I'm talking about nominal inflection, not verbal. And I know what the moods, tenses and aspects are.
Fine. Do you have an example of the case system of Sanskrit, Greek, or Latin used that supports your assertions about inflection and "word play"? Because so far, your one example contains a verb and a participle and isn't word play or in any other sense ambiguous due to inflection.
No, I did not. I was pointing out how the English versions are bastardized and mistranslated because Modern English does not have the nominal inflections or verbal conjugations of the original languages the bible was transcribed into.
They aren't mistranslated or bastardized. And nominal inflections are easily rendered into English. Despite the various categories of genitives, for example, if you stick and "of" in front of just about any genitive from Latin, Sanskrit, or Greek, you've got a good translation. Same with "to/for" and the dative in all three languages. Our prepositional system is directly related to the evolution from case to adposition from PIE through Greek, Latin, Into-Aryan, Hittite, and other ancient IE languages. Same with abstract grammatical constructions like the impersonal, which are nightmares to translate into non-IE languages like modern Hebrew and other Semitic languages.
All translations are imperfect. Period. This has zero to do with inflection.
Anglo-Saxon didn't even come close.
It did, especially with respect to the case system (Anglo-saxon had nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive cases).
The Mahā Mantra is the Hare Krishna Mantra. Let's examine what this means:
Hare Krishna Hare Krishna
Krishna Krishna Hare Hare
Hare Rāma Hare Rāma
Rāma Rāma Hare Hare
You might want to give context, then. This is the answer to a question. Also, it's utterly irrelevant that these words have cases. They're names. The fact that they may or may not refer to two different characters/deities/names of deities (a modern interpretation) has zero to do with the fact that the words are in a particular form (vocative). The vocative adds clarity by letting us know these are to be understood as spoken by Brahma in the text. The ambiguity (such as it exists) is related to what the names actually refer to which is completely and utterly unrelated to inflection.
So... is the Mahā Mantra invoking Vishnu by his three names?
How is this world play that relates at all to inflection? These are names. It doesn't matter what language or case they appear in as the ambiguity would be there if they weren't vocative.
It is theologically important and ambiguous... one little word.
Yes, a lot can ride on a word, whether it's
logos or
rama. What doesn't matter is the inflection (least of all nominal; simple prepositions can convey the semantics of case while entirely different words are required for different verbal inflections).
It is a phrase, used in real life
Yes, in the
300 and on gun rights paraphernalia among other things. It's still a quote from Thucydides. It's like "the game's afoot" which most people, if they know a work of literature it's from, identify it as a quote from Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories when in fact it's from
Henry V by Shakespeare (Conan Doyle quoted Shakespeare). King Leonides is said, by Thucydides, to have responded to the request to surrender his arms (and those of his 300 followers) with
molon labe. That's where it's from. It's a quote. And again, there is no word play and nothing ambiguous because of cases or translations.
Because you proceeded from a false assumption that I did not know what I was talking about
And so far that seems to be the case.
That makes it even worse and corrupts the translations even more.
That they are translated from the original languages into the target languages (e.g., Greek to English) makes them worse than if they were translated from e.g., Greek into Latin into German into English? How?
Now, we can continue to lift our legs to see who can **** higher up the tree or we can agree to disagree and/or agree to agree that 2,000 year old texts translated into a completely unrelated language from the original are seriously flawed and misunderstood.
It's not completely unrelated and unless you can read ancient Greek and Hebrew than how do you know how good (or bad, or flawed, or whatever) the translations are? My Hebrew leaves something to be desired (it's still better than my knowledge of Sanskrit and Arabic, but not as good as most of the languages I am familiar with). This is not true of Greek. Of all the languages I know, I've spent the most time studying all aspects of ancient Greek and my thesis was on the grammatical construal of modality in ancient Attic Greek. I've translated lines from the NT on this forum alone time and time again. I have yet to see how inflection somehow allowed for word play that was ambiguous.