Ah my old nemesis...Spelling

All my life I have been a horrible speller. Going to bed early on Christmas eve was never a problem because my family would always have a giant family Scrabble competition into the wee hours of the morning (thought still retiring before St Nick made an appearance). Who wants to be awake for that? When I learned that spelling and punctuation were not standardized in the distant past, I thought it was the most brilliant idea ever. But, like many of you, when I try to read old documents I shake my fists and shout to the heavens "had these people no sense of language?" Standardization is important for more universal understanding and this standardization has been facilitated and fostered by print and publishing.

I have compiled an annotated bibliography of useful sources on the standardization of spelling. I hope you find it informative.

King James Bible Exhibit.

This past week I visited the Life and Legacy of the King James Bible exhibit in the Harold B. Lee Library. In his most recent blog post, Will analyzed the whole exhibit and explained the pros and cons of translating the Bible. (I encourage everyone to read his post). However, I personally found it interesting how the translated King James Bible has affected society, especially American society from the 1800s to date.

King James I of England ordered that a uniform translation of the Bible would begin in 1604. The translation was complete in 1611. "Cultural, religious, and political forces over the next half century of this version's existence finally contrived to make the King James Bible the only used in England. The King James Bible traveled with the British as they colonized the world" (King James Bible exhibit pamphlet). This means that as people began to come to America for political and religious freedom, they brought the King James Bible with them.

"Publicly and privately, the King James Bible was read, heard, and studied by countless individuals in English-speaking countries and territories, and its language and style shaped their own thoughts and writings. Critics note the influence of the King James Bible—not just the stories, but the syntax and style—in works by many great orators and authors of the 18^th, 19^th and early 20^th centuries, especially in the United States" (Transforming the Word).

Famous Americans throughout history such as Abraham Lincoln, Herman Melville and John Steinbeck were influenced greatly by the Bible. All used imagery, repetition or allusions to the King James version of the Bible (Transforming the Word). This, in turn, influenced the political and social aspects of American society as people read their novels and followed politics closely.

Religiously, the King James Bible was, and still is, used by many of the Protestant churches that flourished in America. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which is not considered a branch of Protestantism, uses the King James Bible as well. In fact, Joseph Smith translated portions of the King James Bible in the 1800s to help clarify the meanings of some passages. In addition, there are cross references in the Book of Mormon to the King James Bible in order to make studying and feasting upon the scriptures much easier for Latter-day Saints. Today, the King James Bible is the most popular Bible used in America by multiple religions. This is significant in that America was founded on the belief of religious freedom. With most religions using and basing their faith off of the King James Bible, it seems that even today is one of the most influential works printed and read.

Corrected and Improved by the Author

 Today I took a visit to the Crandall Historical Printing Museum.  I wasn't really sure what I would find there so I just drove over and walked inside.  No one was at the desk so I wandered inside and I found a group of elementary school or middle school students inside on a field trip.  They must have been an LDS charter school or something and were listening to a presentation of how the first copies of the Book of Mormon were printed using the old printing presses and process.  I slipped into the back of the group and listened a bit.  The presentation was obviously more of an overview than technically historical so I wandered around a bit as I listened, examining the old presses and prints that the museum workers have made on them.  The tour guide said something that really caught my attention though.  He said that With the 37 signatures and setting the type and hand sewing the books together, the 5000 original copies of the Book of Mormon should have taken 2 years to produce working at full speed full time.  A miracle occurred and the books were printed in only 7 months by (if I heard him correctly) fairly inexperienced printers.

A Museum

Hey guys.  I'm at the museum right now.  The post will be up this afternoon.  Sorry about any inconveniences.  :) - That's a smiley so that if you were annoyed by this you will look at it and be placated.

Influence of King James

I went to see the exhibit in the library about the King James Bible several weeks ago. While I enjoyed seeing the old Bibles, I, like Will, found the display about the impact of the King James Bible on the English language and modern culture most interesting. I was reminded of the university forum presented by Dr. Norton on the King James Bible. If you didn't get a chance to watch it, I would highly recommend it. In essence he talks about the impact of having a standardized Bible. Suddenly, people expected a particular tone for scripture and, to some extent, if it didn't match that, it wasn't just different, it was wrong.

Rosetta Stone part II

After creating our original artifact, as described in a previous post, we passed it on to another group and received a new one of our own.

