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38626 results in Cambridge Textbooks

Page 1496 of 1932

  • 1 - Peoples of the Book (380–661)

  • Christine Caldwell Ames, University of South Carolina
  • Book:
    Medieval Heresies
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 28-78

  • Summary

    In the early 440s, Salvian of Marseilles (c. 400–c. 480), known as a “teacher of bishops,” surveyed with great distress the changing world of the Roman Empire in the West. His On the Government of God was a sad record of failures, past and present: the Israelites of the Old Testament; his contemporary Latin Christians. To Salvian's eye, the religious landscape of the late Roman Empire was dark. Roman orthodox Christians were sinners, spurning God. And when Salvian wrote, the Germanic peoples then well advanced in transforming the empire, through settlement and conquest, were either pagans or heretical Arian Christians. Uneducated and unromanized barbarians, sighed Salvian, “follow blindly” whatever someone tells them is the truth, and in this way they had fallen into the heresy of Arianism:

    So they are heretics, but unwittingly. Indeed, it is only among us that they are heretics, and not among themselves, for they are so sure of their own orthodoxy that they libel us in turn by the accusation of heresy. As they are to us, so are we to them … God bears with them patiently, I think, for he sees that though they have not the true faith, yet their error is due to the love of what appears to be the truth, especially since he knows that their wrongdoing is due to ignorance.

    What made this worse was that their heresies “spring originally from the false teaching they received from the Romans, and the inception of heresy among them becomes another heavy charge against us.” If orthodox Romans were sinners, and Germanic Christians accidental heretics, then Roman heretics were the worst of all: “their lack of faith makes them worse than the Romans, and their disgraceful lives than the barbarians.” Given all these failures, it was “easy” for Salvian “to estimate what the whole Roman state deserves”: a just punishment from God, like that Salvian was witnessing in that state's slow collapse.

  • III - Spreading the word

  • Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Old English Reader
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 139-141

  • Summary

    ‘What page, what word in that divine authority, the Old and the New Testament, is not a most proper standard of human life?’ So runs the rhetorical question asked in ch. 73 of the Rule of St Benedict, the guide to daily life drawn up (c. 540) by Benedict of Nursia for the monks of Monte Cassino in Italy and followed, with regional variations, in most of the monasteries of late Anglo-Saxon England. But it was not just monks and nuns for whom the Bible provided a framework for everyday existence. It had a pervasive influence on all medieval life and thought, informing not only the spiritual dimension but the political and historical too.

    For the Christian, history was not the cyclical process conceived of in the classical and heroic worlds – involving the perpetual rise and fall of people and nations under the influence of blind fate or fickle gods – but a linear progression from a known beginning to a clearly anticipated end, the whole process operating within the all-embracing knowledge and will of a single, eternal God. The prelude to human history was Creation, whose paradisal promise was wrecked by Adam's and Eve's disobedience at the prompting of Satan (whose pride, in some accounts, had earlier lost him his position as God's brightest angel). It was their fall which brought pain and struggle into the world, and human history evolved under the burden of their ‘original sin’ until the moment when a merciful God presented humankind with the gift of his son, Christ. His sacrifice on the cross would offer the possibility of redemption and salvation. The end of history, in the Christian scheme of things, will be Doomsday (OE dōmes dæg, ‘day of judgement’), when everyone will be assessed in relation to their conduct on earth, and only those found deserving will enjoy an eternity of bliss in heaven.

  • 4 - Keys to test sentences and texts

  • from Beginning Old English
  • Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Old English Reader
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 27-28

  • Summary

    PROGRESS TEST (p. 22)

  • 1. Tomorrow we shall eat fishes and loaves.

  • 2. He asked me, ‘Why did you do that?’

  • 3. Tell me, what is the (or that) priest's name?

  • 4. The (or That) dumb child cannot speak.

  • 5. Then a boy came who was badly wounded.

  • 6. I heard that the saviour came here.

  • 7. She will come to you and bless you and the children (or little ones).

  • 8. The great ship was filled with dogs and men.

  • 9. The women said, ‘We want to see him’.

  • 10. We believe in this, that the person who does not eat will be ill.

  • 11. Then they answered her and said, ‘We are telling you the truth’.

