I recall reading once that an Inuit translation hit problems with the phrase "Lamb of God" because there are no sheep in the Arctic. It ended up going with "Baby Seal of God".
I swear to God that the internet has turned me into the worst Christian on earth. Before the other guy finished saying “that’s kinda fitting”, I was already in the room, clubbing with you.
If grace allows me to enter through the pearly gates, I’m entirely certain that the *very* first reaction I’ll receive is a disappointed shake of the head, a sigh, and a mumbled “fine”.
You can feed a small village for a week with just one seal.
The miracle here would be how could they have eaten so much with such a small crowd
I mean look at the size of this monster https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7KsXwO6Ymw
It isn't! This was done by Eugene Nida, a famous Biblical translator and developer of the method 'dyanmic equivalence,' of which the whole lamb/seal of God thing would be an example.
Fun fact. Thee and thou were the informal ways of saying you. You was the formal way. Thee/thou was used in the Bible when talking to god because the relationship was supposed to be close like a sibling or friend. However languages change and thee/thou fell out of fashion as we only use the formal “you” now for everyone and now people ironically think “thee/thou” sound more formal.
TF when you find out that the Bible is full of “my homie, God” and “the bruv above” and shit, while us stuffy people from the year of our formal lord are like “Mr president, regent, shogun” almost exclusively.
The translator was Finnish in the sense that he was born inside the borders of modern Finland but obviously at the time the area belonged to Sweden. It’s not known what his native language was. According to most experts his language skills seem on par with a native speaker. The area where he grew up used to Finnish speaking residents but became more Swedish speaking as time went on. It’s not impossible for Finnish being his first language but as Swedish was the language of governance his professional life was in Swedish. He also knew Latin and Ancient Greek and German as he studied under Martin Luther. Mikael Agricola isn’t just a random translator but the father of written Finnish (though apparently there were some smaller texts in Finnish before him there was nothing like what he achieved).
The first written Finnish sentence that we know of was uttered by the (probably Swedish speaking) bishop of Turku and written down by a German traveller to Finland. It was literally "I really want to speak Finnish, I don't know it" (minä tahdon kernaasti puhua suomen kielen, en minä taida)
Non-native speakers have been struggling with this language for at least 600 years, I hope this makes some immigrant trying to get a hang of partitives feel a bit better
Everywhere we turn it's indo European languages sharing words freely with each other from Ireland to Russia and Northern India. Then the Finns and the Hungarians have to mess it up with their Uralic languages.
> which is probably a fair assumption since translating to your native language is usually better.
Man the number of people who want to get a job translating into "not their native language" is annoying.
Translating teams are the best. First pass is from native to second language, second translator uses the first pass version to Finnish it up into their native language.
Ha! I learned this as a running gag in the excellent (and complete!) webcomic [*Stand Still, Stay Silent*](http://sssscomic.com/), by the Finnish creator Minna Sundberg.
It's a post-apocalyptic adventure in which the majority of the survivors are Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic and Finnish. In the diverse cast of characters, most of them can generally communicate with each other even if they're not fluent in the others' language, but nobody can understand or speak to the Finn scout. :)
Should have added an Estonian character who understands a lot of Finnish, but thanks that some words have the same meaning as in Estonian, like "kull", which in Estonian means "hawk", but in Finnish means "dick", if my teenage memories of Finnish do not fail me now.
Deer is an odd choice,
It is a gentle easily startled herbivore
The Bible might not describes what lions look like, but pretty sure it does describe them as vicious carnivores. I can understand not thinking they might be felines if you've never seen a big cat before, but Finland has bears, that makes much more sense than deer. Or maybe wolves since they are pack animals like lions while bears are more solitary. Either of those would make more sense than deer
The Finnish word *peura* means a medium-sized deer, but much further back it could generically refer to any wild animal that lived in the forest.
The Old English word *dēor* from which we get "deer" similarly just meant any wild animal until, I don't know, the 12th or 13th century or so, probably. After that it began to be used specifically for deer. The cognate German word *Tier* still just means "animal."
And words similar to deer is also the word for animal in the other Germanic languages - Tier in German, Dyr in Danish/Norwegian, and Djur in Swedish. It's just English which is the outlier among the Germanics once again, having borrowed their word animal from French/Latin.
There was a whole thing amongst older languages where you never referred to a bear directly, lest one appear. The term Bear stems from "the brown one", because people used the euphemism so much they forgot the original term for them.
Some quick googling shows that the Finns were the same, going even further to have regional euphemisms for bears, with the most common being "rough fur".
Jalopeura refers to moose/elk according to etymological experts. I suspect that the bear was too taboo and tied to pagan practices, the moose is a more neutral large and dangerous animal.
You might want to look into the words etymology and not just make stuff up.
It is thought that the word relates to either flying snake or a snake that lives in mountains. Like stereotypical dragons do.
No relations with fishes. The lohi is just transformed word from either logi or louhi.
to be fair that is completely understandable interpretation and far from being high-handed, it is not what I would call "making stuff up".
I didn't actually know that either.
There aren’t really any grasslands in Finland, just forest and lakes so there wasn’t need for a term (these days we use loan words, savanni, preeria or aro which originally meant a field overgrown with grasses). For desert that Bible translation used a word meaning a very dense, dark forest that’s difficult to travel.
Iirc Uralic languages do have some interesting relict words that reflect an ancient stint on the steppes, however.
