spin

As I said in my first post on this topic, "ay" is a f*cking diphthong, ie made up of two vowel sounds. It is wrong to transcribe an eta as "ay", despite the fact that it is sometimes done in English texts. If you start with an /ε/ (open /e/) [some start with the mouth even wider, as in /a/] and finish with an /i/, you get English "ay".

An eta is about halfway between the two sounds /ε/ (open /e/) and an /i/, could be described as a closed /e/, and it is a longer vowel, ie the mouth doesn't change position (closing) while saying it.

In some pronunciations of English the major difference between "bid" and "bead" is length of vowel. The major difference between eta and epsilon is the length of the vowel. (In some languages, such as Finnish, vowel length is shown by doubling the vowel, so that "tuuli" means something very different from "tuli" (and from "tulli").)

The general lack of knowledge of people in Anglo-Saxon based speech communities reflects the fact that they are detached from any basic phonetic disposition because of the incoherent English spelling. Does the following list make sense of the notion, one letter for one sound: buy, bi, by, bye, eye, etc. or though, thought, through, plough, rough, etc.?

Now, in my first post about the pronunciation of Jesus, I said
It isn't transparent, so yes, something's "odd" about this name "Iesous". Yet the major difference is the length of the vowel, not the quality and much stranger developments have happened routinely.


spin

andrewcriddle

Gautama Buddha (the Boddhisatva) becomes Josaphat like this

Boddhisatva or Bodhisat in Sanskrit becomes
Budhasaf in Arabic becomes
Iodasaph in Georgian becomes
Ioasaph in Greek becomes
Josaphat in Latin

Andrew Criddle

Toto

I thought that IHSOUS was used in the Septuagint as a translation of the Hebrew name that is usually translated into English as Joshua. What difference would this oddity make as far as Christian origins goes?

Dharma

I'm wondering what the original translation of Bodhisatva was by the Greeks, before the destruction of Alexandria, would the western Asiatic Greeks learn of the Boddhisatva as "Ioasaph" or another word?

spin

I'd forgotten about that. The form would have been inherited from the LXX, so any problems once again go back to the Jewish translators, after all the name is used over 200 times in the LXX for Joshua.


spin

Chris Weimer

Um, that's what I was saying. :P I was asking if it might have been Christian interpolation, but then of course the Christians most likely got it from there so it is unlikely. Then I summed up by saying "It is odd indeed."

Chris

spin

One of the reasons for my response was to deal with this: "I wonder if the translators might have had something else in the beginning?", giving a "no" response. That was the purpose of my first paragraph.

But I'm almost as confused about your paragraph above and its relation to your previous response as you have me about that previous response.


spin

Chris Weimer

In the first post, I already answered my question with the question "where else..." which I guess you took as me asking the question again but then...

Ah screwit.

Chris

andrewcriddle

a/ Bodhisat and Ioasaph appear too distinct to be a plausible direct translation from an Indian language into Greek

b/The whole concept of Gautama Buddha as Bodhisatva is far more prominent in Mahayana Buddhism than in earlier forms of Buddhism. It is unlikely that any Greek would have encountered the concept before at least the 2nd century CE.

Andrew Criddle

Dharma

exactly, but so is Iousus and Joshua or Yashua. Remember, that Jews were involved in the translation, not foreigners, why would Jews take such HUGE mispronunciations of their own texts...it is unprecedented. I would agree with the poster who said it might be for the sake of Gematria that many of these rare words were even used...I can't find any other possible explanation.