Is Greek Really More Expressive Than English?
I found a blog this evening discussing how Greek is “more expressive” than English and how this affects translations. Here is what the author wrote:
“The New Testament was initially written in a language that is generally more expressive than English tends to be, and sometimes our English versions do not fully convey the depth or the clarity communicated in the original Greek text. This is not always a weakness of translation as much as a limitation of the English language itself.”
You may have heard someone say something like the following as well: “Hebrew is a more simple language. You can say things with Greek that you just couldn’t communicate in Hebrew.” Have you ever thought about this? First, are some languages really “more expressive” than others? And, second, is this true with Koine Greek compared to English?
In Linguistics for Students of New Testament Greek, David Alan Black writes:
“Most importantly, because languages are similar, all languages will share the same high degree of adequacy in communication—in spite of their differences. Linguists reject the notion that any one language can be more expressive than all other languages, an opinion incorrectly held by many teachers of New Testament Greek. God has undoubtedly conferred special honor upon Greek as the language chosen for the inscripturation of the New Testament, but Greek is not inherently superior to the other languages of the world. At present, both linguists and Bible translators agree that any language can express whatever ideas its speakers are capable of having, and that a language can and does expand and change to fit new needs or ideas those speakers may have” (17–18).
To quote Astroboy over at Philosophy Forums, “Different does not mean more expressive.”
When thinking about this topic, I can’t help but think of that question people sometimes ask those they love: “How much do you love me?” The response “There just aren’t enough words” can sound like the problem is a deficient number of words in English. People say things like “Words really do not suffice…” But the issue there isn’t that the language lacks the capacity to communicate; it’s that our ability to communicate is finite. Sometimes the limitation is not lexical inventory but the communicator’s ability to convey what they mean (and the listener’s ability to receive it). In one sense this is rhetorical, but it’s true too: there are experiences, emotions, and nuances that are difficult to express—not because the language is inferior, but because communication itself is hard.
Translation falls under communication. And the same primary limitation is often true: it lies with the translator, not with the language itself.
When I was reading the blog quoted at the beginning of this post, my immediate reaction was that the author did not really show that English is limited in communicating the ideas of Greek. It seemed to me that he made a fine presentation on how English translations—especially “literal” translations—can fail to think past the lexical level of Greek when carrying it over into English. English can certainly capture any idea found in the New Testament. The problem is that many people believe translation must be quantitatively exact and lexically consistent in every instance in the receptor language.
By quantitatively exact I mean one word for one word. And by lexically consistent I mean a single word has to carry over into the receptor language in exactly the same way without giving attention to things like author, context, and date of composition.
We need to be careful when we say that Greek is “one or two up” on any language. In fact, we don’t need to say it at all. One of my hesitations about claims like this (besides the fact that I don’t think they’re true) is how they can breed dangerous assumptions in local church ministry. It’s not hard to imagine someone who knows Greek entering a church with the mindset, “I wish you knew Greek because then you’d understand what this passage is really saying. There’s just no way for me to put it into words. It’s too deep. Your English translation just doesn’t get it done here.”
That creates at least two major problems in a local church setting. First, it undermines the trust believers should have in their English Bibles. I don’t want to tear down someone’s confidence in their Bible. Second, it can put the pastor on a pedestal—as if he possesses special knowledge that is essentially unknowable to anyone else apart from access to the original languages. That’s a subtle but real shift away from serving the congregation toward positioning oneself above it.
In conclusion, I don’t think any language is “more expressive” than any other language. This includes Greek. What we should consider doing is thinking beyond the word-level of sentences we translate. And for a pastor interested in seeing how a verse or set of verses can be rendered, it’s wise to consult multiple translations during study. Don’t just look at the NASB and ESV either. Check other translations, and—if you know other languages—pay attention to how other translation traditions have made sense of the Greek.