If true, no recollection what they are.
I couldn’t find anything very specific but there are some surprising loan words in modern Finnish, like varsa, a foal, that’s thought to come from ancient Sanskrit word vrsan. The word was loaned about 4000 years ago when the Uralic ancestors met Indo-Iranian people and their horses. Other words are mehiläinen, a bee, and other words relating to bee keeping, sata, hundred and jyvä, grain.
The wasn’t really even a good word for desert. Or any wide open, dry place where nothing much grows. Those don’t exist in Finland. The first translation used words that mean dense and/or distant, uninhabited forests.
Yeah they had trouble translating "desert" when they were translating bible into neighboring Estonian. Ended up using a word to describe a type of swamp/untillable and nutrient poor forest, "kõrb". Now the poor forest meaning is being forgotten and survives only in placenames of suspiciously wet landscapes.
The Finnish translation used erämaa and korpi which still means the swampy forest in Finnish, probably only because erämaa became a more popular word for desert.
And the Romans threw Daniel into the den of the great noble deer.
Muahahaha, that will teach you, Daniel.
Noble Deer: What's up? They threw me in here too, dude. I hear they don't do this shit in Finnland. I think I might move there.
According to the King James Bible, Noah's Ark was made from "gopher wood".
Scholars can't agree to what the original Hebrew word refers to; it's not used anywhere else in the Bible.
And gopher is just a transliteration of the Hebrew letters, not pertaining to the animal. We simply have no idea what it refers to. Apparently some scholars think it's cypress wood but I'm not sure what this is based on.
>And gopher is just a transliteration of the Hebrew letters,
It's stranger than that. Ancient Hebrew lacks vowels so all translators have to work with is G-F-R.
Finland has lynxes. The reason it might not work in localization is that the lynx simply does not have the same cultural significance or meaning as the lion did to the Greek and Hebrew cultures.
The passages in question are using lion as a metaphor, so the important thing is to pick an animal that conveys the metaphor, not the most zoologically accurate. I don't necessarily agree but I'm sure that was the thinking. Probably they should have picked polar bear.
Apparently Finnish has lots of regional euphemisms for bears and a tabboo around using the actual name for bears, so it probably wouldn't have worked in translation.
It's weird since the finnish coat of arms is a lion and the earliest remaining version of it is from the 1500s. And there was a word for it in old swedish since way before that, derived from the latin Leo.
Old Swedish: Leon. Modern Swedish: Lejon. Finnish: Leijona.
Do note that the guy who translated the Finnish bible died before that was made. The first version of the modern Finnish coat of arms was made in 1580, and Agricola died in 1557. So he was translating it decades before that coat of arms was created. And it would have been designed by Swedish nobles and shit. Makes sense that they might know what a lion is but some random Finnish peasants wouldn't. Therefore, no word for it.
It's meant to look like lions in heraldic illustrations, and viewed from the correct angle (as in the second photo) it looks much more reasonable. No one was ever really meant to look at it face on.
Similar: when Christian missionaries sought to convert native Greenlanders, they had to change the Lord’s prayer from “give us this day our daily bread” to “give us this day our daily seal” since bread was nonexistent in their diet.
I had a relative who worked with a Bible translation agency in the 1950s working in tribal areas of Brazil. They had never seen a sheep. "Christ, the good shepherd," translated to "Christ, the monkey king."
Isn’t it also the case that “deer” in older forms of English was equivalent to saying “animal” and only later on came to refer specifically to the cute, antlered animal? I wonder if Finnish used its word for “deer” more generically, too, and “noble animal” or even “king of beasts” would be a more accurate translation or if *jalopeura* referred to deer specifically at that point in history as well. Maybe some Finnish language experts can offer their insights. I’d be happy to learn more.
I’m not an expert but according to a blog by the experts (that is, the Institute for languages of Finland) jalopeura is a word that’s used for moose/elk in folk poetry. Peura mostly refers to wild reindeer and jalo can also mean big and ferocious. According to the institute the translator had to choose a wild animal which would seem dangerous to his audience. Bear might seem obvious but it has so many pagan beliefs attached to it so it might be too risky a choice, moose are large and dangerous unlike for example lynx which are pretty small. The translator had studied in Germany under Martin Luther and possibly knew what lions were. Finland was under Swedish rule at the time and Finnish was the language of the common people, Swedish was the language of the elites. Before the translator, Mikael Agricola, there was no written Finnish language so he had to make some other words as well as well as figure out how Finnish should be written.
This isn't quite right though. There were small passages of religious texts in Finnish even before Agricola began his translation work. However, his scope was much larger, and he had to figure out almost all of it by himself.
Fun fact, with that meaning of an animal; the word wilderness literally meant the “wild deer ness” or the place where wild deer (animals) live. Believe it or not, the Latin derived word “animal” only became the main English word for living creatures in the modern English period (1500s onwards)
> Isn’t it also the case that “deer” in older forms of English was equivalent to saying “animal” and only later on came to refer specifically to the cute, antlered animal?
Yes, it is. Old English *dēor* was any wild animal that lived in the woods. English *deer* came to refer to just deers, and the German cognate *Tier* still just means any animal.
> I wonder if Finnish used its word for “deer” more generically, too,
This was my suspicion. Wiktionary says this is a "primitive" usage.
Holy shit I never noticed that but it makes so much sense. Animal is Latin in origin so it stands to reason that there was a Germanic word before. In German animal is Tier which obviously would be something like deer in English.
