Christendom - Who are members?

by donny 13 Replies latest jw friends

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  Narkissos

  sbf,

  I notice the 2nd part of the definition ("people," not "peoples") has a correspondence in Chambers' Dictionary: "that part of the world in which Christianity is the received religion; the whole body of Christians". This second meaning (afaik) doesn't exist for (non-JW) French chrétienté. A Jew living in Germany would belong to chrétienté (= Christendom in the sense of Christian world) just as a Jew living in the Ottoman empire would belong to the Muslim world, in spite of his minoritary affiliation.
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  slimboyfat

  You got my brain hurting late at night.

  In English there is also an opposition between "Christendom" and the "Muslim world", especially if we are talking about the crusades. I guess that's clear. And to talk about "a Jew living in Christendom" makes sense to my ears at least.

  So does that mean the English word shares that sense with the French word, but also has another sense ("the whole body of Christians") which the French word lacks? (Apart from among French Witnesses who adopt the English sense)

  In English Witnesses are fond of talking about the "missionaries of Christendom" and their bad deeds. This is to avoid saying: "Christian missionaries". What does a French Witness use there? Is it the same word French people would use generally in connection with missionaries?

  I think this is where German Witnesses also run into difficulty between Christenheit and Christentum. My wife is asleep so I might be totally wrong about that too, but I am sure she said that to Witnesses Christenheit is the worst of the two, and the one they use for cross-wielding missionaries and so on.

  French and other non-English speaking Witnesses should not feel too hard done by because as I say, what the Witnesses already do to their native English in the literature is pretty inventive also at times.
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  Yizuman

  None of us has the Truth, only Jesus has the Truth and in Christiandom, if they follow His word and walk the talk like Jesus did, they're Christians. Jesus is neither a democrat nor a republican. He doesn't care for a church building or how you dress on the outside. He only cares how we dress on the inside. He neither cares for denominations as well. What he cares about is individuality, not groups, but you alone.

  Yiz
• 

  Narkissos

  The oldest entries of the English-French Theocrateselexicon almost always work with formal, unique word-to-word correspondence; comparative analysis of semantic range, usage and stylistics be damned. Unless this has changed in the last 20 years or so, when the translator reads "Christendom" s/he writes chrétienté (Btw, I doubt the WT uses the English word "Christendom" nowadays as often as it used to; much of the ire against "apostate Christendom" has been diverted against the WT own "apostates," but that's another story). In "free" conversation it depends. Educated Witnesses tend to speak approximately "normal" when addressing non-Witnesses and would not use an "odd" word like chrétienté. The less educated ones are unable to make the difference and tend to speak Theocratese everywhere. It works as a social marker as well, which weighs more heavily on the less educated, putting them more apart from their own (lower) social class.

  Formal correspondence is only avoided if unbearable. For instance, I don't think the English Theocratese "to impale" was ever translated as "empaler" which in French would imply the sense of driving a pole through someone's body. But even what's hardly tolerable is tolerated. An example that comes to mind is "field service," which in English can be understood as a scriptural allusion ("the field is the world") but can work apart from this reference (along the line of "field work," "field survey" and so on). In French, however, a different word is used for the agricultural/scriptural "field" ("champ") and for "field" in "field work" ("terrain"). So in French Theocratese "service du champ" the agricultural sense is unescapable and makes the expression weird 99 % of the times. I remember when I worked in Bethel translation dept. we tried to "reform" some of the old Theocratese expressions to make them closer to "normal" French usage but this one was deemed untouchable by the Branch Committee.