Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 12 March 2005

A Lexicographer writes

issue 12 March 2005

I enjoyed the book Long Live Latin rather more than the Spectator reviewer (5 February) seems to have done, and its author, John Gray, has put his finger on a misleading passage in Lynne Truss’s famous book, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. (I’m not sure I wouldn’t have hyphenated ‘Zero-Tolerance Approach’, but no matter.) Mr Gray takes a sentence from the prophet Isaiah (xxxx 1): Consolamini consolamini populus meus dicit Deus vester. This is translated in the Authorised Version (which Americans and people who say ‘toilet’ call the King James Bible) as, ‘Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people, saith your God.’ Lynne Truss asks whether this verse means, ‘Comfort ye my people [please go out and comfort my people]’ or ‘Comfort ye, my people [just cheer up, you lot; it might never happen].’

She then writes, ‘Of course, if Hebrew or any of the other ancient languages had included punctuation, 2,000 years of scriptural exegesis need never have occurred.’

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