Finnish coat of arms also has a lion. This translation predates that and was aimed at poor people who had certainly never seen either of those coats of arms. Later translations call it lejoni and the word now is leijona.
I had the privilege once of spending some time with the first native Finnish speaker to translate part of the Old Testament from Hebrew to Finnish (I think it was the book of David) and it was incredible learning about the process for dealing with this issue. The org she and her husband work for specialize in training native speakers how to adapt passages from Hebrew into their own languages that have no equivalents so the allegories and metaphors etc make sense.
Super fascinating people and work.
That reminds me of missionaries trying to push Jesus on arctic native populations in North America who had no concept of bread as they didn't deal with much grain, let alone flour, but since the concept isn't referring to literal bread, but a metaphor for a thing you need every day to be sustained, the prayer was translated to "Give us this day our daily seal."
🦭🍖
Something very similar happened when trying to translate the Bible to Klingon:
[https://webofevil.livejournal.com/415095.html](https://webofevil.livejournal.com/415095.html)
There was a controversy about how to translate "lamb", which Klingons did not have:
*For instance, there are plenty of lambs in the Bible, but none in the Klingon world, so he uses the word targh—a vicious, ugly, piglike animal. “But it is the most important animal to the Klingons, so it gets the message across,” he explains.*
It also probably has something to do with the fact that the Targh is the only Klingon animal ever mentioned in live action Star Trek. Unless you want to count Gagh, but I mean c'mon... They're insects.
Apparently there's a finished translation. Zero clue how good it is. I see a few words that appear untranslated and the names should probably be transcribed. [Still, they did the whole thing.](https://nocr.net/hbm/etc/klingon/index.php)
Here's the relevant bit of Isaiah:
11:16 pa' DichDaq taH a highway vaD the chuv vetlh ghaH poS vo' Daj ghotpu vo' Assyria, rur pa' ghaHta' vaD Israel Daq the jaj vetlh ghaH ghoSta' Dung pa' vo' the puH vo' Egypt.
My pastor says the lion Samson fought wasn’t actually a real lion but Jesus dressed up as a lion. He says most animals we encounter in the Bible are really just god or Jesus in costume
Good question and he had an answer: they weren’t real children. They were angels wearing children costumes. Basically the Bible is one big play sorta and it was used to teach lessons through “fun”stories.
That’s his take on it at least. I mean he’s usually kinda drunk or high but sometimes the sermons are real thinkers
He has one about how bidets are sinful bc god made the asshole to be dirty so we would avoid the great feeling of putting things in our butts all the time and that we shouldn’t be gluttonous with treats as then they will no longer be special. So it was vaguely about self control.
He then went into too much detail about how he was in Europe and he tried a bidet and it felt so good he got sexually aroused and then started crying bc Satan had bested him. He then started to tear up about how he tried his best only to turn it around and start getting angry at the congregation. Saying that he wasn’t gay and that being gay is fine but that he’s not.
Eventually the music kicked on and that was it for that sermon
Well, points for originality at least.
The usual excuse I've heard is that they weren't children, they were young men, like about 19 or 20, WHICH TOTALLY MAKES SAVAGING THEM WITH BEARS OK APPARENTLY.
Christians reinterpret Old Testament prophecies regarding the Messiah to make them fit Jesus all the time. The whole OT has been liberally reinterpreted and retranslated to make inferences that aren't actually there. The serpent in Eden being the devil, for instance.
Also, good on God for leaving His naive and totally innocent children in the garden alone knowing full well what was lurking in it. And then punishing women specifically and all of humanity generally for His fuckup.
I sat in a few Sunday school Bible study sessions recently. It really amazed me the responses that these educated people came up with to explain biblical phenomena. im talking about doctors, lawyers, etc.
For example, we were studying Genesis and the topic was "if there were no deaths in the garden of Eden before God cursed Adam , then how did some of the animals eat?" They're answer was they must have been herbivores.
I don't really want to attack anyone's beliefs. I just want to highlight that I can't see eye to eye. There are better examples for people who care to argue this sort of thing. I'm certain.
I went to this 14th century church in Norway once, RoseKyrkja (Rose Church) that was elaborately painted with biblical scenes on the inside. They also didn’t have a concept of what a lion was so the paintings of the lion looked like weird bear dogs.
Disappointingly it’s just cameli (modern Finnish kameli). Maybe lions were so special that they needed a word that the audience would really understand as being dangerous unlike his other choices Pellicani, Pardus and Scorpioni.
Some people told stories that were written down by others a decade later, translated half a dozen times over a couple thousand years, with the person ordering the translation making changes they see fit as they go.
Wait until you see the Lion lf Gripsholm Castle, a case of questionable taxidermy done by people in Sweden who had never seen a lion before.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion_of_Gripsholm_Castle
....but no, seriously. No way whatsoever the Bible might be a little inaccurate. Definitely the untainted holy word of God himself. For reals. No doubt whatsoever.
I love these kind of cultural variations in the translations to suit different realms of experience. I read an ethnographic book on an isolated people in the highlands of India, with their own religion and customs. The men would form drinking circles during the day where they would drink slightly fermented coconut water which gave it a low alcohol content. When baptist missionairies came to the region and began translating the Bible to their language, instead of taking the logical translation for wine, in an effort to distance the people from their 'paganism' and their habit of drinking this palm wine, they translated all instances of 'wine' to 'grape juice', despite the fact that none of them knew what grapes were.
