This word means what, exactly?

[JCA]

It's sort of been bothering me for a while, and I wanted to get it off my chest, and see if I can get a good answer for it.

What "it" is, is that I am not sure how we get to say that we uunderstand the meanings of some of the words in the Bible, almost 2000 years after; and in some cases much older.

As an example of how quickly word meanings can change depending on societal issues, I would like to use the word "gay". I don't want a homosexual discussion.. this is purely about word transitions..

Here is what people see today when looking the word up in dictionaries:

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=gay

gay
adj. gay·er, gay·est

1) Of, relating to, or having a sexual orientation to persons of the same sex.
2) Showing or characterized by cheerfulness and lighthearted excitement; merry.
3) Bright or lively, especially in color: a gay, sunny room.
4) Given to social pleasures.
5) Dissolute; licentious.

n.
1) A person whose sexual orientation is to persons of the same sex.
2) A man whose sexual orientation is to men: an alliance of gays and lesbians.

[Middle English gai, lighthearted, brightly colored, from Old French, possibly of Germanic origin.]

gayness n.

Usage Note: The word gay is now standard in its use to refer to homosexuals, in large part because it is the term that most gay people prefer in referring to themselves. Gay is distinguished from homosexual primarily by the emphasis it places on the cultural and social aspects of homosexuality as opposed to sexual practice. Many writers reserve gay for males, but the word is also used to refer to both sexes; when the intended meaning is not clear in the context, the phrase gay and lesbian may be used. Like the other names of social groups derived from adjectives (for example, Black), gay may be regarded as offensive when used as a noun to refer to particular individuals, as in There were two gays on the panel; here phrasing such as gay members should be used instead. But there is no objection to the use of the noun in the plural to refer collectively either to gay men or to gay men and lesbians, so long as it is clear whether men alone or both men and women are being discussed. See Usage Note at homosexual.

Source: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition - Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.


Please notice how in just under 40 years, the major connotation of this word has changed.. drastically. I would suspect that in another 40 years, the memory that 'gay' also meant a cheerful disposition, will also be gone. How well documented do you think such changes are today? How many people will remember? Now put that into context of 3000 years ago, or 2000, or even 1500..

How do we know, NOW, that we are making better translations, when we have no 'real' way to verify what a word could possibly have meant to everyone, so long ago?? No matter how many copies of what original texts we have, we still can't be sure.. can we?


What do you think?


Love and Peace

:jca:

[Bib Lit Major]

Please notice how in just under 40 years, the major connotation of this word has changed.. drastically. I would suspect that in another 40 years, the memory that 'gay' also meant a cheerful disposition, will also be gone. How well documented do you think such changes are today? How many people will remember? Now put that into context of 3000 years ago, or 2000, or even 1500..

How do we know, NOW, that we are making better translations, when we have no 'real' way to verify what a word could possibly have meant to everyone, so long ago?? No matter how many copies of what original texts we have, we still can't be sure.. can we?


What do you think?

We know that the meaning of "gay" has had a shift in nuances because we observed its usage change from merely being "happy" or "merry" to being used synonymously with "homosexual" and it becoming a term people generally avoid when referring to each other.

This gets down to the philosophy behind semantics. There is nothing intrinsic to the letters "gay" which pre-dispose it to have the meaning homosexual. For all practical purposes, "imdaja" (which is a word I just made up, not an implication or whatever) or some other combination of letters could mean homosexual, if it is consistently used that way by several people within a culture and/or time period. What determines the meaning of a word is its usage by contemporaries within the same language, and especially within the same cultures and sub-cultures.

Thus, by looking at all the contemporary writing (and not necessarily the same language hundreds of years before and after, which are examples of both the root fallacy and anachronism), both within and outside the canon, we can get a feel for what a word means. It is contemporary usage determines what it means. To find this meaning we look and see how the writer we are reading uses the term, then people with similar beliefs and cultural backgrounds, then general contemporaries, and least desirable, how people around 30-50 years or more prior to the writer used the term.

Thus, the answer on how we determine the meaning of a word is the same for how we determine the meaning of a verse or a passage of Scripture: context.

Unfortunately, there are those words which show up rarely in the literature that has been preserved, and we might be forced to look up how the word was used hundreds of uyears before and guess at how it evolved since then, or sometimes we just have a small sample from any time period, let alone the contemporary time period and we have to determine a word's meaning from little evidence.

All in all, however, it is not as difficult an endeavor as you might suppose, and we can be very reasonably sure of the vast majority of words in the NT. (I am not dealing with OT, since I am still in the process of learning Hebrew, but it seems there is more work to be done here than in the NT.)

[Edit: As far as how we are sure we are making better translations, there are two factors, (1) we are discovering more and more manuscripts of ancient writing all the time, including non-canonical material, which adds to our evidence and helps us be more sure of how a word was used, and (2) English, as you have observed, is contantly changing, thus, what a word meant in King James English is not necessarily what the same word means in modern English and other words have been added and dropped, thus, there is a need for translations which adapt to modern language.]

Anyways, I hope that answered your question and if I was unclear on anything, ask me and I'll rephrase it.

Take care,
Kevin