  • 12. When they heard that, (then) they came to the ship.

    • PRACTICE TEXT 3a (p. 23)

    Sign-Language in the Monastery

  • 1. The sign for honey [lit. honey's sign] is that you put [lit. set] your finger on your tongue.

  • 2. When you want to drink, lay your forefinger [lit. shooting finger] along your mouth.

  • 3. When you want to have wine, make with your two fingers as if you want to draw out the spigot from a cask. [Lit. When thou wine have will, then do thou with thy two fingers as-if thou tap from cask draw-out want.]

  • 4. The sign for beer is that you rub your (one) hand on the other.

  • 5. When you want to have a fish, move your hand as it [the fish] does its tail when it swims.

  • 6. When you want to have soap, rub your hands together.

  • 7. When you want to have a comb, stroke downwards on your hair with your fingers, as if you were combing yourself.

  • 8. The sign for underpants is that you stroke with your two hands up your thigh.

    • PRACTICE TEXT 3b (p. 25)

    Sunday Special

    Then the Lord God said: ‘It is the truth that I say to you, that I was nailed on the cross for you, and there I suffered for you’. And I arose on Sunday from death, because Sunday [lit. the Sunday] is a rest-day and a glorious day and a day of brightness, and because on Sunday the Lord created heaven and earth and all the created things that are in them.

  • Preface

  • Sonia Colina, University of Arizona
  • Book:
    Fundamentals of Translation
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp xv-xxv

  • Summary

    Purpose of this book

    Overall, Fundamentals of Translation serves the purpose of disseminating up-to-date, fundamental knowledge about translation in an appropriate format for a non-specialist, broad readership.

    More specifically, the purpose of this book is threefold. It intends …

    1. … to offer a basic, easy-to-read introduction to concepts essential to translation practice.

    Practitioners, language and translation students, and professionals in related fields (managers of translators, communication specialists, etc.) need to acquire a general understanding of basic translation concepts without having to read through pages of translation theory and scholarship or publications geared toward specialists or graduate students. This need for knowledge remains mostly unmet, as evidenced by the disconnect between the current understanding of basic translation concepts among translation scholars and that possessed by translation practitioners, students and language professionals. Many language professionals and students still refer to deeply entrenched and outdated views of language and of translation, at a time when research in translation has seen unprecedented growth and advances. It is our opinion that this situation is due not to a lack of interest but to the dearth of publications that make this information accessible to wide audiences, who often feel overwhelmed and discouraged when confronted with books that are too long, too theoretical and too complex for their purposes. Along similar lines, many believe that theory and other conceptual elements are irrelevant to practice, mostly because they have been presented in a manner that is too complex and too far removed from their reality.

    2. … to reach out and introduce translation, in an accessible manner, to readers who may not intend to become translators but who work in fields that can benefit from informed knowledge about translation.

    3. … to lay the ground for a better understanding of translation among language students and other language specialists, disseminating basic concepts and dispelling myths about translation.

  • Introduction

  • Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Old English Reader
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp xvi-xxviii

  • Summary

    The period of English history which we now call ‘Anglo-Saxon’ lasted from the mid-fifth century until until the end of the eleventh, when the Normans arrived. Most surviving Anglo-Saxon manuscripts date from the latter part of this period and many of them are in Latin, but England was unique in early medieval Europe in having a thriving vernacular literature also. This was written in what we now call ‘Old English’ (OE), to distinguish it from the ‘Middle English’ stage of the evolving language, which culminated in the works of Chaucer and Malory. The fifty-seven reading texts which make up the major part of this book have been chosen to illustrate the range and variety of OE literature.

    Beginning Old English

    The first section of the book, ‘Beginning Old English’, is designed for those with little or no prior knowledge of OE. It is a graded introduction to the reading of the language, based on the belief that, with suitable guidance, this skill can be learned ‘on the job’. It is self-contained, with all vocabulary and translations provided, though the vocabulary from the practice sentences and practice texts is also integrated in the main Glossary. Help with pronunciation is given by means of an imitative system, despite its inevitable flaws (it cannot of course completely accommodate all the huge variety of ‘Englishes’ spoken by users of the book). Learners cannot be expected to master the international phonetic alphabet before they even begin.