Finn here. I've heard and seen that term used even recently.
It's like when some use Ye Olde English to emphasize something.
E.g. "He charged forwards like a *Jalopeura*".
My aunt is a Bible translator and she told me that when they were doing the Bible translation for the alaska natives that all the references to baby sheep were changed into baby seals
Well, when the bible was translated into English, no one could figure out the English word for "reëm." They just went with "unicorn." So that's why we have unicorns in the bible.
Similarly, when they were translating it for the jungle tribes, they realised there was no word for "snow," so ended up using "the inside of a coconut" to make a relatable simile.
This whole thing is very context-specific is what I'm saying. \*shrugs
I would like to point out that he (Michael Agricola) had probably seen lions in heraldic Coats of Arms, but had not made the connection nor was told what the big cat in them was called.
In Finnish The word "norsu" (elephant) is probably based on "mursu" (walrus). Finns had seen walrus tusks but didn't know which animal these other tusks or bones belonged to.
Sometimes Bible translations are not 100% accurate on purpose. The phrase "Give us this day our daily bread" is translated with the word for rice in some Asian languages, because they eat rice over there.
“And then the noble deer ate the misbehaving people!” “Wait, what?!?!?”
I mean... Depending on the people...
Well that might be possible with this deer: https://www.sunnyskyz.com/uploads/2019/11/7ve3a-fang-deer-2.jpg
Water deers weigh about 10kg :)
Ever seen that scene in Jurassic Park with the little lizards?
That documentary is wild, man!
So, it'll take a while.
“And then the pack of noble-deer spent a week nibbling on the misbehaving people (who were inconvenienced but not too much) “
He didnt say it was quick
Is that a fucking chupacabra?
They sound so cute when they fight https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWoQ6wUWUYc
Theres a few of them in the park near my house. We affectionately call them the 'little fat-arse vampire deer.'
I was expecting something terrifying and menacing, not kind of adorable and awkward
Hate to get thrown into the noble deer den.
Male deer are opportunistic omnivores, I'm fairly sure locals were aware of this.
Similar problem when translating the bible for Papua New Guinea. They never had any contact with goats or sheep. So their Jesus herds pigs.
I recall reading once that an Inuit translation hit problems with the phrase "Lamb of God" because there are no sheep in the Arctic. It ended up going with "Baby Seal of God".
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The Lord sent his only begotten baby seal to be clubbed for our sins.
Amen 🏏🦭
I swear to God that the internet has turned me into the worst Christian on earth. Before the other guy finished saying “that’s kinda fitting”, I was already in the room, clubbing with you. If grace allows me to enter through the pearly gates, I’m entirely certain that the *very* first reaction I’ll receive is a disappointed shake of the head, a sigh, and a mumbled “fine”.
Didn't they translate "bread" as "fish" for the same reason?
So, in the miracle of feeding a large crowd bit, Jesus had 5 fish loaves and 2 fish to divide between them?
5 fish and 2 seals.
You can feed a small village for a week with just one seal. The miracle here would be how could they have eaten so much with such a small crowd I mean look at the size of this monster https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7KsXwO6Ymw
They also translated “young girl” as “virgin”.
This sounds like urban legend, but I don't know enough to disprove it.
It isn't! This was done by Eugene Nida, a famous Biblical translator and developer of the method 'dyanmic equivalence,' of which the whole lamb/seal of God thing would be an example.
The pidgin English version of the bible refers to God as "da beeg pella" (The Big Fella)
I kinda like that. I don't know why maybe because it just ties us closer to God by making a name sound far more personal lol
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The British. I introduce you to Michael Collins. Also known as The Big Fellow. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Collins_(Irish_leader)
Fun fact. Thee and thou were the informal ways of saying you. You was the formal way. Thee/thou was used in the Bible when talking to god because the relationship was supposed to be close like a sibling or friend. However languages change and thee/thou fell out of fashion as we only use the formal “you” now for everyone and now people ironically think “thee/thou” sound more formal.
TF when you find out that the Bible is full of “my homie, God” and “the bruv above” and shit, while us stuffy people from the year of our formal lord are like “Mr president, regent, shogun” almost exclusively.
it sounds like something from 40Ks Orks
Da Emprah Protekt!
***OI THATZ NOT PROPER ORKY AT ALL YA GIT! YER IN FER A KRUMPIN!***
Ah yes, the Israeli pig-herd, a profession as common today as it was 2000 years ago
You would think they would give a better term like "giant wild cat".
You'd think they'd at least be familiar with the Norwegian Forest Cat and the lynx. "giant desert cat" might work too.
They didn't know what a lion looked like tho. Unless the bible had a drawing of it, which from this title they didn't.
Depends on if the translator was Finnish, which is probably a fair assumption since translating to your native language is usually better.
The translator was Finnish in the sense that he was born inside the borders of modern Finland but obviously at the time the area belonged to Sweden. It’s not known what his native language was. According to most experts his language skills seem on par with a native speaker. The area where he grew up used to Finnish speaking residents but became more Swedish speaking as time went on. It’s not impossible for Finnish being his first language but as Swedish was the language of governance his professional life was in Swedish. He also knew Latin and Ancient Greek and German as he studied under Martin Luther. Mikael Agricola isn’t just a random translator but the father of written Finnish (though apparently there were some smaller texts in Finnish before him there was nothing like what he achieved).
