Andrushka

My first gut reaction when I read your post was to say, "Um, you spelled y'all wrong."

What does that say about me?

Dangit.

I think a better question is hwhether (and yes the "h" was intentional) bible translators/publishers have an agenda--linguistically or otherwise. Besides, how can you get on authors when all they use are consonants.

odiycca

I'm actually with Daniel on that one. Anything that is translated from the original text loses so much. The Bible has more than one original language, plus more than one author, so well, good luck on your quest. My gut level guess for several books would be prescriptive though, but I like jerks and snobs.

Apples, oranges, & toomahtoes... There's a movie, that always gets played to death this time of year, which features a song sorta like this:

Deck the hawrs with bows of horry
Fa ra ra ra ra, ra ra ra ra
Tis the season to be jorry
Fa ra ra ra ra, ra ra ra ra

And have you ever seen the looks English only speakers give you when you write down a word containing a 'zh'?

I agree that much is "lost in translation" (R's & L's are featured in that movie also), but even from the context of the material, would it be too far fetched to think that, in the "jot and tittle" statement attributed to Jesus, the term "law" might not be synonymous with "written text" (specifically "bible")?

And Furthermore... Is it entirely accurate to call "descriptivists" "post-modern" even though they are clearly still within the "structuralist" camp?

:)

Is it accurate to call all prescriptivists snobs? Let hyperbolic dogs lie.

Actually, we were just talking about /zh/ in English during class Monday. It exists, it just can't be the first phoneme in the word and relies on phonological rules. Consider the ess in "pleasure". Esses sandwitched by vowels in English always switch from the voiceless /s/ sound to the voiced /z/ (such as the British -ise ending. This also applies to /th/ which is why "breath" becomes "breathe" even though the ee is silent). Then you combine that with the rule that an ess followed by a yu will normally be a voiceless postalveolar fricative (/sh/). For example, "sugar" and "tissue". But when it's preceded by another vowel, it must be a voiced (/zh/). Other ways of producing it is "vowel-z-u" (azure), "vowel-s-i" (allusion), "vowel-g-e" (mirage).

Wouldn't it be great if we just wrote ž, ʒ, ж, or some other symbol? I really wish we didn't have to depend on complex phonology to know how to pronounce a word.

I think Biblical language is presriptive in a descriptive way. It prescribes behavior and rule adherence, but through lenses that are descriptive of the cultural and temporal dimensions at the time of writing.