We were fortunate enough to get the Latin group's artifact. I had the assignment translating their Latin inscription into English and then into Chinese. Fortunately for me, English has adopted many words from Romance Languages, so I was familiar with Latin word roots. Using my deductive skills I came up with a rough approximation of the text. I then took my approximation "Horse no trust. ... it is...party" to the great internet. It turns out that this is a famous line from the Iliad "Do not trust the horse Trojans! whatever it is, I fear the Danaans even when bearing gifts." A tricky element in finding this translation was that the letters are inconsistently formed. Some of the O s look like D s or rectangles rather than O s.
Translating our passage into Chinese was harder than translating it from Latin. Again I consulted the internet and discovered that ancient Chinese has no word for Trojan or Greek and even modern Chinese does not have a term for Danaans. Also tenses are very different in Chinese, this made it difficult to translate the progressive phrase "bringing gifts." After I thought I had an acceptable version,  I presented it to a friend from China, made a few corrections, and passed on my translation to Montana. He then took care of transferring it onto our cool bamboo scroll. See his blog for a summary of the process and a picture of our final product.
Shuan has a good post about making our original artifact.

Akkadian Cuneiform - the Hardest Language I Have Ever Tried to Learn!

For my Rosetta Stone project, I was in the Mesopotamian group (Phoenicia is in that area) and we had some difficulties with our language and writing form.  I mostly worked with Catherine to create the first artifact, and so during the second part I took a back seat, and mostly worked as the liaison to the group that received our artifact.  But the first artifact itself was hard enough.

To start with, one of our other group members had talked to  a professor on campus that was fluent in Akkadian cuneiform, so he went and talked to him, and gave us a sheet of paper with the English phonetic syllables and the English translation of the Akkadian, but not the cuneiform.  For that, he told us to go down to the Museum of Peoples and Cultures and look at the actual clay nail that it was written on.  (Note: Akkadian is the language of the Babylonians around 2500 B.C., cuneiform is the script they used to write it down, and Babylonia was the civilization that Catherine studied.)

To Fold or Not to Fold? That is the Publisher's Question

If you have studied Shakespeare even a little bit, you should have been exposed to the idea of folios and quartos, not to mention octavos or thirty-twomo's.  If not you are about to be educated.

A thirty-twomo (its a book size :-)

The Rosetta Balsa Wood

So here is the picture of our final product for the Rosetta Stone Project.  Yes that's right - you have here a sampling of modern English, Akkadian written in cuneiform, and some Mayan glyphs (you have to turn your head to read them by the way).

So the process after receiving our Akkadian clay tablet was a lot harder than anyone expected.  A number of us started to try to find the characters and look up which syllables they represented independently.  Luckily Erin was able to visit with a professor who gave her some more direction.  It turns out that not all the characters were actually correct - revealing to us why it was no one could find a few of them.  After translating all we could, we had to find the original document that the other group used in order fill in the gaps and get it translated to English ---------->
 

 With that done, Holland and Brianne headed up the artistic process (with Will's help and materials of course) of getting the cuneiform written on our "wood paper." This also proved to be very difficult because the ink bleeds easily in the porous wood.  They ended up having to use a SUPER fine pen to get everything to fit as small as possible.

I again was in charge of the Mayan translation which was difficult of course, because 1-Mayan is not completely deciphered yet 2: I am still shady on Mayan syntax and grammar 3: There are not equivalent words in Mayan, English, and Akkadian.   This is something that I have realized as I have volunteered as a Spanish medical translator too.  Sometimes things really are just "lost in translation," whether it is because of translator error, or meanings difficult to express in another language, copy errors, bias of a translator, or just plain laziness in translation.  It is not an easy task.

This was a difficult assignment for MANY reasons but I really liked the idea of it and had fun learning about these mayan glyphs.  I think that it really helped me understand how knowledge is passed on and how that really has changed from the age of writing to typing to the pixel.  I also think this project helped us think creatively in order to solve problems that were completely unfamiliar to us.

"A Bible! A Bible! We have got a Bible, and there cannot be any more Bible"

bible: (lowercase) any book, reference work, periodical, etc.,accepted as authoritative, informative, or reliable: Heregarded that particular bird book as the birdwatchers' bible. (from dictionary.com)


note: in this post I do not intend to summarize the exhibit because we are all going to go there but rather analyze my thoughts on the exhibit. This seems kind of obvious but I thought I should add that...