Word Puzzles

Do you ever try to decipher those personalized licenses plates? I do! We even have one, 'ACE IV', our car.It stands for the first initials of my husband's name, and the Roman numeral four because he is the fourth generation where the eldest son of the eldest son has had the same name! For us, it is obvious, for others not so much. I remember one day having a stranger in a parking lot ask my husband if he player poker. Apparently he thought that the licence plate was memorializing an exceptional poker hand of 4 aces!

The other day as I was driving through the parking lot at the mall, I saw this licence plate: CLNGRL. It stumped me until I remembered that one of the common ways to come up with these plates is just to remove the vowels. So I guessed ‘CaRoLiNa GiRL’ was the message it was imparting.

It was an ‘AHA‘ moment when I learned that Hebrew does not have any letters that are designated as vowels. “When necessary, vowels are indicated by diacritic marks above or below the letter representing the syllabic onset, or by use of matres lectionis, which are consonantal letters used as vowels.” [from Wikipedia]

Can you even begin to imagine the difficulty of translating from such a language? Never mind that the writings you are try to translate are centuries old, incomplete, with parts of the sentences missing. As more and more work is done by translators, we become more familiar with the meaning of the words used at the time the Biblical stories were written down. It only stands to reason that the newer translations of the Bible using that knowledge will be closer to the original meaning.

Earlier this winter, while having a coffee, my husband and I got into a conversation with a stranger. One thing led to another as they so often do and before long she was saying, “These new bibles change the words that are in the King James Bible and they shouldn’t be allowed to do it. IT IS JUST WRONG!” Deciding that it was neither the time or the place to embark on some basic biblical literacy education, we said good-bye and left. However I was left wondering if she had ever tried to translate middle English from the 1300’s into today’s English or even to decipher licence plates.

What difference is there is saying, as my mother used to, that someone is "the be all and the end all' or the writer of Revelation saying Jesus is 'the Alpha and the Omega'? They're both saying essentially the same thing in the vernacular, 2000+ years apart. While the old translation of the King James bible is familiar, comforting and yes, poetic, the newer translations offer us a closer understanding of what the original writers were saying to their audience.

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NUDGINGS: a journey into the unknown

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