that the word can mean both genders: instead of "die Ärzte", "die ÄrztInnen" is used. Some say that it makes stuff harder to read and looks ugly, but in my experience you get used to it quickly. A derivative of this form which has become the defacto standard (and in my opinion, the most preferable one) is the "Gendersternchen" ("Gender Starlet"): "Ärzt*innen" is inclusive of all genders.

And then you can try to avoid gendered forms altogether: "Personen mit medizinischer Ausbildung" (People with medical training) avoids using any gendered words at all. As you can see, it can get quite a mouthful in spoken language, and it is very formal, but i quite like it in written language - it's a bit more verbose, but flows nicely when reading.

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[-] TheEighthDoctor@lemmy.world 27 points 1 day ago
[-] leisesprecher@feddit.org 35 points 1 day ago

In many aspects English doesn't distinguish between genders at all.

I chose the words above specifically because they are gendered. I'm not a native speaker, but as far as I know, teacher, butcher, officer, warrior, president, welder, etc. can each mean male or female. There's maybe a connotation, but the words are not gendered. English also has no concept of a grammatical gender. Articles, adjectives, etc. are gendered in most European languages.

[-] Aqarius@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago

English absolutely has grammatical gender, it just defaults to "male" so much people forget there's other options. For example, "teacheress" is a real word, it's just so archaic that the male word now means both, same with how "you" is both singular and plural.

[-] rottingleaf@lemmy.world 5 points 21 hours ago

Having some feminitives in lexicon is not the same as having grammatical gender. I mean, is having a word for werewolf the same as having a "wolf" gender?

[-] Aqarius@lemmy.world 1 points 20 hours ago

"Some feminitives" is disingenuous. It's an Indo-European language, it shares the structure of other IE languages, in some cases pared down and/or in disuse, but they're still there, same as vestigial base-12 counting.

I don't get why people are so upset about the concept of grammatical gender, though. It's gramatical, it's not actual gender - original division in PIE was "animate" and "inanimate". Hell, I vaguely remember a conlang that had separate genders for terrestrial and aquatic animals, so you could absolutely make one that has a gender for "wolf".

[-] rottingleaf@lemmy.world 4 points 17 hours ago

I'm not talking about that, frankly. Just that grammatical gender means usually its own inflections for cases, for adjectives, for verbs. At least some of those.

[-] Aqarius@lemmy.world 1 points 3 hours ago

Fair point. My point would be that English doesn't really inflect words at all, but when it does, namely pronouns, it has both cases and genders.

For comparison, in German, cases don't change nouns either (except some genitives - kinda like English, now that i think about it), they instead affect articles, and even then the nominative and accusative case are identical, except for masculine singular nouns, and first and second person pronouns. So, if n. and f. nouns dominate, you could make the case that German doesn't have an acc. case, and then make a carveout for m. noun "outliers". Except step into first and second person, and acc. pops back out, meaning it was always there, even for f. and n.

[-] rottingleaf@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago

OK, I agree with the argument, but one can call that a rudiment - same as for Russian some people say it has not 6, but 7 cases. That is, a vocative case (which archaic Russian speech would have, Belorussian and Ukrainian have without doubt, but standard Russian does not formally). It's used when calling someone by name, like "Вась, Петь, Миш, Маш".

Well, it's never clear cut with languages

[-] Aqarius@lemmy.world 1 points 38 minutes ago
[-] AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I mean if you want to go that far, there's an argument to be made that the gendered terms wifman, werman, man, woman, and men were all simplified, to the gender neutral term of man and the feminine specific term of woman. We seem to have gone back and forth linguistically.

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[-] leisesprecher@feddit.org 7 points 1 day ago

Take "The has a yellow ". Which gender do these nouns have? In German, I could tell you. Both articles and the adjective have a gender.

Of course, you can use gendered nouns, but only a very small minority of nouns actually have female forms.

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[-] idiomaddict@lemmy.world 108 points 1 day ago

But to answer your question, yes. If an unbiased translation is impossible (which it is), the solution is to have versions with as many contradictory biases as possible, so they hopefully cancel each other out.

[-] dohpaz42@lemmy.world 91 points 1 day ago

Christianity enters the chat…

[-] Cruxifux@feddit.nl 19 points 1 day ago

This reply has only upvotes and I still think it’s underrated.

[-] Maggoty@lemmy.world 10 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Obviously a classicist is someone who studies how the working class can overthrow their divinely mandated white men overlords.

Right? No other possible thing it could mean.

Nothing else. Nothing at all.

[-] P4ulin_Kbana@lemmy.eco.br 26 points 1 day ago

Where can I find a unbiased translation?

[-] Jake_Farm@sopuli.xyz 34 points 1 day ago

Classicist sounds hyper specific to classical Greece.

[-] PugJesus@lemmy.world 42 points 1 day ago

Classicism can be broadly applied to Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, because of how often the sources intermingle (with many older Greek sources transmitted through Roman copies, and many Roman sources themselves written in Greek), but there's usually an element of specialization in one or the other for any given classicist.

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[-] Katana314@lemmy.world 15 points 1 day ago

For a while, I would get YouTube recommendations with “Translators DID IT again - when do they learn???” videos highlighting what they viewed as horrendously biased censorship in translation.

Every once in a while, I give these idiots a minute of my attention and by their own data they look stupid. Whatever inaccuracy they thought was there pales in comparison to getting the writing to flow well in English.

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this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2024
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