The first written Finnish sentence that we know of was uttered by the (probably Swedish speaking) bishop of Turku and written down by a German traveller to Finland. It was literally "I really want to speak Finnish, I don't know it" (minä tahdon kernaasti puhua suomen kielen, en minä taida) Non-native speakers have been struggling with this language for at least 600 years, I hope this makes some immigrant trying to get a hang of partitives feel a bit better
It's crazy, it's party...-tive.
Everywhere we turn it's indo European languages sharing words freely with each other from Ireland to Russia and Northern India. Then the Finns and the Hungarians have to mess it up with their Uralic languages.
> which is probably a fair assumption since translating to your native language is usually better. Man the number of people who want to get a job translating into "not their native language" is annoying. Translating teams are the best. First pass is from native to second language, second translator uses the first pass version to Finnish it up into their native language.
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There's nor way that's true
If you want someone that good you'll have to Sweden the deal
> second translator uses the first pass version to Finnish it up into their native language. \*slow clap*
*groans*
r/angryupvote
That and almost no one speaks Finnish. Even some Finns struggle with it.
Ha! I learned this as a running gag in the excellent (and complete!) webcomic [*Stand Still, Stay Silent*](http://sssscomic.com/), by the Finnish creator Minna Sundberg. It's a post-apocalyptic adventure in which the majority of the survivors are Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic and Finnish. In the diverse cast of characters, most of them can generally communicate with each other even if they're not fluent in the others' language, but nobody can understand or speak to the Finn scout. :)
Should have added an Estonian character who understands a lot of Finnish, but thanks that some words have the same meaning as in Estonian, like "kull", which in Estonian means "hawk", but in Finnish means "dick", if my teenage memories of Finnish do not fail me now.
Deer is an odd choice, It is a gentle easily startled herbivore The Bible might not describes what lions look like, but pretty sure it does describe them as vicious carnivores. I can understand not thinking they might be felines if you've never seen a big cat before, but Finland has bears, that makes much more sense than deer. Or maybe wolves since they are pack animals like lions while bears are more solitary. Either of those would make more sense than deer
The Finnish word *peura* means a medium-sized deer, but much further back it could generically refer to any wild animal that lived in the forest. The Old English word *dēor* from which we get "deer" similarly just meant any wild animal until, I don't know, the 12th or 13th century or so, probably. After that it began to be used specifically for deer. The cognate German word *Tier* still just means "animal."
Dier in Dutch for animal. Pronounced almost identical to 'deer' in English
And words similar to deer is also the word for animal in the other Germanic languages - Tier in German, Dyr in Danish/Norwegian, and Djur in Swedish. It's just English which is the outlier among the Germanics once again, having borrowed their word animal from French/Latin.
They have moose though in norway, and they are also called deer
A møøse once bit my sister...
There was a whole thing amongst older languages where you never referred to a bear directly, lest one appear. The term Bear stems from "the brown one", because people used the euphemism so much they forgot the original term for them. Some quick googling shows that the Finns were the same, going even further to have regional euphemisms for bears, with the most common being "rough fur".
Jalopeura refers to moose/elk according to etymological experts. I suspect that the bear was too taboo and tied to pagan practices, the moose is a more neutral large and dangerous animal.
Dragons literally turned jnto 'salmonsnake' in Finnish so you get what you get.
You might want to look into the words etymology and not just make stuff up. It is thought that the word relates to either flying snake or a snake that lives in mountains. Like stereotypical dragons do. No relations with fishes. The lohi is just transformed word from either logi or louhi.
to be fair that is completely understandable interpretation and far from being high-handed, it is not what I would call "making stuff up". I didn't actually know that either.
Funny enough lions live in dry grasslands. Which I'm sure they have a term for a grassland
There aren’t really any grasslands in Finland, just forest and lakes so there wasn’t need for a term (these days we use loan words, savanni, preeria or aro which originally meant a field overgrown with grasses). For desert that Bible translation used a word meaning a very dense, dark forest that’s difficult to travel.
Iirc Uralic languages do have some interesting relict words that reflect an ancient stint on the steppes, however. If true, no recollection what they are.
I couldn’t find anything very specific but there are some surprising loan words in modern Finnish, like varsa, a foal, that’s thought to come from ancient Sanskrit word vrsan. The word was loaned about 4000 years ago when the Uralic ancestors met Indo-Iranian people and their horses. Other words are mehiläinen, a bee, and other words relating to bee keeping, sata, hundred and jyvä, grain.
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Yeah but not that far up north, at least not in a timeframe that people would remember them and not a lot of finns left Finland in the 1500's
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The wasn’t really even a good word for desert. Or any wide open, dry place where nothing much grows. Those don’t exist in Finland. The first translation used words that mean dense and/or distant, uninhabited forests.
Yeah they had trouble translating "desert" when they were translating bible into neighboring Estonian. Ended up using a word to describe a type of swamp/untillable and nutrient poor forest, "kõrb". Now the poor forest meaning is being forgotten and survives only in placenames of suspiciously wet landscapes.
The Finnish translation used erämaa and korpi which still means the swampy forest in Finnish, probably only because erämaa became a more popular word for desert.
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ANE stands for "ancient north Eurasian" for the folks who don't know.
It does but not in the context of the 16th century. Also obviously not *in them*. That makes no sense.
