Chapter 11.—Knowledge of
Languages, Especially of Greek and Hebrew, Necessary to Remove
Ignorance or Signs.
16. The great remedy for
ignorance of proper signs is knowledge of languages. And men who
speak the Latin tongue, of whom
are those I have undertaken to
instruct, need two other languages for the knowledge of Scripture,
Hebrew and Greek, that they may have recourse to the original texts
if the endless diversity of the Latin translators throw them into
doubt. Although, indeed, we often find Hebrew words untranslated
in the books as for example, Amen, Halleluia, Racha, Hosanna, and
others of the same kind. Some of these, although they could have
been translated, have been preserved in their original form on
account of the more sacred authority that attaches to it, as for
example, Amen and Halleluia. Some of them, again, are said to be
untranslatable into another tongue, of which the other two I have
mentioned are examples. For in some languages there are words
that cannot be translated into the idiom of another language. And
this happens chiefly in the case of interjections, which are words
that express rather an emotion of the mind than any part of a
thought we have in our mind. And the two given above are said to
be of this kind, Racha expressing the cry of an angry man, Hosanna
that of a joyful man. But the knowledge of these languages is
necessary, not for the sake of a few words like these which it is
very easy to mark and to ask about, but, as has been said, on
account of the diversities among translators. For the
translations of the Scriptures from Hebrew into Greek can be
counted, but the Latin translators are out of all number. For in
the early days of the faith every man who happened to get his hands
upon a Greek manuscript, and who thought he had any knowledge, were
it ever so little, of the two languages, ventured upon the work of
translation.