From: Steven Craig Miller (firstname.lastname@example.org)
Date: Tue Feb 15 2000 - 17:10:19 EST
<x-flowed>To: the participants of B-Greek,
Myron C. Tuman, in his "A Preface to Literacy: An Inquiry into Pedagogy,
Practice, and Progress" (The University of Alabama Press, 1987), writes:
<< Few languages of the world without a written form have a word for
'word,' that is, have a word by which to refer to the concept of discrete,
meaningful verbal units that are combined to form utterances >> (95).
<< Scribner and Cole, for example, discuss the difficulty they had asking
native Vai speakers to name the longest word they knew, since the Vai
language has no word for "word" and since the subjects themselves were
often unaware of the underlying concept. The closest Vai equivalent,
Scribner and Cole note, literally meant "a piece of speech" or "utterance,"
and they discovered when they asked an expert in Vai script to divide a
piece of writing into such "pieces" what we might expect--that he grouped
units together on the basis of the way in which they were used in a
specific context. The minimal unit of speech for this expert was not
individual words as we know them but clusters of meaning. In studying
another West African language, Jack Goody notes that the native term for
"word" was best translated as "'bit' of speech" (1977:115), leading him to
conclude that "in the beginning was not the word but speech" >> (95).
One common definition of the term "word," for example, as given by John
Lyons in his "Semantics" (2 volumes; Cambridge University Press, 1977), is
<< ... a word is any sequence of letters which, in normal typographical
practice, is bounded on either side by a space >> (1:18).
Of course, such "normal typographical practice" simply did not exist for
our earliest Greek MSS.
Under the entry on LOGOS in LSJM, they note the following:
<< VI. 'verbal expression' or 'utterance' ..., rarely a single 'word,' v.
infr. b, never in Gramm. signf. of vocable (EPOS, LEXIS, ONOMA, RHMA), usu.
of a 'phrase' ... >>
And it is interesting to note that although Louw & Nida  give "Word"
as one of a number of possible meanings for LOGOS, they don't give "word"
as one of them.
Although "Word" as a translation of LOGOS is enshrined in tradition, I
wonder if perhaps "utterance" (or even "Utterance" -- I'm not trying to
raise any Christological issues here) might be a better translation of
LOGOS at John 1:1a. Similarly, I wonder if Psalms 33:6a might be better
translated as: "by the utterance of Yahweh the heavens were made." (BDB
gives "utterance" as a meaning for the Hebrew word DBR.)
I'll note that Tyndale  translated LOGOS at John 1:1 as "word." Does
anyone have any idea why Tyndale made such a choice? And is it possible
that for Tyndale, the term "word" might have meant "utterance"? OED1 seems
to suggest that the notion of "word" referring to "a combination of vocal
sounds, or one such sound, used in a language to express an idea (e.g. to
denote a thing, attribute, or relation), and constituting an ultimate
minimal element of speech having a meaning as such; a vocable" dates back
to 1000 CE (I have the small print edition of OED1 and I hope my eyes
aren't playing tricks on me).
What do you think?
-Steven Craig Miller
Alton, Illinois (USA)
FWIW: I'm neither a clergy-person, nor an academic (and I have no post-grad
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