    After a ‘Getting started’ section featuring short extracts from Beowulf, five groups of practice sentences follow, along with essential grammatical notes. All the sentences are taken from original OE texts, chosen for their relative simplicity and their usefulness in illustrating specific aspects of the language. Several have been edited or emended and some spellings have been adjusted. Each sentence is provided with a word-for-word literal translation, as well as an idiomatic translation and notes. A progress test follows the section of practice sentences, and then two practice texts. Keys to all the OE material are given. Finally, a ‘Beginning poetry’ section gives an introduction to the reading and understanding of OE verse.

  • THE TEXTS

  • Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Old English Reader
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 35-36

  • Summary

    READING THE TEXTS

    All the Old Englsh texts are provided with line-numbering, to facilitate reference to specific words or phrases.

    Each of the texts is provided liberally with glosses (i.e. translations of individual words) and notes. These are signalled within the texts themselves as follows:

  • A superscript circle (°) next to an OE word shows that the word is glossed. For poems, the gloss appears on the same line, on the far right of the page; for prose texts, the gloss is in a separate register immediately beneath the text, where corresponding line-numbers are given and glosses appear in the order in which they occur in the line.

  • Superscript angle-brackets (┌ ┐) show that the words bracketed are discussed in the notes at the bottom of the page, where again they are identified by line-numbers.

    • All the vocabulary of the texts will be found in the Glossary at the back of the book. Every instance of use is listed, and identified by text- and line-number (e.g. 2/17 = Text 2, line 17), except in the case of very common words, where only a few representative instances are listed. In the texts, space usually only allows for a single gloss to be given; alternative words are often possible and will be found in the Glossary.

  • VI - Reflection and lament

  • Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Old English Reader
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 341-343

  • Summary

    The making of wise observations on life, derived from experience and modified by reflection on that experience, and the formal (often formulaic) expression of these in song or poem, were part of the oral inheritance of the Anglo-Saxons and continued to have an essential place in their literature. Even the eponymous hero of Beowulf must find time for reflection before he performs his great deeds: ‘fate proceeds always as it must’, he announces before fighting Grendel, and ‘it's better that a man avenge his friend than mourn much’, before taking on Grendel's mother. Such sayings, whether we call them ‘maxims’ (the term usually applied to sayings with an ethical dimension) or ‘gnomes’ (more descriptive sayings) or ‘aphorisms’ (any wise or sententious sayings), pervade much of OE literature.

    There are two poems – known rather drearily as Maxims I and Maxims II – which are built entirely of such material; the second of the two begins this section (Text 33). Social regulation seems to be at least part of the purpose of such poems. They make sage and incisive comments on the world and its people, using the ordinary and the obvious to impart to their audience a sense of the necessary order of things. Closely related to maxims in their form are so-called ‘proverbs’, but they take a more robustly independent view of the world and express their truths through metaphor. As the OE collection known as the Durham Proverbs shows (Text 34), this is a more cunning and more subversive, and often humorous, method.

    Humour is a natural ingredient also, though not the only one, in many of the OE Riddles. Riddling is an active process of reflection, in which the mind is forced to participate in liberating dislocations of imagined experience; like maxims and proverbs, riddles direct us towards social and existential truths, but they do so with forensic intensity, erecting elaborate structures of double meaning and exploiting paradox as they scrutinise the things of the world and the creatures (including us) which inhabit it. A selection of five riddles is given below (Text 35).

  • V - Telling tales

  • Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Old English Reader
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 267-268

  • Summary

    The telling of tales is one of the world's oldest professions. In pre-literate societies it was the bard, minstrel, poet or (to use an OE term) scop on whom the roles not only of entertainer but also of historian fell. The oral poet was the keeper of the collective memory and transmitter of the narratives which recreated a nation's or tribe's past and the achievements of its heroes, and thereby forged its present sense of identity. The OE poem known as Widsith, which is a sort of catalogue of the professional poet's repertoire, shows this well, and so does Deor, given below in section VI (Text 36).

