The translation and exegesis of the religious texts and the need for religious linguistics

Abstract EN

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 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.