The language of formal prayer; or, "to Thee or not to Thee"

[pne]

Next week, it'll be my turn to give the lesson again, and the General Conference talk the bishop had chosen is “Lessons from the Lord’s Prayers”, by Russell M. Nelson.

That talk included a bit about the specific words we use: one passage mentioned that we close our prayers with “Amen” and another that we can use “right words”—special pronouns—in reference to Deity, that we have been asked to protect the formal, proper language of prayer, and that using respectful pronouns helps us to be humble, which can also enhance our prayers.

You probably know what I think about labelling “Thou” and friends as specifically “respectful” or that doing so was originally calculated to help people be humble when they prayed.

Anyway, so I wondered how the translators grappled with that bit of KJVism, and had a look at the translations of the Liahona online in PDF format: Danish, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Norwegian, Portuguese, Finnish, Swedish, and Russian. For good measure, I also watched the ASL version of the talk (Conference footage with a simultaneous interpreter in an inset).

And they tackled the problem in several different ways.

Several languages simply said that “When we pray in English, we use…” or talked about “special pronouns (in English)” in some way or other; these were Danish, German, French, Norwegian, Finnish, and Russian. Dutch had a puzzling (to me) mixture of what I'd consider “respectful” (“U” and “uw”) and “traditional” (“Gij”); Portuguese was similar, recommending “o Senhor” (respectful, AFAIK) on the one hand and “Tu, Ti, Teu e Tua” on the other hand rather than “você”; the latter set looks like straightforward derivatives from the Latin second person singular pronoun so I’m guessing that in modern Portuguese, they’re used mainly in prayer for being archaic but were originally simply the intimate form of address. The Swedish translator seemed to be grasping at straws a bit for how to convey the message; he settled for “vi säger till exempel Fader i ställe för far” (“for example, we say Fader instead of far”).

I found the Spanish example particularly amusing: “En nuestras oraciones conjugamos los verbos apropriadamente para los pronombres Tú, Tuyo, Te y Ti en lugar de Usted, Su y Suyo. El hacerlo nos ayuda a ser humildes” (“In our prayers, we use verb forms corresponding to the pronoun ‘You, Your, Yours (informal)’ rather than ‘You, Your, Yours (formal)’. Doing this helps us be humble.”). Since AFAIK “tú” and friends are still in use in Spanish for the regular informal pronoun, this seems to convey that using the non-respectful form will help us to be humble! (Now that I think about it, that probably makes as much sense as imagining that a 15th century Englishman would feel more humble for using Thou than for using Ye.)

Finally, the translation I found best was the Italian: “Quando preghiamo, facciamo di tutto per mostrare il nostro rispetto, facendo attenzione alle parole che usiamo.” (“When we pray, we do everything to show our respect, paying attention to the words we use.”) I can live with that: by all means encourage people to show respect and to use “proper language”; it's more the declaration that “proper language” requires “Thou” and friends, and moreover, that these forms are particularly humble ones, that gets my goat.

For that matter, I personally think that God doesn’t care that much about the exact words we use, as long as there’s no disrespect; if a person thinks that “Hey, God dude, I’mma have a big test tomorrow, so can you, like, help out a brother, big guy? Thanks, yo.” helps him cultivate a closer relationship to their Heavenly Father than using language that conveys distance or oddness, that's between the two of them. For that matter, I’ve always found the German custom of using the informal pronouns to be more natural than the Dutch custom of using the formal “U”, since it’s how you’d address someone you love and feel close to here on earth, and I think God should be someone you feel you can talk with rather than someone you have to feel in awe of and using respectful/formal/distant language. (But then, I’m biassed by what I grew up with. It wouldn’t surprise me if Dutch people feel that their manner of praying is more appropriate.)

Oh, and ASL? I didn’t understand the bit about the “Thou” vs. “you” bit; the main difference seemed to be that the signer signed upwards and looked that way for “Thou”, but I don’t think that’s specifically respectful, but more a reflection of the fact that you sign to the direction where the listener is, and God is considered as being “up in the sky”.

But in the bit where it talked about ending prayers with “Amen”, I noticed a difference. The paragraph in question is this:

As the Lord closes His prayer, He acknowledges God’s great power and glory, ending with “Amen.” Our prayers also close with amen. Though it is pronounced differently in various languages, its meaning is the same. It means “truly” or “verily.” Adding amen solemnly affirms a sermon or a prayer. Those who concur should each add an audible amen to signify “that is my solemn declaration too.”

Now, each time the word “Amen” was mentioned, the interpreter fingerspelled it, so I imagine the substance of his interpretation was, “At the end of our prayers, we should close with [the fingerspelled word] a-m-e-n”. Which doesn’t jibe with what I’ve seen in ASL interpretations of LDS prayers (e.g. at General Conference); there, prayers seem to be finished by placing one palm around the other fist and moving those hands upwards and inwards in front of your chest, and I’ve always interpreted that sign as being roughly equivalent.

So should LDS ASL prayers now fingerspell “Amen” rather than use this sign? I doubt it, somehow.

