Not in question is the necessity of translations post dating original texts.
Whether or not a translator uses the very first version of a text, the version from which he or she translates is the original with regard to that translation.
Not in question is the necessity of translations post dating original texts.
Whether or not a translator uses the very first version of a text, the version from which he or she translates is the original with regard to that translation.
Not in question is the necessity of translations post dating original texts.
"The Turing test is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human." I'm not sure how that applies here unless you are suggesting the relentless logic of my responses is indistinguishable from how a machine may be expected to respond (a reverse Turing test). My responses remain the same as the point remains the same.
So are there any translations that beg the question: Can we find the original text?
All of the Old Testament falls into this category - long lost originals, sometimes attributed to authors that according to accepted chronology could not have written them, e.g. the books of Moses.
One way out of some of the problems may be to assert that conventional chronology is incorrect.
But the more important issue may be theological editing of the texts over the centuries - e.g. to write female deities out of the accounts. The word Elohim is the word for goddess adapted (disguised?) by attaching the male plural "im".
Eloah (Aleph, Lamed,Waw,Heh) is etymologically identical to Allah. Thus we might wonder if Allah is female. The common argument against that is that where the definite article is used in conjunction with the word for god, the reference is the supreme god - necessarily male.
The identity of the supreme god may have varied with locality.
All of the Old Testament falls into this category - long lost originals
The various books of the Bible appear to have begun as oral traditions from different sources, elaborated over time by different story-tellers with different agendas and only gradually committed to writing with the rise in literacy in Judea, shortly after the time attributed to Solomon. Thus, if you want an original version of any book in the Bible you would need to resurrect someone and have them speak.
Whether or not a translator uses the very first version of a text, the version from which he or she translates is the original with regard to that translation.
Not in question is the necessity of translations post dating original texts.
>the version from which he or she translates is the original with regard to that translation.
I am a bit slow. You are not claiming that any translation bears a resemblance to the original author's statements, only that the translation bears some resemblance to the later document, reputedly related to the document of the same name by the original reputed author.
Whether or not a translator uses the very first version of a text, the version from which he or she translates is the original with regard to that translation.
Not in question is the necessity of translations post dating original texts.
In the case of the Bible we have a pre-medieval copy of the Septuagint, the Codex Sinaiticus.
In the case of the Middle Ages, there was no absolute break with Antiquity: The still sizeable Byzantine Empire "survived the 5th century fragmentation and collapse of the Western Roman Empire and continued to exist for an additional thousand years until it fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453" (the closing years of the West's Late Middle Ages).
