 The new series it's called a lunch break with Luke. I would tell you about this series But it'll become clear as it goes on today I want to talk about Something that you should probably find really boring, but hopefully hopefully you'll understand why it's important and the boring thing is Translation okay linguistic translation many of you guys know that I am a linguist I also know classical languages and stuff. It's just stuff. I've done and I want to talk about some of the problems the Inevitable constraints that happen when you are translating something or well, I'll just jump into it Okay, so take translating English to German or vice versa. It's not a very difficult thing to do Okay, English and German they're related languages They have some aspects that are different, but they're mostly it's easy to translate From from English to German now, of course, if you know, you know, there are lots of specifics You have to look out for but it's not it's not like there's something in English. That's totally untranslatable in German same thing Even in languages that aren't really related to English that much so take Chinese Despite the fact that Chinese is a totally unrelated language to English It's relatively easy to translate something from Chinese to English or vice versa now again Chinese Linguistically is very different. Okay, Chinese has serial verb constructions. We have Participals, right? We have different constructions and things like that, but it's not so difficult to translate not just the Chinese language, but the Chinese mindset but When you're talking about ancient translation You're often talking about Translating not just a language, but a totally different mindset the modern people don't necessarily have Right. So when you hear people talk about ancient Greek philosophy like it means something to us nowadays I'm not really keen on ancient Greek philosophy But you'll hear them talking about the good, you know, though You'll hear them talking about logos all these words that are either not translatable or You translate them into English and they make absolutely no sense Okay, and that's because you know that the abstract categories that people in ancient society The concepts that they had in their brain and were important to them are just not analogous to things that we talk about nowadays And this isn't just a linguistic thing. I mean take taking another example So, you know, you know, one of my favorite collections of poetry is the Karmina Burana, which is a medieval Latin poetry Selection one of the reasons I like it is is that it's the kind of thing that even though it's written in Latin It could have been written today. It has a very modern mindset. Is it even has a modern rhyme scheme I find it very enjoyable if you I just find it enjoyable. I'll just say that but if you compare that where the mindset of the people writing it is pretty similar to us and some kind of earlier Latin text, it's like night and day or You know, really, you know, a lot of times when we're looking at ancient texts Even, you know, in languages like Latin or ancient Greek that we know relatively well and have a constant strain of communication up to us You know, there's a lot of nuance that just sort of is totally lost there and you translate these documents You translate philosophical or metaphysical documents and they make absolutely no sense It's like people are just talking in words that don't make any sense to us Now that's even more true when you talk about something like ancient Egyptian or Samarian or something like that where there is not a constant chain of communication to us We've rediscovered reinterpreted these languages. So, um, you know, I was reading for not related this book, what is it Hamlet's Mill and one point they note in there that If you go through an Egyptian Dictionary ancient Egyptian dictionary, there's something like 60 words that mean the equivalent of heaven now That's not that they're all synonyms. They all have slightly different nuance But we don't know how to translate those so we translate them as heaven Okay, where our words for heaven or sky or stratosphere might mean something different they have a metaphysical view of the world where all of these words mean something a little different and That has been totally lost to time So when we read some kind of funerial document from written in ancient Egyptian Or, you know, something written in Samarian or something like that a language we barely have deciphered a lot of words We don't even know Don't know how they're pronounced or something like that When we're translating something like that. Well, of course It's gonna be gobbledygook. All right. So, you know, let's if you imagine put yourself in their shoes Okay, let's say there's a there's a pretty advanced Either metaphysical or scientific dialogue that they're having and it could it's going to appear to us as total gobbledygook But imagine if we were in the same position imagine if our society collapses, okay And let's say There's a book unix system administration. There's a lot of wisdom in that book. It means a lot to people now Who know stuff about unix system administration But if our society collapses computers, you know, don't exist anymore It's sort of entropy the complex stuff is going to be destroyed or degrades faster um, you know, if you Uncover a library of ours and uncover unix system administration Well, some esotericist of the future would read this book And they would read it as if it was some kind of occult magic book Oh, it's talking about said and awk and grep and all these Magical commands and they don't understand them as you know being what they actually are as you know computer programs They understand them as you know, this is some kind of book. It's a metaphysical language or something like that So when you're looking at documents that we have not deciphered that's sort of the the mindset You really have to have That is a lot of stuff, you know, the tenant there's a modernist tendency that people have When you read something that is poorly translated that we don't really know what it is and we read that in English You know, sometimes people say oh well people back then were just crazy. They were just saying random stuff It doesn't make any sense. They're just dumb modern good ancient bad, but the reality is we have totally lost a a You know intellectual traditions are lost all the time And once you lose that kind of jargon, it becomes totally indecipherable, you know, whenever you try and understand what's going on You know, one other example, I was thinking about recently, you know, I was reading some old medieval linguistic stuff You know, there's this school of thought called the modists So the modists you can translate their stuff from latin into english and a lot of it translates word for word But you read it in english and it's not going to make any sense I read some of their stuff in latin. I was like, maybe my latin's bad. I'll read a translation in english made even less sense And that's because they have a bunch of jargon I mean, you know, if you're a real pro at this kind of stuff, you can understand modists But you know, that's it's not it's neither here nor there But the point is they have a bunch of jargon that you have to Really be explicitly taught and if you don't know what they're talking about even if you literally translate it It doesn't make any sense and you're you're looking at what they're writing as if it's just a much a nonsense. So Anyway, that's what I wanted to talk about. So I think it's important to have a sense of humbleness When people translate ancient texts Just because uh, you know, a lot of people again, they come in this modern mindset where If something doesn't make sense as it's written in 21st century english If I literally translate it or translate the nuance then it must be proof of their stupidity If it doesn't make sense when really it's sort of a statement of our translators ignorance and not just translation but interpretation of texts So anyway, that's pretty much all I had to say today. So I will see you guys next time