The Translation and Exegesis of the Religious Texts and the Need for Religious Linguistics
Talib Al-Quraishi
Former dean of the college of Languages/ Univ. of Baghdad
DOI: https://doi.org/10.25130/jls.1.3.5
Keywords: -linguistics -translation -exegesis - religion
Abstract
Linguistics, the science which studies the humanitarian languages
scientifically, tackled from its beginning in the 19th century certain linguistic aspects
such as, Phonetics, Syntax, Morphology, and Semantics. In the course of time, this
science has witnessed continuous developments so as to include other lingual
disciplines and secondary lingual sciences, like Historical Linguistics,
Psycholinguistics, Contrastive Linguistics, not to mention the other lingual sciences
and theories, such as Language Acquisition and Learning, Discourse Analysis,
Stylistics and others. In spite of the fact that all these disciplines have come about
from General Linguistics, still there is a field which needs a great deal of study and
concern, namely the effect of the religious texts or religion in general on language. It
is a well-known fact that different religious interpretations and exegeses, especially
those dealt with Divine religions, created sectarian outlooks which led to blood sheds
in European Christian communities since the middle ages and recently amongst
Arab and Muslim peoples. This can be attributed to the lack of understanding
languages since they are pregnant with rich heritages of their own, something which
requires the need of dedicating a new branch of linguistic study, namely Religious
Linguistics. The oriental linguists, whether Muslims, Christians and Jews can
contribute greatly in this field of studies since these Jewish, Christian and Islamic
holy books were basically written in their Hebrew, Aramaic/Syriac and Arabic
respectively, and had different translations and exegeses. Such a new field, then, will
lead to revise the holy books, their exegeses, rhetoric, idioms, style and all their
lingual aspects scientifically, and to more understating, harmony and rapprochement
between all the followers of these religions.