    The poet of Beowulf, too, never misses the chance to promote his own craft within his story. After Beowulf's defeat of Grendel, the monster's blood is hardly dry on the ground before a bard among the Danish king's thegns is produced to commemorate the hero's exploit in song (Text 31a). Then, that same evening, a minstrel performs at a celebratory feast, applying a timely check on the triumphalism of the occasion by telling the sad tale of the Danish princess Hildeburh's ill-fated marriage to Finn of the Frisians (Text 31b). It is a reminder to the Danes of how sorrow invariably seems to follow joy, and the allusive way in which this tale is told shows that the Beowulf-poet's audience were thoroughly familiar with it. Indeed, they may have known it from a version of another OE poem which has come down to us, though only in a fragment – The Fight at Finnsburh (Text 32). The surviving lines present a blow-by-blow account of an encounter between Danes and Frisians which is only lightly sketched in the longer poem. In Beowulf, the arrival of Grendel's mother to avenge her son after the Danish celebrations proves the minstrel's point about changing fortunes. The details of Beowulf's subsequent tracking down and killing of this she-monster suggest how close in character monsters and heroes may be (Text 31c). They illustrate, too, with the inclusion of an episode of divine intervention to enable the hero to complete his task, how Christianity can be used to colour a tale of the Germanic pagan world without diminishing it.

  • 24 - On False Gods (Wulfstan's De falsis deis)

  • from IV - Example and exhortation
  • Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Old English Reader
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 239-244

  • Summary

    Little is known about Wulfstan before he was appointed bishop of London in 996, though he seems to have had family connections in the East Midlands, around Peterborough or Ely. Thereafter, however, he became a prominent and influential figure in church and state, being involved among other things in the drawing up of lawcodes for two kings, Æthelred and Cnut. In 1002, he was appointed bishop of Worcester and archbishop of York and held the two sees in plurality until 1016, after which he retained York until his death in 1023.

    Four sermons in Latin and twenty-two in OE have been identified as Wulfstan's, though the number of the latter should certainly be put higher, in view of several fragments which show his highly distinctive style (discussed below). Their subjects are often eschatological – dealing, that is, with ‘end things’: death, judgement, heaven and hell – or they offer guidance on specific aspects of faith, such as baptism. Among Wulfstan's other known works are the Institutes of Polity, which sets out the distribution of authority among members of church and state, and the Canons of Edgar, a handbook of instruction for the secular clergy.

    The sermon De falsis deis is preserved in a single copy in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton 113, a two-volume homiliary (a collection of homilies) compiled at Worcester between 1064 and 1083 for the presiding bishop (another Wulfstan); it contains several items by Ælfric, as well as most of Wulfstan's sermons. De falsis deis is in fact an expansion of part of one of Ælfric's homilies (not one of the main collection of Sermones catholicae), which in turn drew on the work of a sixth-century continental writer, Martin of Braga. Pagan practices had survived into Christian times in England and Wulfstan denounced them regularly in his works; each of the lawcodes with which he was involved includes injunctions against such practices. With his archiepiscopal see at York, in a strongly Scandinavian area, he may have been particularly aware of the problem.

    The equation of Germanic deities with classical counterparts was well established in the early medieval period, with consequences still visible today in the names of the days of the week in Germanic and Romance languages.

  • 3 - Practice texts

  • from Beginning Old English
  • Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Old English Reader
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 23-26

  • Summary

    Sign-Language in the Monastery

    Anglo-Saxon monasteries were organised according to the Rule of St Benedict (see p. 139). This demanded silence from monks at table and at night time, and so systems of signing had been developed in continental monasteries to provide a non-verbal means of communication. A guide to 127 signs in OE, from which the following examples are taken, survives in a single, mid-eleventh-century copy. Nothing is known of the extent to which signs were actually used. Originally, the instructions would have been in Latin. The eight signs selected here are numbered for convenience but there is no numbering in the manuscript. New vocabulary is given below, after the text, but you might prefer to try reading it first without help, as most of the words are guessable. The signs are taken from Monasteriales Indicia: the Anglo-Saxon Monastic Sign Language, ed. and trans. D. Banham (Pinner, 1991).

