Translation and transmission in the Armenian New Testament: a note on Luke 3:23

The Armenian translation of the Greek New Testament usually follows the original quite closely whilst still employing various translation strategies for dealing with one and the same type of construction. In one passage, Lk. 3:23, none of the common translation strategies are employed: a participle in the nominative singular (Gk. ὤν ṓn) is translated as a relative pronoun in the genitive plural (Arm. oroc‘). Using corpus-linguistic methods and comparative data, this paper demonstrates that this kind of translation has no parallel in the New Testament corpus. The origin of this peculiar translation unequivocally lies in a translation error, as previously hypothesised, the result of confounding two members of a minimal pair in Greek: the participle (Gk. ὤν ṓn) and the genitive plural relative pronoun (Gk. ὧν hõn).

Cite as: Robin Meyer. 2023. Translation and transmission in the Armenian New Testament: a note on Luke 3:23. Indogermanische Forschungen 128: 65–82
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