Comments on: It Supposeth Me http://bycommonconsent.com/2006/10/21/it-supposeth-me/ A Mormon Blog Thu, 16 Feb 2012 12:20:30 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: Wm Jas http://bycommonconsent.com/2006/10/21/it-supposeth-me/#comment-19044 Thu, 16 Nov 2006 11:18:55 +0000 http://www.bycommonconsent.com/2006/10/it-supposeth-me/#comment-19044 Interesting speculations so far. Thanks for addressing it, Kevin. (Incidentally, the reason Baneemy and I asked similar questions is that we are the same person.)

]]> By: annegb http://bycommonconsent.com/2006/10/21/it-supposeth-me/#comment-19043 Mon, 23 Oct 2006 16:37:27 +0000 http://www.bycommonconsent.com/2006/10/it-supposeth-me/#comment-19043 Oh, you have to use your English Book of Mormon and compare phrases. It’s sort of tedious, but less tedious than looking up words in a dictionary. When you do it quickly, you sort of pick up the words and remember them.

I used a notebook and listed them alphabetically. It went pretty fast when I started comparing my English and Russian Books of Mormon.

]]> By: Justin http://bycommonconsent.com/2006/10/21/it-supposeth-me/#comment-19042 Mon, 23 Oct 2006 16:14:37 +0000 http://www.bycommonconsent.com/2006/10/it-supposeth-me/#comment-19042 I came across a transcript of an 1862 letter from a SLC resident to his brother in New York containing the construction “it supposes me.” Perhaps the writer picked it up from reading the BoM.

“But it supposes me that I am now talking to those that will not thank me for these things So I will now forebear.”

]]> By: any mouse http://bycommonconsent.com/2006/10/21/it-supposeth-me/#comment-19025 Mon, 23 Oct 2006 03:00:18 +0000 http://www.bycommonconsent.com/2006/10/it-supposeth-me/#comment-19025 so, annegb, how DO you do it???

]]> By: annegb http://bycommonconsent.com/2006/10/21/it-supposeth-me/#comment-19041 Mon, 23 Oct 2006 02:34:41 +0000 http://www.bycommonconsent.com/2006/10/it-supposeth-me/#comment-19041 I spent a good year trying to read the Book of Mormon in Russian. After several months, I called the MTC and spoke to the guy who teaches it there and he told me how to do it. I actually got through 2nd Nephi, and got sidetracked.

I had a lot of trouble because of the archaic terms and like Sarah says, the differences in English and Russian (who knew, huh?).

On the other hand, I like that “it supposeth me.”

]]> By: Kevin Barney http://bycommonconsent.com/2006/10/21/it-supposeth-me/#comment-19024 Mon, 23 Oct 2006 01:39:23 +0000 http://www.bycommonconsent.com/2006/10/it-supposeth-me/#comment-19024 Sarah, I’m impressed that you got those Cyrillic fonts to display properly in #15 above. Good work!

]]> By: Clair http://bycommonconsent.com/2006/10/21/it-supposeth-me/#comment-19023 Mon, 23 Oct 2006 01:26:19 +0000 http://www.bycommonconsent.com/2006/10/it-supposeth-me/#comment-19023 Interesting Russian stuff.

Forms of the word “suppose” appear 117 times in the Book of Mormon. Most are in common sentence constructions.

]]> By: Sarah http://bycommonconsent.com/2006/10/21/it-supposeth-me/#comment-19040 Sun, 22 Oct 2006 22:53:28 +0000 http://www.bycommonconsent.com/2006/10/it-supposeth-me/#comment-19040 I don’t know nearly enough about 19th century language, or English, or German, to bring much light to this. But I know a lot of new speakers of Russian mistranslate “it seems” in exactly this way, because they don’t yet understand (or, aren’t yet comfortable with) case usage:

Kажется мне, что…

ought to be read as:

(To) me it seems, that… (or, in natural English, “it seems to me that…”)

But because of the word order, learners see it as:

It seems me, that…

They have the same problem with other Dative constructions — “(to) me (there are) 15 years” [Мне 15 лет] gets read as “Me 15 years.” It’s complicated in part because they usually already see constructions that they think mean “to me,” as in possession: “У меня есть книги” (means “I have books,” but is easy to read as a literal “to me (there) are books.”) Translation is tough, especially for native English speakers translating stuff from a language with lots of cases. None of my classmates in Russian are very comfortable with “it seems to me” and we’ve been using it for two academic terms now.

Anyway, it doesn’t seem very unusual to me to translate something in this manner, especially if you’re thinking the whole time about how something is “old” and “foreign” and “from God.” Aren’t there any instances of “suppose” in the Book of Mormon that are parallel to the usages in the KJV? I say: Joseph saw something that seemed odd, and decided how to render it, and rendered it that way each of the other times he saw it, having solved the puzzle to his satisfaction.

(I left my Russian Book of Mormon in my car, so I don’t know, but I’d think that they used that impersonal кажется construction for those verses — or a similar Dative construction that means “in my opinion” in modern texts. Darn it all, now I have to go look.)

]]> By: annegb http://bycommonconsent.com/2006/10/21/it-supposeth-me/#comment-19039 Sun, 22 Oct 2006 22:35:16 +0000 http://www.bycommonconsent.com/2006/10/it-supposeth-me/#comment-19039 And I have a new insult. “It supposeth me to believe that you are a (fill in the blank).”

I like the line from Les Miserables, “I consider them dead.”

My mind goes right to people who irritate me in this type of discussion.

]]> By: J. Nelson-Seawright http://bycommonconsent.com/2006/10/21/it-supposeth-me/#comment-19038 Sun, 22 Oct 2006 22:15:13 +0000 http://www.bycommonconsent.com/2006/10/it-supposeth-me/#comment-19038 The OED does have a single example of an analogous construction: “1390 GOWER Conf. II. 128 Bot al to lytel him supposeth, Thogh he mihte al the world pourchace.” This was evidently a Surrey provincialism.

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