    Language Note. The instructions for signing tend to be formulaic. One pattern is a simple statement: ‘The sign (tācen) of [the thing wanted] is …’. Another pattern uses a ‘correlative’ structure: ‘When you want to have [a thing], then you [make the following sign]’. In OE, ‘when’ and ‘then’ (adverb and conjunction) are expressed by the same word, þonne, making a correlative pair. In idiomatic ModE, the second þonne may be better left untranslated. Most of the verbs are in the subjunctive mood (þū sette rather than þū settest, wille rather than wilt, etc). This is because hypothesis is involved, but it makes no difference to our interpretation. Dō, gnīd and strīċ are imperative forms (i.e. they convey an order).

  • 1. Huniġes tācen is þæt þū sette þīnne finger on þīne tungan.

  • 2. Ðonne þū drincan wylle, þonne leġe þū þīnne scyte-finger andlang þīnes mūðes.

  • 3. Ðonne þū wīn habban wille, þonne dō þū mid þīnum twām fingrum, swilċe þū tæppan of tunnan ontēon wille.

  • 4. Bēores tācen is þæt þū gnīde þīne hand on þā ōþre.

  • 5. Ðonne þū fisc habban wylle, þonne weġe þū þīne hand, swilċe hē dēþ his tæġl þonne hē swymð

  • 6. Ðonne þū sāpan habban wille, þonne gnīd þū þīne handa tōgædere.

  • 7. Ðonne þū camb habban wylle, þonne strīċ þū mid þīnum fingrum on þīn feax nyþerweard, swilċe þū cembe þē.

  • 8. Breċena tācen is þæt þū strīċe mid þīnum twām handum up on þīn þēoh.

  • 13 - After the Flood (from the Old English Hexateuch: Gen 8.6–18 and 9.8–13)

  • from III - Spreading the word
  • Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Old English Reader
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 142-145

  • Summary

    According to the story told in chs. 6–9 of the Book of Genesis, God became so exasperated when he saw the corruption that had overcome the world he had created that he decided to destroy everything in it with a great flood. There was, however, one righteous man left – Noah. He was commanded by God to build an ark, into which he was to take his own family and representatives of all living animals. It rained for forty days and forty nights and the sinful world was drowned, but Noah and his companions survived in the ark. When God finally allowed the waters to recede, Noah began to send out birds. This was common practice among ancient navigators to see whether any dry land was near; if a bird did not return, it meant that it had found somewhere to land. After some delay, eventually Noah and his companions emerged from the ark and a new era for humankind began. God made a covenant with them that he would never again destroy the earth, and he established a special sign as confirmation of this, a rainbow (a natural phenomenon which features in the mythologies of many religions).

    For Christian writers, the story of Noah's flood reveals key aspects of the relationship between God and the human race, especially the concepts of judgement (for humankind's sins) and salvation (for those, like Noah, who put their trust in God). The ark itself symbolised the Christian church, with its promise of hope for the faithful, who live according to God's will while on their ‘pilgrimage’ in this earthly world; they are the citizens of the ‘City of God’, described by Augustine in his great work, De ciuitate Dei (‘On the City of God’; see bk. 15, ch. 26).

    Genesis is the first of the crucial opening books of the OT which were translated, in large part, into OE. The translations are preserved in two main manuscripts, which bring together contributions from Ælfric (see 16/headnote) and from other, unnamed, translators. One manuscript (London, British Library, Cotton Claudius B. iv) is known as a ‘Hexateuch’, because it includes the first six books of the OT (Genesis to Judges), the other (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Laud. Misc. 509) as a ‘Heptateuch’, because it has the first seven (Genesis to Joshua).

  • 14 - The Crucifixion (from the Old English Gospels: Mt 27.11–54)

  • from III - Spreading the word
  • Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Old English Reader
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 146-151

  • Summary

    The gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John provide a narrative of the career of Christ, culminating in his crucifixion and resurrection. Our word ‘gospel’ derives from OE gōdspel, ‘good news’, a translation of Latin euangelium, which was itself a borrowing of the Greek euangelion; this meant originally a ‘reward for good news’ and then came to mean the ‘good news’ itself. The Old English Gospels (formerly known as the West Saxon Gospels) represent the earliest complete rendering of the gospels in English, made from the Latin Vulgate, probably in the second half of the tenth century. Six complete manuscript copies survive, along with fragments of two others. All were made in the eleventh or twelfth centuries. It is unlikely that the OE version was intended to give the common people access to scripture, as were the much later Middle English translations associated with the reformer Wyclif. The context of both its production and its use was probably the monastery. The addition of Latin annotations to some of the manuscripts may have been to allow cross-referencing with the Vulgate, which remained the official Bible of the church; and no doubt they would have been a help for monks learning Latin, too.