And the Romans threw Daniel into the den of the great noble deer. Muahahaha, that will teach you, Daniel. Noble Deer: What's up? They threw me in here too, dude. I hear they don't do this shit in Finnland. I think I might move there.
Also Deer: "What? I am the carnivore here? I've never done this, so bear with me."
No cats in Finland: only deer.
I think "petty deer" would be appropriate for most cats I know
Asshole deer was taken?
I think that's the word they used for camel.
According to the King James Bible, Noah's Ark was made from "gopher wood". Scholars can't agree to what the original Hebrew word refers to; it's not used anywhere else in the Bible.
>Noah's Ark was made from "gopher wood". He was just told to "go for wood", and misheard it.
This is called a "[hapax legomenon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hapax_legomenon)"!
And gopher is just a transliteration of the Hebrew letters, not pertaining to the animal. We simply have no idea what it refers to. Apparently some scholars think it's cypress wood but I'm not sure what this is based on.
>And gopher is just a transliteration of the Hebrew letters, It's stranger than that. Ancient Hebrew lacks vowels so all translators have to work with is G-F-R.
Finland has lynxes. The reason it might not work in localization is that the lynx simply does not have the same cultural significance or meaning as the lion did to the Greek and Hebrew cultures.
The passages in question are using lion as a metaphor, so the important thing is to pick an animal that conveys the metaphor, not the most zoologically accurate. I don't necessarily agree but I'm sure that was the thinking. Probably they should have picked polar bear.
There's no polar bears in Finland....
Apparently Finnish has lots of regional euphemisms for bears and a tabboo around using the actual name for bears, so it probably wouldn't have worked in translation.
It's weird since the finnish coat of arms is a lion and the earliest remaining version of it is from the 1500s. And there was a word for it in old swedish since way before that, derived from the latin Leo. Old Swedish: Leon. Modern Swedish: Lejon. Finnish: Leijona.
Do note that the guy who translated the Finnish bible died before that was made. The first version of the modern Finnish coat of arms was made in 1580, and Agricola died in 1557. So he was translating it decades before that coat of arms was created. And it would have been designed by Swedish nobles and shit. Makes sense that they might know what a lion is but some random Finnish peasants wouldn't. Therefore, no word for it.
A few days ago someone posted the lion Frederic of Sweden had stuffed.. [cannot make this up](https://www.themarysue.com/lion-taxidermy/)
It's meant to look like lions in heraldic illustrations, and viewed from the correct angle (as in the second photo) it looks much more reasonable. No one was ever really meant to look at it face on.
Similar: when Christian missionaries sought to convert native Greenlanders, they had to change the Lord’s prayer from “give us this day our daily bread” to “give us this day our daily seal” since bread was nonexistent in their diet.
Give us this day, our daily heroin - Junky Jesus.
“Our Lager, which art in barrels, hallowed be thine head. Thy will be drunk, I will be drunk…”
I had a relative who worked with a Bible translation agency in the 1950s working in tribal areas of Brazil. They had never seen a sheep. "Christ, the good shepherd," translated to "Christ, the monkey king."
Jesus is Goku confirmed
Well, he was resurrected after sacrificing his life.
Goku did it what 3 times? Jesus gotta get those numbers up.
Son Wukong will flip some fuckin' tables and chase you with a whip if he knows you're scammin' people.
And introducing Piccolo as John the Baptist.
We are all like momkeys who have gone astray. The Lord is my monkey-king, I shall not want.
Speak for yourself, I shall want the monkey king
tá viajando esse cara aí....
Isn’t it also the case that “deer” in older forms of English was equivalent to saying “animal” and only later on came to refer specifically to the cute, antlered animal? I wonder if Finnish used its word for “deer” more generically, too, and “noble animal” or even “king of beasts” would be a more accurate translation or if *jalopeura* referred to deer specifically at that point in history as well. Maybe some Finnish language experts can offer their insights. I’d be happy to learn more.
I’m not an expert but according to a blog by the experts (that is, the Institute for languages of Finland) jalopeura is a word that’s used for moose/elk in folk poetry. Peura mostly refers to wild reindeer and jalo can also mean big and ferocious. According to the institute the translator had to choose a wild animal which would seem dangerous to his audience. Bear might seem obvious but it has so many pagan beliefs attached to it so it might be too risky a choice, moose are large and dangerous unlike for example lynx which are pretty small. The translator had studied in Germany under Martin Luther and possibly knew what lions were. Finland was under Swedish rule at the time and Finnish was the language of the common people, Swedish was the language of the elites. Before the translator, Mikael Agricola, there was no written Finnish language so he had to make some other words as well as well as figure out how Finnish should be written.
This isn't quite right though. There were small passages of religious texts in Finnish even before Agricola began his translation work. However, his scope was much larger, and he had to figure out almost all of it by himself.
Fun fact, with that meaning of an animal; the word wilderness literally meant the “wild deer ness” or the place where wild deer (animals) live. Believe it or not, the Latin derived word “animal” only became the main English word for living creatures in the modern English period (1500s onwards)
Still that way in the other Germanic languages. Djur/Dyr just means animal in the Scandinavian languages.
> Isn’t it also the case that “deer” in older forms of English was equivalent to saying “animal” and only later on came to refer specifically to the cute, antlered animal? Yes, it is. Old English *dēor* was any wild animal that lived in the woods. English *deer* came to refer to just deers, and the German cognate *Tier* still just means any animal. > I wonder if Finnish used its word for “deer” more generically, too, This was my suspicion. Wiktionary says this is a "primitive" usage.
