Phrossack
Armored Fish and Armored Men
- Joined
- Oct 26, 2008
- Messages
- 6,045
Translating names and words literally is fun and educational, and helps knock Latin and Greek off their high horses a bit. The orator was called Marcus Tullius Chickpea. Africa is full of beasts like the riverhorse and the nosehorn and many beasts are dragged into the water by the Nile pebbleworm.
Rome sounds very sophisticated when you read about things like the Senate, the gens, dictatores, and maniples. But when you translate these to "elder council," "clan," "tell-ers," and "handfuls," it comes back down to earth and you remember that they were once a cattle-herding hill people who sometimes wore wolf-pelts on their heads when going to raid rival tribes, much like any "barbarians." It is said that Demokritos theorized the atom, but really he was asking, "What if there's something so small you can't cut it up into smaller things?", which seems less like advanced science than like teenagers looking up at the stars and saying, "Dude..."
Do I oversimplify here? Maybe! But, to avoid a long ramble about the clearness or word choice and a retelling of Orwell's "Politics and the English Language," I'll just say translating things word for word, beyond being fun and enlightening, makes the Romans and Greeks seem less like stuffy, abstract, authoritative, colorless marble and more like the living, breathing, normal flesh and blood they really were.
