--- Jon Johanning <jjohanning at igc.org> wrote: This is obviously not a serious translation of the Aristotelian passage, but an attempt at a word-for-word interlinear. He is particularly difficult to translate into meaningful English because (aside from a few books like the Nichomachean Ethics) his surviving writings are probably either his lecture notes or notes by his students, not much more than jottings. Also, he coined many technical terms, which he does not always define, so their meanings have to be gleaned from context, which means that you have to figure out the context -- a sort of chicken/egg problem. And, like any serious philosopher, he makes you think, so you can't speed-read him.
---
Well the technical terms do a lot of violence to the Greek language too. Attic Greek was a lot more flexible in this respect than English, but how else would you translate something like "ho tis" other than as "the this," or "ho pos" as other than "the how"? It's been a long time since I read Aristotle in Greek, or anything in Greek, but he does this kind of wordplay all the time, and I think it probably sounded almost as weird to his fellow Greeks as it does to us. I think it's one of the reasons Heidegger uses it so much in Sein und Zeit, which was largely inspired by his never-completed book on Aristotle.
===== Nu, zayats, pogodi!
__________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Y! Messenger - Communicate in real time. Download now. http://messenger.yahoo.com