Quantitative Equivalence

I happened to notice that the yesterday's post by Wayne was #666. Since this was causing me some unwarranted anxiety, I felt that I should make a post today instead of a comment. So I will respond to Dan's post on Unnecessary Clutter with a quote that I hope will support his thesis.

This is from a recent article by Dr. Pietersma on Hermeneutics and a Translated Text, page 6.

Discourse Analysis or Text-Linguistics has made us aware of the fact that human discourse is held together by all sorts of devises, labeled cohesive links. One might perhaps call these the glue of discourse. That the source text would have such links is to be expected, since Hebrew Ps. 29 is a piece of written discourse, a text. That such cohesive links would be transferred in some shape or form from the source text to the target text might also be expected, given the fact that translations in the Septuagint are typically isomorphic, i.e. each morpheme is quantitatively represented in the target text. But since in a commentary on the translated text as produced, the exegete’s concern is with the interpretive difference of the target text from the source text, simple representation does not come into play.

When one asks whether in Ps 28 such cohesive links are added by the Greek translator without explicit warrant in the source, the answer is a resounding No. Most conspicuously lacking, for example, are the ubiquitous particles of Greek prose. In point of fact, what one does find is what I have called (for lack of a better term) anti-links, i.e. disruptive items resulting from an excessive insistence on quantitative equivalence between source text and target text. A case in point is the strange use of an article with κυριος. When the source gives no explicit warrant for an article, κυριος remains anarthrous (13x), when the source does give explicit warrant (4x), an article is duly produced, even if it only represents the source text quantitatively. The presence or absence of an article with κυριος is, therefore, based not on considerations of text-linguistics but of quantitative equivalence between target text and source text.

I have also been enjoying Lingamish's Fallacy Files and Mike's recent Exegetitor posts.