Friday, May 29, 2009

A taste of close reasoning

I am part way through chapter 24. Chapter 25 is done - being only 6 verses, I attacked it before chapter 24. Chapter 24 is quite difficult and seems to have some structure - but I have not finished seeing. I thought you might get a kick out of a diagram I threw together this morning that shows how close almost to rigidity my translation is. The whole diagram is here.

The colours show repeated words - note how 'and not' is repeated in chapter 23 and 'not' by itself in chapter 24. Also note how sometimes a single word gathers all prepositions and pronouns into itself - and sometimes not (e.g. verse 6). I suspect that stylistically, where both possibilities were open to the author, that he chose separate words for a reason.

I left chapter 24 as an exercise if you want one. You can print out this diagram and fill in the blanks. - hmm... a good flashcard exercise - I might even try it myself.

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