The new series, it's called Lunch Break with Luke. I would tell you about this series, but it'll become clear as it goes on. Today I want to talk about something that you should probably find really boring, but hopefully you'll understand why it's important. And the boring thing is translation, okay, linguistic translation. Many of you guys know that I am a linguist. I also know classical languages and stuff. It's just stuff I've done. And I want to talk about some of the problems, the inevitable constraints that happen when you are translating something. Or, well, I'll just jump into it, okay? So take translating English to German or vice versa. It's not a very difficult thing to do, okay? English and German, they're related languages. They have some aspects that are different, but they're mostly, it's easy to translate from English to German. Now, of course, if you know, you know, there are lots of specifics you have to look out for, but it's not, it's not like there's something in English that's totally untranslatable in German. Same thing, even in languages that aren't really related to English that much. So take Chinese. Despite the fact that Chinese is a totally unrelated language to English, it's relatively easy to translate something from Chinese to English or vice versa. Now, again, Chinese linguistically is very different, okay? Chinese has serial verb constructions. We have participles, right? We have different constructions and things like that, but it's not so difficult to translate not just the Chinese language, but the Chinese mindset. But when you're talking about ancient translation, you're often talking about translating not just the language, but a totally different mindset, the modern people don't necessarily have, right? So when you hear people talk about ancient Greek philosophy, like it means something to us nowadays, I'm not really keen on ancient Greek philosophy, but you'll hear them talking about the good, you know, you'll hear them talking about logos, all these words that are either not translatable or you translate them into English and they make absolutely no sense, okay? And that's because, you know, the abstract categories that people in ancient society, the concepts that they had in their brain and were important to them are just not analogous to things that we talk about nowadays. This isn't just a linguistic thing. I mean, take another example. So, you know, one of my favorite collections of poetry is the Karminaburana, which is a medieval Latin poetry selection. One of the reasons I like it is it's the kind of thing that even though it's written in Latin, it could have been written today. It has a very modern mindset. It even has a modern rhyme scheme. I find it very enjoyable if you, I just find it enjoyable. I'll just say that. But if you compare that, where the mindset of the people writing it is pretty similar to us and some kind of earlier Latin text, it's like 9-day or, you know, really, you know, a lot of times when we're looking at ancient texts, even, you know, in languages like Latin or ancient Greek that we know relatively well and have a constant strain of communication up to us, you know, there's a lot of nuance that just sort of is totally lost there. And you translate these documents, you translate philosophical or metaphysical documents. And they make absolutely no sense. It's like people are just talking in words that don't make any sense to us. Now, that's even more true when you talk about something like ancient Egyptian or Samarian or something like that, where there is not a constant chain of communication to us. We've rediscovered, reinterpreted these languages. So, you know, I was reading for not related this book, what is it? Hamlet's Mill. And one point, they note in there that if you go through an Egyptian dictionary, ancient Egyptian dictionary, there's something like 60 words that mean the equivalent of heaven. Now, that's not that they're all synonyms. They all have slightly different nuance, but we don't know how to translate those. So, we translate them as heaven, okay? Where our words for heaven or sky or stratosphere might mean something different. They have a metaphysical view of the world where all of these words mean something a little different. And that has been totally lost a time. So, when we read some kind of funerial document from written in ancient Egyptian or, you know, something written in Samarian or something like that, a language we barely have deciphered. A lot of words we don't even know, don't know how they're pronounced or something like that. When we're translating something like that, well, of course, it's going to be gobbledy gook. So, you know, let's, if you imagine, put yourself in their shoes, okay? Let's say there's a pretty advanced, either metaphysical or scientific dialogue that they're having, and it's going to appear to us as total gobbledy gook. But imagine if we were in the same position, imagine if our society collapses, okay? And let's say there's a book, Unix System Administration. There's a lot of wisdom in that book. It means a lot to people now who know stuff about Unix System Administration. But if our society collapses, computers, you know, don't exist anymore. It's sort of entropy. The complex stuff is going to be destroyed or degrades faster. You know, if you uncover a library of ours and uncover Unix System Administration, well, some SOTerisist of the future would read this book and they would read it as if it was some kind of occult magic book. Oh, it's talking about said and awk and grip and all these magical commands and they don't understand them as, you know, being what they actually are as, you know, computer programs. They understand them as, you know, this is some kind of book, it's a metaphysical language or something like that. So, when you're looking at documents that we have not deciphered, that's sort of the mindset you really have to have. That is a lot of stuff, you know, there's a modernist tendency that people have. When you read something that is poorly translated, that we don't really know what it is and we read that in English, you know, sometimes people say, oh, well, people back then were just crazy. They were just saying random stuff. It doesn't make any sense. They're just dumb. Modern good, ancient bad. But the reality is we have totally lost a, you know, intellectual traditions are lost all the time. And once you lose that kind of jargon, it becomes totally indescribable, you know, whenever you try and understand what's going on. You know, one other example I was thinking about recently, I was reading some old medieval linguistic stuff. You know, there's this school of thought called the modists. So the modists, you can translate their stuff from Latin into English. And a lot of it translates word for word. But you read it in English and it's not going to make any sense. I read some other stuff in Latin. I was like, maybe my Latin's battle, read a translation in English, made even less sense. And that's because they have a bunch of jargon. I mean, you know, if you're a real pro with this kind of stuff, you can't understand modists. But you know, that's, it's not, it's neither here nor there. But the point is, they have a bunch of jargon that you have to really be explicitly taught. And if you don't know what they're talking about, even if you literally translate it, it doesn't make any sense. And you're, you're looking at what they're writing as if it's just a much nonsense. So anyway, that's what I wanted to talk about. So I think it's important to have a sense of humbleness when people translate ancient texts. Just because, you know, a lot of people, again, they come in this modern mindset where if something doesn't make sense as it's written in 21st century English, if I literally translate it or translate the nuance, then it must be proof of their stupidity if it doesn't make sense. When really it's sort of a statement of our translators ignorance and not just translation, but interpretation of texts. So anyway, that's pretty much all I had to say today. So I will see you guys next time.