> 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.
Yes, he did coin those terms, but I think they made more sense to his fellow Greeks than "the this" and "the how" do to us -- which is practically no sense at all. A cardinal principal in translation is that the translation has to make sense to the readers of the target language -- otherwise, why bother doing it? Translation does not involve replacing each word in the source text, one by one, with a word in the target language; that is an interlinear, which is meant to be a crutch for learners of the original language.
Any serious translator of Aristotle has to find meaningful English expressions which, in the translator's judgment, express to English readers what Aristotle was saying to his contemporaries, or as close to that as possible. That's the skill of translation; evading that by just putting in something like "the this" is falling down on the job.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A gentleman haranguing on the perfection of our law, and that it was equally open to the poor and the rich, was answered by another, 'So is the London Tavern.' -- "Tom Paine's Jests..." (1794); also attr. to John Horne Tooke (1736-1812) by Hazlitt