You should hear it in the original Greek!

Singing Angels We Have Heard On High in church this morning reminded me of something I thought of some years back when I was first learning Greek: namely, that you can replace the Latin refrain Gloria in excelsis Deo in the carol with the original Greek, Δόξα ἐν ὑψίστοις θεῷ (Doxa en hupsistois theo). It's not quite a perfect fit since δόξα has two syllables to gloria's three, but it's generally less awkward to stretch a syllable slightly than to squash another one in. 

I've mentioned this curiosity to a few people over the years, but today it occurred to me that with LilyPond I could engrave some sheet music to demonstrate it. I brushed off my LilyPond skills (which I found surprisingly fresh for not having been used in a few years) and spent a few hours today making this lovely rendition:

Thankfully, I found a version of Christ, the Lord, is Risen Today I'd done a few years ago laying around which gave me a very useful hymn template, including useful features like multiple verses and a refrain; otherwise having to figure out how to do that would've taken me a lot more than a few hours. There are a few small cosmetic tweaks I could still do (the lyrics attach to the soprano voice so there are few choices which simplify the lyrics handling at the expense of nice-looking notes), but it should be performable. I hope. Let me know if you do.

Anyway, Merry Christmas! I know it's been pretty quiet around here, but there are positive developments which I hope to share in the not-too-distant future. A hui hou!

Edit: Actually, I forgot to mention the most interesting thing I learned while doing this, which is that the the way I grew up singing Angels We Have Heard On High is different from how the music reads. I'm short on time at the moment and it really needs some music to show visually rather than trying to explain it in words, so I'll return to this in the future when I have time.

Edit 2: Okay, here's a picture showing the music as traditionally written (top) and how I grew up hearing it. I'm just focusing on the melody here for simplicity:

This four-bar phrase gets repeated for the second half of each verse, so we can look at it by itself. The thing that immediately drew my attention is that in the traditional formulation the entire phrase begins and ends on the same note (A), whereas the way I grew up with it has the final three notes descend to the F below. To me, the traditional way sounded quite jarring at first (to the point I thought I'd made a mistake in transcribing the music) because it feels like there's no resolution: you begin on A, sing around it a bit, then end…back on A, where you started. The version I'm familiar with does that in the first half of the phrase (setting up a mild unresolved tension), but then resolves it in the second half at the end.

Of course, in music, there's no right or wrong, just different matters of taste. Having listened to a rendition of the traditional melody a few times I find it growing on me. The song is one whose origins have been lost in the mist of time, so we can't exactly ask the author(s?) what they were thinking. Perhaps the verses are intentionally set up this way to increase the emotional payoff from the spectacular resolution in the refrain, which is the kind of beautiful polyphonic waterfall of sound you no longer find in modern church music. Anyway, let me know in the comments which version you heard growing up, I'm curious if what I learned is widespread or some local phenomenon. I can't really trace it to a single source, it's just…how I know the song.

ἠγέρθη! He Was Raised!

ἠγέρθη!

Matthew, Mark, and Luke all record this same angelic utterance in their respective recountings of the Resurrection. (It's pronounced ē-GER-thē.). If we parse it we get third-person singular aorist passive indicative, “he was raised.”

The aorist tense gives the action the perfective aspect, a single unit of completed action, without internal structure or ongoing duration. Jesus was raised, over and done.

The passive voice indicates the subject being the recipient of the action and reveals the Divine agency latent in the Resurrection; Jesus was raised by the Father, not of his own agency.

And finally, the all-important indicative mood, not the "possible" or "potential" of the subjunctive or optative moods but the factual actuality of reality. Jesus was raised! Happy Easter everyone!

Adding Cubits to your Lifespan

In my Bible-reading this morning I ran across Matthew 6:27 where Jesus says “And who of you by worrying can add a single πῆχυν to his ἡλικίαν?” This is an interesting verse to translate, because ἡλικίαν (pronounced heylikian, with the i's sounding like the i in machine) is usually translated as something like ‘lifespan,’ but πῆχυν (pronounced peychoon, where the ‘ch’ sounds like it does in German ‘Bach’ or Scottish ‘loch’) is a very straightforward word meaning ‘cubit.’

On the face of it, this doesn't make grammatical sense; how do you add a cubit to your lifespan? This has lead to two divergent translations I've seen: one involves translating πῆχυν as ‘hour’ (despite there being another definite word for hour, ὥρα [hora]), while the other translates ἡλικίαν as ‘height.’

Neither of these translations sound really good to my ear, so I when I came to the passage this morning I decided to go back to the literal meaning of both words and incorporate insights from relativity theory. Relativity tells us that time is simply another dimension like the three dimensions of space (which are inextricably linked in a four-dimensional spacetime), and that by using the speed of light as a conversion factor we can use units of measurement for space to measure time, and vice versa. What does a ‘second of distance’ mean? It's the distance light travels in one seconds, approximately 186,000 miles or 300,000 kilometers. And similarly, one ‘meter of time’ is the amount of time it takes light to travel one meter, approximately three nanoseconds.

A cubit, by the way, is very close to half a meter, so what Jesus is basically saying here is that you can't add even a nanosecond and a half to your life by worrying—so don't worry, because your Heavenly Father is in control. A hui hou!

