I've read the pages and pages and pages of complaining about this issue and have felt compelled to finally add something.

I'm a Linguist by training and my field is Sociolinguistics, which is how language is used in society. So I'm very attentive to modern speech and it's variation (I'm a "variationist"). To further explain myself, I'm very conservative with regards to liturgy and praxis, in most cases.

With regards to this new translation, I think that as long as the so-called inclusive language does not contradict Theology, I see no problem with it. It is modern English. We speak, read, and write in modern English. The suggested idea in another thread that we translate the Liturgy into Elizabethan English was, I hope, a joke. He who hath made that comment knoweth not the problem for sooth we would encounter if we need speak such tongue in Church. Woulde we use moderne spellyng or olde?

I know folks are upset, but I've seen little to be so upset about when I read through the translation and it seems to me that this is being blown a bit too much out of proportion. Perhaps there are some problems, but it's not the end of the world some of us here are making it out to be. Just my 2 cents.

Dear Marc,

There are indeed places where the current language does indeed distort the theology but it appears those are not the issues causing the gravest concern in many of the posts here. They have been outlined pretty clearly by at least one poster.

I do think that the idea that one expands options for a full liturgy by removing the text is something kin to raffling off a car with no engine or wheels.

I think you perhaps have taken the suggestion for Elizabethan English too seriously. That was corrected in several places to indicate the use of a hieratic vernacular. Would that cause a problem for you as a linguist?

Eli

In the topic Changes in the Roman Catholic Mass there were some very good links that touch on this topic.

One link from an article written by Michael Foley of Baylor University included this which I found very interesting. He is speaking about the changes to the texts of English translation of the RC Mass recently approved by the Latin bishops of the USCCB.

This is very much the approach that the New ICEL has taken with the translations of the Latin Mass.
I have also mentioned that I recently switched from the RSV to the ESV for my personal Scripture reading. I have found in my reading (and verified it on their website at www.esv.org) that there were occasions in the RSV were the term “man” was employed when it really didn’t belong. The editors of the ESV removed the references to “man” and “men” where it was not in the original for purposes of accuracy. This is the kind of translation I support.

Thought the Administrator would like this tidbit from CWNews Off the Record...

Controversial since its inception, ICEL became a focus of serious alarm among the orthodox in the 1980s, when it embarked on a revised translation of the Roman Missal. Feminist ideology had made its deepest inroads into English-speaking hierarchies at this time, and Wilkins continues to put forth the party line in his account of the conflict:


Any commission charged with English translations at that time would have felt the need to use inclusive language. By the 1980s it was hardly possible in ordinary speech or writing to continue to use the words "men" or "man" as applying also to women. The ICEL translators felt their way forward, both on the horizontal level, where masculine collective nouns, pronouns, and adjectives described groups including both women and men, and on the vertical level, where references to God were wholly masculine. Women religious, concerned that they should not yet again be marginalized by terms that excluded them, lobbied powerfully and effectively.
Effectively indeed. It has never been satisfactorily explained how masculine references to God "exclude" women, nor how translators can be licensed to "correct" their originals in this regard. But correct them they did. The first segments of ICEL's revised Missal declared war on the overly masculine deity which feminists found in the Latin editio typica (official text). You'd never guess it from Wilkins's superficial treatment, but ICEL engaged in a wholesale transformation of divine imagery, dropping masculine pronouns for God, changing third-person texts to second-person (genderless) addresses, and inserting supposedly feminine attributes to counter-balance masculine ones.

In ICEL's revised Proper of Seasons, for example, the following titles were substituted for the simple vocative Deus ("God") -- i.e., without any qualifier:


God of mystery
God of life
God of blessings
God of majesty
God of mercy
God of our salvation
God of nations
God of hope
God our Creator
God our Creator and Preserver
God ever-faithful
Ever-faithful God
All provident God
Compassionate God
Merciful God
Gracious God
Just and gracious God
Likewise, the title "Lord" was deemed too sexist, and got the gelding treatment. This is what ICEL gave us in place of simple (unqualified) vocative Domine. I'm not making this up, folks:


God of light
God of wisdom
God of majesty
God of forgiveness
God of mercy
God of mercy and compassion
God our Creator
All-provident God
To make it clear: ICEL was not commissioned to create a renewed liturgy but to translate Latin originals. The Church understands that the renewal process the Council called for produced the Latin originals, whence the Latin editio typica was itself the renewed text. But ICEL felt the renewal didn't go far enough, and sent to Rome a gender-titrated, androgynous, 1980s-style God/dess for its recognitio.

Dead on arrival. Somebody in the Holy See was paying attention, understood that "merciful and faithful God" did not translate omnipotens Deus, and sent it back to ICEL with a "What have you guys been smoking?" letter.

The ICELites are understandably bitter. After all, they were one rubber stamp away from a grand slam. We shouldn't forget, however, that the controversy was not a controversy over methods of translation. They were out to give us a different deity.

PAX

james