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Oh, and another random amusing bit: I copied-and-pasted the paragraph about Thou and Thee in the various languages into a document, to have them together for easier comparison, and I also put all of them through Google Translate and/or Babelfish (depending on the languages each translator offered), to help me get a better idea of what they said.

And the French translated the use of “right words” as Nous pouvons utiliser les « bons mots » en rapport avec la Divinité, which Babelfish rendered as We can use “witty remarks” in connection with the Divinity. Heh :)

And another fun bit of machine translation was where Google Translate (which uses statistical methods for learning, AFAIK: looking at texts available in multiple languages in order to draw conclusions what phrases are rendered by specific other phrases in the target language) translated the Finnish quotation from the scriptures “Ole nöyrä, niin Herra, sinun Jumalasi, johdattaa sinua kädestä ja antaa sinulle vastauksen rukouksiisi.” as “Be humble, the Lord your God will lead you by the hand and give thee answer to thy prayers.” (underlining mine). I found it funny that it used “Biblical” pronouns for the second portion of that sentence; presumably, it had learned that from “reading” the Bible in Finnish and English, using an archaicising Bible for the English :D

Comments

[pthalo]

that's interesting. I think we've talked about this before, but in Hungarian we use "Te", and sometimes we use old fashioned forms like "Néked" (dative) instead of "Neked". the old fashionedness just sounds nice but we would never use Ön for God. Ön is someone that you are emotionally distant from.

[pne]

I'm not sure whether we had talked about it before, so thanks for mentioning it.

the old fashionedness just sounds nice

That's kind of what I think; it gives things an appropriately "churchy" sound, to me.

But I wouldn't think that this necessarily applied to all people, or that using old-fashioned language makes prayers better or more effective (or makes us more humble, except if someone realises what a struggle it is to recall the correct form and how puny they are as a result - but I'm not sure that's what God expects us to feel when we pray to him).

we would never use Ön for God. Ön is someone that you are emotionally distant from.

That makes sense to me, too. (Mutatis mutandis, at least, e.g. for German Sie.)

[pthalo]

i think we did, but it was several years ago, so i don't remember the conversation very well. it's more just an a knowledge that we've had it before. :)

I think the old fashionedness would keep some people away, especially people who aren't used to this form of language and who had never been exposed to it before, or maybe someone who wasn't a native speaker but can get by in conversational English though maybe not, I've often heard "I don't understand a word of it, but it sounds very beautiful." (I'm thinking more about our own texts here, where the appearance of thy/thee/thou/thine is one of the easiest things to remember. verb forms like "wert" and the old past tense with -th.

I think God expects us to be humble, but I don't think God particularly cares whether we use Ön or Maga or Tetszik or Te :D (Ön is emotional distance + high rank than the speaker. Maga is emotional distance + lower rank than the speaker. Tetszik is in use with old people, either in combination with Ön or Maga, or in combination with the "aunt" or "uncle" + name.)

Among ourselves the Bahá'ís use the te form with everyone. But that might not be the case in other countries. I know at least one country that uses the Vi form (Croatia) but that makes sense, because Vi is polite from / talking to more than one person. Unlike here where we have separate pronouns for each of our polite forms.


Also, something that was probably not realised by person who mixed up thee and you (that Thee is the more humble form of you), is that in languages like ours, often times the Ti/Vi distinction is just a formality, an aspect of the language (and at least in the case of Hungarian more an indication of emotional clearness rather than respect), and that having a specific grammatical formal form to use can make a person less humble.

After all, in English if you want to be "polite" and use the "Polite form", you don't have any pronouns to help you, so you have to use words like "please" and "I was wondering if it would be possible for you to" and avoid certain other words.

In Hungarian, of course, our swear words can be put into the polite form, we can tell a teacher, politely, ,,don't f*** me up on this test" [don't fail me]. (The case of this that I heard of, the student used the "tetszik" form. "Ne tessék [swear word, infinitive] a vizsgán, tanár úr" [Don't let-it-please-you[imperative] to-f***-me [on the test], teacher mister]


Do you, as a German feel that you are humbling yourself before someone when you call them "Sie"? As a grown up, in most of my interactions with strangers I use Ön with them and they use Ön with me, and nothing about it feels very humbling. :)

I still use Te with people my age, especially with friends, but I've been feeling more and more weird about it, given that most people my age have children and are married women.

[pne]

Do you, as a German feel that you are humbling yourself before someone when you call them "Sie"?

No -- it just puts more emotional distance between me and them.

For example, one of my superiors offered to let me call him "du", and I said I'd rather stay with "Sie" because I don't like him enough to call him "du". I find "Sie" more appropriate for our interactions -- but not because I feel more humble that way.

[pthalo]

yeah, that's how i feel about it too. I used to prefer te because i was just learning the language and i found the te verb forms easier to use, but now i'd rather not have the implied linguistic closeness of te with people I don't feel that way about.

[pthalo]

another thing, we have some new Bahá'ís in our community, two adorable old ladies and we all use te with them, mutually, but i even though i like them a good deal, i want to use tetszik with them because, well, they're old women who aren't in my family and i feel they deserve the respect that tetszik implies. it feels odd saying "te" to them, but i do because it's the custom within our religious community.