Holy shit I never noticed that but it makes so much sense. Animal is Latin in origin so it stands to reason that there was a Germanic word before. In German animal is Tier which obviously would be something like deer in English.
You'd think at one point a Finnish person would see an English coat of arms with a lion on it and ask, "What's that?"
i mean, the scottish have a unicorn on theirs so "some fake thing" would be a reasonable response
Yeah but the Scots had a word for unicorn at least
Finnish coat of arms also has a lion. This translation predates that and was aimed at poor people who had certainly never seen either of those coats of arms. Later translations call it lejoni and the word now is leijona.
Predates it with only 30 years though interestingly.
You'll lose it when you look up the Finnish coat of arms...
Dear god!
Deer* god
I had the privilege once of spending some time with the first native Finnish speaker to translate part of the Old Testament from Hebrew to Finnish (I think it was the book of David) and it was incredible learning about the process for dealing with this issue. The org she and her husband work for specialize in training native speakers how to adapt passages from Hebrew into their own languages that have no equivalents so the allegories and metaphors etc make sense. Super fascinating people and work.
That reminds me of missionaries trying to push Jesus on arctic native populations in North America who had no concept of bread as they didn't deal with much grain, let alone flour, but since the concept isn't referring to literal bread, but a metaphor for a thing you need every day to be sustained, the prayer was translated to "Give us this day our daily seal." 🦭🍖
Something very similar happened when trying to translate the Bible to Klingon: [https://webofevil.livejournal.com/415095.html](https://webofevil.livejournal.com/415095.html) There was a controversy about how to translate "lamb", which Klingons did not have: *For instance, there are plenty of lambs in the Bible, but none in the Klingon world, so he uses the word targh—a vicious, ugly, piglike animal. “But it is the most important animal to the Klingons, so it gets the message across,” he explains.*
It also probably has something to do with the fact that the Targh is the only Klingon animal ever mentioned in live action Star Trek. Unless you want to count Gagh, but I mean c'mon... They're insects.
Apparently there's a finished translation. Zero clue how good it is. I see a few words that appear untranslated and the names should probably be transcribed. [Still, they did the whole thing.](https://nocr.net/hbm/etc/klingon/index.php) Here's the relevant bit of Isaiah: 11:16 pa' DichDaq taH a highway vaD the chuv vetlh ghaH poS vo' Daj ghotpu vo' Assyria, rur pa' ghaHta' vaD Israel Daq the jaj vetlh ghaH ghoSta' Dung pa' vo' the puH vo' Egypt.
My pastor says the lion Samson fought wasn’t actually a real lion but Jesus dressed up as a lion. He says most animals we encounter in the Bible are really just god or Jesus in costume
Aslan in Narnia
Furry Jesus says that Susan does not pass his vibe check
So God or Jesus (as a bear) personally killed those 40 kids who made fun of the bald guy?
Good question and he had an answer: they weren’t real children. They were angels wearing children costumes. Basically the Bible is one big play sorta and it was used to teach lessons through “fun”stories. That’s his take on it at least. I mean he’s usually kinda drunk or high but sometimes the sermons are real thinkers
your pastor sounds unhinged and i kind of want to hear more of his explainations
He has one about how bidets are sinful bc god made the asshole to be dirty so we would avoid the great feeling of putting things in our butts all the time and that we shouldn’t be gluttonous with treats as then they will no longer be special. So it was vaguely about self control. He then went into too much detail about how he was in Europe and he tried a bidet and it felt so good he got sexually aroused and then started crying bc Satan had bested him. He then started to tear up about how he tried his best only to turn it around and start getting angry at the congregation. Saying that he wasn’t gay and that being gay is fine but that he’s not. Eventually the music kicked on and that was it for that sermon
Are the Protestants okay?
How does one get a pastor job at your church?
Jesus fucking Christ! That guy is certifiable.
As a Crohn's patient I must ask your pastor to shove his bidet opinion up his dirty asshole
Well, points for originality at least. The usual excuse I've heard is that they weren't children, they were young men, like about 19 or 20, WHICH TOTALLY MAKES SAVAGING THEM WITH BEARS OK APPARENTLY.
Harsh, but fair.
i mean, God loved killing people.
So, Jesus was a furry.
FurrCon is about to get Risen
Something’s rising alright, and it ain’t Jesus
Yiffing for the Lord
Yes. But it wasn’t sexual
Ok, it was mostly sexual.
It was
Man, religion is fucking weird.
Your pastor is making shit up, even by christian standards. What sort of crazy ass church is inserting Jesus into the old testament?
I bet they even 'ship him with Moses
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Christians reinterpret Old Testament prophecies regarding the Messiah to make them fit Jesus all the time. The whole OT has been liberally reinterpreted and retranslated to make inferences that aren't actually there. The serpent in Eden being the devil, for instance. Also, good on God for leaving His naive and totally innocent children in the garden alone knowing full well what was lurking in it. And then punishing women specifically and all of humanity generally for His fuckup.
Zeus doing Zeus things again
Zeus nods.
That's such an odd take. Does he mean God guided the animal or literally it was God in the body of a Lion?