    The extract given here covers the last hours of Christ's life as a man: his arrest by the Roman authorities, his ‘trial’ before Pilate and his execution, followed by his resurrection from the tomb. One of the central aims of the gospel-writers was to show Jesus to be the Messiah of the Jews, whose coming had been prophesied in the OT, and this idea of fulfilment is repeatedly emphasised by quotations from OT books. In the extract, for example (lines 40–2, translating Mt 27.35), we are told that the sharing out of Christ's clothes by his executioners fulfils the words of a prophet (see 41–2n).

    The language of the preserved copies of the Old English Gospels is late WS. The eleventh-century manuscript used here (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 140) was written by four different scribes with their own idiosyncrasies; the one who wrote the latter part of Matthew preferred the ‘late’ form heom to him for the dative plural third-person pronoun (17, 18, etc) but also wrote hym (25), another late form, and he preferred hyne to hine for the third-person accusative singular masculine pronoun.

  • 5 - Purity and peoples (1328–1510)

  • Christine Caldwell Ames, University of South Carolina
  • Book:
    Medieval Heresies
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 263-322

  • Summary

    Sometime before 1391, an anonymous writer against the Waldenses threw at them a familiar charge: because they were divided, their religious beliefs must not be true. God was unity and harmony, not fragmentation and weakness. As we've seen, this criticism was often used throughout the Middle Ages by Christians, Jews, and Muslims alike – with the critics usually ignoring their own religion's splits and diversity. However, this anti-Waldensian polemicist gave the traditional accusation a decidedly national spin:

    They are divided into three parts in their opinions and errors. And therefore they by no means constitute the Church, since the Church is one … These Waldensians constitute a three-headed monster in nature, for they say they make one body and yet they have three heads. For some of their heresiarchs are called ‘Romans’, others ‘Piedmontese’, others ‘Germans’, nor does any one of them receive jurisdiction or authority from another, nor profess himself [to be] the subject of another.

    This accusation referred to the schism that had broken the Waldenses in 1205, which had split the group into French and northern Italian branches. But it also reflects a very late-medieval way to think about and to organize people, one in which heresy was deeply engaged. We see in the late Middle Ages an increasing consciousness about people as naturally distributed into nations, with vernacular languages as an important component of that identity.

    Certainly, persons everywhere had long understood and described themselves (and others) as different kinds of collectives, whether “people” or “nation.” We might recall from Chapter 3, for instance, twelfth-century Muslim heresiographer al-Shahrastani, who observed that humans could be grouped by language, ethnicity, or geography in addition to religious creed. But something began to change in the late Middle Ages.

  • 2 - Triumphs of orthodoxy (661–1031)

  • Christine Caldwell Ames, University of South Carolina
  • Book:
    Medieval Heresies
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 79-136

  • Summary

    In 833, ‘Abbasid Caliph al-Ma’ mun (r. 813–33) instructed the governor of Iraq to launch an investigation into wrong belief. The governor, Ishaq ibn Ibrahim, was to summon several judges and find “out from them their beliefs about God's creating and originating the Qur'an in time.” They should be warned that those not agreeing with the caliph's own belief – that the Qur'an was created – would lose public status and position. Judges whose orthodoxy was assured should then, in turn, be ordered to “interrogate closely the legal witnesses in their sphere of jurisdiction and to question them about their knowledge of the Qur'an; then [they are] no longer to recognize the validity of the testimony of those failing to affirm or hold the view that the Qur'an was created and originated in time.” Once Ishaq ibn Ibrahim received reports from the judges, he should himself write to the caliph to communicate “the results of their enquiries.” Finally, the governor was instructed to “keep a close oversight [upon] them and search out what they have been doing.” In these examinations, those who had formerly held that the Qur'an was uncreated should repent publicly; those who refused would be executed.

