Word for Word

The day before Valentine's day I sent an email to my Mom. I had misspelled the heading and since I am dyslexic that was something in my normal range of writing. It was fortunate for me that she had come over to visit and had brought her laptop so when she opened the email she asked about it. The word Site had been changed to Stie.

I had to look at it and realized that it was a dyslexic thing and we started to laugh. This started me to thinking as I had been reading about how all the old text were copied by hand before the printing press was invented and that most of the oldest text copies could be subject to manual error. This could be form a mistake of the hand or misinterpretation since a lot of the oldest books were from Europe and were translated to meet the audience of that time.

I had also learned that and it makes since that most of the world, only a few hundred years ago were illiterate. Education and reading were not as it is today in our everyday existence. Because of my own dyslexia I got an Education degree in reading to help me understand it.

What really fascinates me is that we take things for granted that our books are copied exactly the same so in mass production if there is an error in th copy then it is in millions of copies. Everyone gets the same copy "word for word". You can go to one book store and read the same book over and over without skipping a beat.

But what about the older text that were translated by a town scribe that did not have a college education or a degree in Language? Yes, there were educated monks but what about how the text could be changed by the translation of one language to another. What happens if someone who is translating an ancient text and has their own insight of something and changes the words ever so slightly to meet the meaning of the person copying the text?

An example would be like, when I attended a sermon as the quote form Jesus was used,"that you should render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's and render unto God that which is God's. This was followed by that we should be tithing to the church. Maybe that is what it is supposed to be but my take is that Caesar's things are of this earth and God's is of the spirit. My own belief and personal feelings seem to step in the way of what I was being told. So my own judgment stands in the way of translation.......

This makes me wonder that the things that we take for granted are not the things that the old world could take for granted and yet we fight over old text and differences. We all seem to agree that man is quite capable of being imperfect. So by taking a text word for word that has been copied for thousands of years are we not saying that man is infallible and that perfection is achieved?

As a dyslexic I see how a single word can change a single meaning. Just imagining if a massager was to take a message to a fellow kingdom form a dyslexic scribe....

Just something to think about.....

Ana