[qwerty456127]

Same thing with the Bible - to me reading it as a single translation seems making little sense. Reading every verse in multiple versions in multiple languages, looking up multiple meanings of every word feels a whole different story. Luckily reading Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Latin and Old English is much easier than reading Chinese. I still feel like learning Chinese to read Taoist texts though, because they are so cool, Alan Watts inspired me to the point I can't imagine giving up this idea.

[harimau777]

For people who aren't Christian or aren't as familiar with the various translations:

English translations of the Bible tend to be a tradeoff between making the text easy to read for modern English speakers (at the risk of inserting the translator's own interpretation of the text) versus translating the text literally. The tradeoff is particularly important since some sects of Christianity believe that the specific words of the Bible as originally written were inspired by God. As you might expect, most translations fall somewhere in the middle between literal and readable.

The existence of the King James Version (KJV) further complicates things. As I understand it, most scholars would consider it an accurate translation but not necessarily an extremely literal translation. Being written in the 1600s, it doesn't incorporate the most recent scholarship and archeology; e.g. certain verses that scholars no longer think were in the original text[1]. However, because of how culturally influential the KJV is there can be significant resistance to using other versions. The extreme being the King James Only Movement which believes that the KJV is the only acceptable version of the Bible.

Wikipedia has pretty good articles on a lot of these subjects:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_version_debate

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_translations

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_James_Only_movement

[1] I want to emphasize here: These range from relatively minor differences in wording, to stories that appear to be original but may be in the wrong chronological place in the narrative, to passages (notably the story of "The Woman Caught in Adultery") that may not be original. Although personally I don't think these differences call the reliability of the Bible into question, it's a nuanced subject and you definitely shouldn't just take my word for it.

[Podgajski]

Regarding the Bible, you should read Young’s literal translation. It blew me away how much liberties that king James version took in their interpretation.

[guerrilla]

Thanks for the tip. That sounds fun.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young's_Literal_Translation

Text: https://www.bible.com/bible/821/GEN.1.YLT98

Audio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1xjL2wFDoY&list=PLciALUPf8s...

"THE WORD OF GOD IS MADE VOID BY THE TRADITIONS OF MEN."

So cool.

[suoduandao3]

Is there a difference between '-th' and '-s' suffixes in English? I thought 'seeth' was just an old fashioned way of saying 'sees' but now I'm wondering if this is saying something about tenses that I'm missing.

[ralferoo]

-(e)th was the Middle English ending for 3rd person singular and plural present tense. It has mostly been replaced by -s in Modern English, except for a few fixed expressions (e.g. my mum used to say "quoth he" which is subtly different from the modern "he quoted" or "he quotes" which is normally followed by an object that is being quoted as well as the quote itself).

Middle English is quite interesting in general, as it still has a pretty regular inflection system for verbs that's largely been lost now (3rd person singular -s is the main vestige): https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Middle_English_verbs...

It's also interesting to look at the case system for ME nouns too, as it makes some things easier to understand. For instance the 's in Modern English for possessive is really just an abbreviation for the -es genitive case, which probably occurred when spoken forms had changed from -es to -s, which in turn was probably due to the shift to drop terminal -e from words which had started even by Chaucer's day (some places in Canterbury Tales you need to treat the -e as its own syllable to hear the rhyme, in other places it needs to be silent).

[yorwba]

saith is to says as says is to sez, in the sense that each spelling is an attempt to represent English pronunciation in writing and their progression tells us something about how the pronunciation changed over time, but not everyone who uses a certain spelling necessarily also pronounces the word the way one might naïvely expect based on the spelling.