    Caliph al-Ma'mun's “inquisition” (mihna) lasted several years, and in many ways resembled the more famous Christian heresy inquisitions that would begin in earnest in the thirteenth century. Suspects were interrogated; publicly acknowledged their error; punished (and possibly executed) if they didn't; and watched afterwards. Although there were differences – notably the lack of foundation in Roman law – it is not too much to say that these trials were the first heresy inquisitions of the medieval world.

    In the usual narrative of medieval heresy, the early Middle Ages are rather empty, neither very useful nor enticing. Especially after the combative liveliness of the centuries we have just encountered, this period can seem too quietly devoid of controversy.

  • 3 - The functions of translation: Pragmatics

  • Sonia Colina, University of Arizona
  • Book:
    Fundamentals of Translation
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 79-110

  • Summary

    INTRODUCTION

    Chapter 2 considered how textual functions and other extra-linguistic factors shape texts in both monolingual and translational contexts. The role played by translation norms, which are implicit behavioral practices regarding translation activity, was also examined. Chapter 3 will focus on language and translation functions by examining pragmatics and its relevance to translation. After a brief introduction to the concept of pragmatics, this section covers the differences between grammatical/syntactic functions and pragmatic functions, speech acts, which are closely related to function and intention, presuppositions (in connection with the idea of information shared by writer and reader) and the non-linguistic context.

    What is pragmatics?

    Pragmatics is a discipline that investigates language use in its social and cultural context. In particular, pragmatics studies how language is interpreted by users beyond the literal meaning of the actual words used. In order to do that, it considers the effects of the linguistic and non-linguistic context on that interpretation. The non-linguistic context includes participants, their relationships, attitudes and emotions, inferencing procedures, cultural and word knowledge, etc. Much of what we covered in the previous section in connection with functionalism in translation falls under the purview of pragmatics.

    To better understand what pragmatics is, consider Example 3.1.

    Example 3.1: Pragmatic adequacy

    [In the street, to a stranger]

  • i. Excuse me, do you have the time?

  • a. Yes. I don't have a watch, but my cell phone has a clock.

  • b. It's five o'clock.

    • In English, (i) is normally interpreted as a request for the time, despite the fact that the question is not “What time is it?” As a result, the pragmatically adequate answer is (b). We may wonder how we come to interpret the question “Do you have the time?” as “What time is it?” – as a request, rather than a question asking for information.

  • 1 - The term “translation”: Concept, definitions and usage

  • Sonia Colina, University of Arizona
  • Book:
    Fundamentals of Translation
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 1-42

  • Summary

    INTRODUCTION

    Most books on translation start out with a section devoted to the definition of translation. In that respect, this book is not unlike them. Yet, it also differs significantly from them. While it makes sense for many publications to define and delimit their field of study before embarking on it, the concept and definition of translation are core elements of Fundamentals of Translation. Fundamentals is about achieving a better understanding of the concept and definition of translation. In this first chapter, we explicitly present the concept and associated terms, and then devote the remainder of the book to related issues, with the goal of helping the reader come to a deeper understanding and a transformed conceptualization of translation. The following sections take as their point of departure a brief, basic definition of translation and related terms (e.g., translating, interpreting, translation studies), to later present the difficulties involved in arriving at a more definitive concept, including the notion of equivalence. In an effort to assist the reader in acquiring a more up-to-date conceptualization of the term, the chapter also reviews types of translation activity, professional translation (i.e., translation in a professional context) and their connection with translation ability.

    Translation, translating and translation studies

    As illustrated by the examples in Example 1.1, the term translation can refer to an activity, a product and the scholarly field that studies both the activity and the product(s). This book will deal with the first two, namely, the product (translation or translations), and the activity or process that produced this product(s) (also referred to as translating). The distinction between the process and the product is not always clear-cut, as the two concepts often overlap, whereby it can be difficult to draw a clear line where the one ends and the other begins.

    Example 1.1: The term “translation”

  • Product. The brochure was a translation from English, so it did not work well in the Russian market.

  • Process. The interns were working on a translation of the letter from the principal to the workers.

  • Field. Translation is sometimes considered an area of applied linguistics.

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