by Haruo » Fri May 19, 2017 12:47 pm
Zamenhof translated the Old Testament, purportedly from the Original Hebrew, which presumably subsumes the original Aramaic where the Tanakh is in Aramaic. A number of books were published by Hachette during his lifetime, and the whole testament was revised by the British, probably all Anglicans, prior to its publication in 1926 by the British and Foreign Bible Society and the National Bible Society of Scotland. Those societies remained the publishers of record until KAVA-PECH took over in 2008. There is a very interesting monograph by D. B. Gregor, probably 50 or more years old now, about the evidence for the influence of various national-language translations on Zamenhof's choices where a variety of possible renderings present themselves. I'm not sure how strong his command of Hebrew actually was. He was a non-practicing Jew raised by a modernist father, though his mother may have been somewhat observant. Not sure if he was Bar Mitzvah. But he was a dedicated polyglot, and spent some years as a Zionist while in College, so he may well have had more Hebrew than his upbringing might suggest.
The NT was donfacebook.com, purportedly and I think probably, from the Greek by a committee of Anglicans led by John Cyprian Rust, who also composed the first indigenous Christian Esperanto hymn and hymn tune, DOKSOLOGIO. My impression is that Rust used the Revised Version (1881-85) as his model in resolving points of potential dispute among translations.
The Dutch Protestant (Remonstrantist) clergyman Gerrit Berveling, who did the now standard Deuterocanonicals, has been working on a new NT translation for decades. Portions have been published, but I'm not sure how close he is to finishing it.
Haruo = Leland Bryant Ross
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