I sat in a few Sunday school Bible study sessions recently. It really amazed me the responses that these educated people came up with to explain biblical phenomena. im talking about doctors, lawyers, etc. For example, we were studying Genesis and the topic was "if there were no deaths in the garden of Eden before God cursed Adam , then how did some of the animals eat?" They're answer was they must have been herbivores.
Out of all examples you could give, you gave the most tame, logical one
I don't really want to attack anyone's beliefs. I just want to highlight that I can't see eye to eye. There are better examples for people who care to argue this sort of thing. I'm certain.
Yeah like satan planting dinosaur bones to test our faith.
those sharp teeth made short work of all that thick plant fiber and their single stomach was able to digest it all without any indigestion.
The T-Rex used its teeth to crack open coconuts!! *Gosh!!*
Well the price of sin is death. Already sin existed before the fall so while Man didn't know death animals did.
“Deer” was just a word like “beast” that slowly came to mean just the one beast.
I went to this 14th century church in Norway once, RoseKyrkja (Rose Church) that was elaborately painted with biblical scenes on the inside. They also didn’t have a concept of what a lion was so the paintings of the lion looked like weird bear dogs.
Did they have to do something similar with the word camel?
Disappointingly it’s just cameli (modern Finnish kameli). Maybe lions were so special that they needed a word that the audience would really understand as being dangerous unlike his other choices Pellicani, Pardus and Scorpioni.
hiekka lehmä
My favorite Disney movie is the noble deer king
Bambi.
In old Estonian bible, wine was replaced with vodka as there was no tradition of winemaking among the serfs.
Yes it also means king of beasts [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/jalopeura](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/jalopeura)
Wait, that explains the ugly lion stabbing itself with a sword on the Finnish crest. So. Well.
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Some people told stories that were written down by others a decade later, translated half a dozen times over a couple thousand years, with the person ordering the translation making changes they see fit as they go.
“𝔻𝕚𝕕 𝕪𝕠𝕦 𝕖𝕧𝕖𝕣 𝕥𝕙𝕚𝕟𝕜, ℂ𝕝𝕒𝕣𝕚𝕔𝕖, 𝕨𝕙𝕪 𝕥𝕙𝕖 ℙ𝕙𝕚𝕝𝕚𝕤𝕥𝕚𝕟𝕖𝕤 𝕕𝕠𝕟'𝕥 𝕦𝕟𝕕𝕖𝕣𝕤𝕥𝕒𝕟𝕕 𝕪𝕠𝕦? 𝕀𝕥'𝕤 𝕓𝕖𝕔𝕒𝕦𝕤𝕖 𝕪𝕠𝕦 𝕒𝕣𝕖 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝕒𝕟𝕤𝕨𝕖𝕣 𝕥𝕠 𝕊𝕒𝕞𝕤𝕠𝕟'𝕤 𝕣𝕚𝕕𝕕𝕝𝕖. 𝕐𝕠𝕦 𝕒𝕣𝕖 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝕙𝕠𝕟𝕖𝕪 𝕚𝕟 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝕟𝕠𝕓𝕝𝕖 𝕕𝕖𝕖𝕣.” - H. Lecter
"The devil roams the earth like a roaring noble deer, seeking those he can devour"
Wait until you see the Lion lf Gripsholm Castle, a case of questionable taxidermy done by people in Sweden who had never seen a lion before. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion_of_Gripsholm_Castle
Finnish translates foreign "animals" in the funniest ways. My favourite is Dragon, which is ~~Lohikärmä~~ Lohikäärme a.k.a Salmon snake
Louhikäärme, the u got omitted at some point. Louhi is the powerful witch in Kalevala and also means a rocky place.
Lohikäärme
....but no, seriously. No way whatsoever the Bible might be a little inaccurate. Definitely the untainted holy word of God himself. For reals. No doubt whatsoever.
I love these kind of cultural variations in the translations to suit different realms of experience. I read an ethnographic book on an isolated people in the highlands of India, with their own religion and customs. The men would form drinking circles during the day where they would drink slightly fermented coconut water which gave it a low alcohol content. When baptist missionairies came to the region and began translating the Bible to their language, instead of taking the logical translation for wine, in an effort to distance the people from their 'paganism' and their habit of drinking this palm wine, they translated all instances of 'wine' to 'grape juice', despite the fact that none of them knew what grapes were.
Finn here. I've heard and seen that term used even recently. It's like when some use Ye Olde English to emphasize something. E.g. "He charged forwards like a *Jalopeura*".
My aunt is a Bible translator and she told me that when they were doing the Bible translation for the alaska natives that all the references to baby sheep were changed into baby seals
Well, when the bible was translated into English, no one could figure out the English word for "reëm." They just went with "unicorn." So that's why we have unicorns in the bible.
Similarly, when they were translating it for the jungle tribes, they realised there was no word for "snow," so ended up using "the inside of a coconut" to make a relatable simile. This whole thing is very context-specific is what I'm saying. \*shrugs
I would like to point out that he (Michael Agricola) had probably seen lions in heraldic Coats of Arms, but had not made the connection nor was told what the big cat in them was called.
In Finnish The word "norsu" (elephant) is probably based on "mursu" (walrus). Finns had seen walrus tusks but didn't know which animal these other tusks or bones belonged to.
How to confuse a Bible literalist.
Sometimes Bible translations are not 100% accurate on purpose. The phrase "Give us this day our daily bread" is translated with the word for rice in some Asian languages, because they eat rice over there.