Fun with False Cognates

I discovered an interesting false cognate in church today between Greek and Hawaiian. False cognates, for the curious, are two words from different languages that sound similar and have the same meaning, but have no linguistic history between them. An example would be the word dog (meaning a domesticated canine), which means the same thing and is pronounced the same in both English and the Australian Aboriginal language Mbabaram despite having developed completely independently. Another case would be the Hawaiin word kahuna, which means “priest”, and the Hebrew word k'huna (כְּהוּנָה) which means “priesthood”.

The one I discovered today is between the Hawaiian word pau, meaning “finished, done, ended,” and the Koine Greek root παύ- (pau-), meaning “stop, cease, to stop or make cease.” It wasn't in the list of false cognates on Wikipedia when I checked today, so as far as I know I may be the first person ever to notice it (given that there are probably not that many people who are familiar with both Koine Greek and Hawaiian). It's in the list now because I added it while writing this post.

(Edit 3/23/19: The Wikipedia list has since been shortened dramatically to just a few examples, not including this one, and on reflection this was probably noticed by the missionaries translating the Bible into Hawaiian a hundred and fifty-odd years ago. Oh well, it's still an interesting find.)

Anyone else out there have any interesting ones to share that aren't yet in Wikipedia? Feel free to post 'em here and add 'em to the list if you do!

Νυνὶ δὲ Χριστὸσ ἐγήγερται...

The title of this post comes from Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 15 verse 20, "But now Christ has been raised from the dead..." where Paul points out how the Christian faith stands or falls on the historicity of the bodily resurrection of Jesus.

Apparently some among the early followers of the Way in Corinth were denying the possibility of resurection of the dead. Paul spends a good paragraph meticulously pointing out the logical consequences that flow from this premise, namely that Christianity itself is worthless and Christians are ἐλεεινότεροι πάντων ἀνθρώπων, of all men most to be pitied if Jesus was not, in fact, raised from the dead in the first place. The point is so important that he makes it twice in slightly different terms: if there is no resurrection from the dead, then Jesus hasn't been raised. If Jesus hasn't been raised, then your faith is κενὸν – empty, worthless, void of purpose. We might as well all be Epicureans. You can be a Christian if and only if (and I don't use that specific logical term lightly) you accept the fact of Jesus having been raised from the dead (the passive voice of that verb is a discussion for another time). If you don't accept the resurrection of the dead as a real possibility, you cannot consistently be a Christian because you destroy the whole foundation of your faith; and likewise if you accept the fact of Jesus' resurrection, you have no logically consistent choice but to accept Him for who He claimed to be.

"Νυνὶ δὲ Χριστὸσ ἐγήγερται..." And here Paul pulls a proof from contradiction out of the syllogisms of the preceding section: But since Christ has, in fact, been raised, we see that the premise that there is no resurrection of the dead leads to a false conclusion, and thus the premise itself must be false (to paraphrase slightly). As many people over the ages have investigated, found, and proclaimed, the Resurrection is one of the best-attested facts of history. "But since Christ has been raised, your faith is not worthless. It's not pointless. And that's just a taste of what's going to come." (Again paraphrasing.)

A hui hou everyone, and happy Easter! Remember He has been raised indeed.

Happy Resurrection Day!

“No ke aha lā ʻoukou e ʻimi ai i ka mea ola i waena o ka poʻe make? ʻAʻole ʻo ia ma ʻaneʻi; akā, ua ala aʻe nei ia.”  -Luke 24:5b-6a
“Why will you search for the Living One among dead people? He is not here, but He just rose.”

Heh, translating that reminds me how much more difficult it is to make direct literal translations from Hawaiian than it is from Greek. Lots of fun though. Thought I'd do something different from last year, and go with Hawaiian and Luke, first-rate historian that he is, instead of Greek and Matthew. Maybe next year I can do Latin. And after that...I'll have to re-pick up one of the languages I started learning once upon a time...Arabic, or Hebrew, or...Nahauatl, or something. Or pick up something entirely new. Choices! Choices!

Happy Easter, everyone! A hui hou!

Language Teachers - Some Thoughts

I was thinking today that of the several language teachers I have had, they've all had one thing in common. And while it makes sense in my mind, I find it somewhat hard to define or articulate. It's...a sort of theatrical quality? The ability to take a sentence someone randomly created a few seconds ago, and give it life. Paint a picture of words describing the conjured scene in such a way you feel yourself there. Come up with a few more sentences to flesh it out and give it life, with such amazing intonation and verve you could be right in the midst of whatever is being depicted.

Are all language teachers like this? Or am I just fortunate?

Happy Easter!

ούκ ’έστιν ‛ώδε, ’ήγέρθη γάρ καθώς ’είπεν! δευτε ’ίδετε τόν τόπον ‛όπου ’έκειτο  - Matthew 28:6
'He is not here, for He was raised, as He said! Come, see the place where He lay.'

For those of you who know Koine Greek, apologies for the pathetic accents. I thought it'd be a simple matter of opening up Character Map and picking the right symbols, but there really aren't a whole lot to choose from. There aren't even rough and smooth breathing marks! I had to use apostrophes for those. And forget about circumflex accents. Anyway, it's hard to be annoyed on such a glorious day. Happy Easter everyone!

(I also took the liberty of adding an exclamation point because the Greeks didn't have those, but I think it's certainly implied by the text.)