Brexit – what next? (guest article by my friend Martin Williams of European Business Solutions)
The UK voted in the Referendum by a very narrow margin the leave the EU. But it is not as simple as that. The process of leaving begins when the UK writes formally to the EU, specifically commencing the process set out in Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty. The Referendum is technically not binding on Parliament, the overwhelming majority of MPs preferring Britain to stay in the EU. The Prime Minister, Mr Cameron, has said he will step down for a new leader of the Conservative Party to be appointed, sometime in the Autumn, and he will not invoke Article 50, believing that this should be done by the new Prime Minister.
The leader of the “Out” side, Mr Johnson has said that he believes that the EU and the UK will retain access to each other’s markets. Mr Johnson adds that “Immigration was not the main issue in the Referendum” and a spokesman for Mrs Merkel has already commented that access to the EU Market for the UK is perfectly possible if the UK pays a contribution to the costs of the market in a similar way to Norway. Incidentally, this model also involves, for all practical purposes, free movement of people. Then what is going to change I hear you ask, and my opinion is “Not very much” The UK and the EU will continue to be effectively a free trade area, there will be movement of people and the UK will contribute to the costs. Read the rest of this entry
A good time to germinate your German
Today’s article is in response to a request I had on Facebook Messenger from a Polish youth called Adam.
He complains of having received 10 years of teaching at school in German after which he has emerged with very little German knowledge, and blames this on the teaching. He has however managed to learn English even though he didn’t get this kind of classroom time in English. He feels if anything that the lessons at school just served to make him feel bad about German as a language.
Vergissmeinnicht – naja, das ist genau worauf wir hinauf sind…
This is not to do with any implicit dislike of German people or the country – indeed in 8 months time he means to move there on his own and wants now to learn sufficient German in the intervening 8 months to cope with the move and function properly in the country.
So I agreed to produce an 8 month plan of action for someone in this situation, but it will just be a first 8 months of an ongoing study plan, but in English and here for other people to benefit from who are in the same situation. Read the rest of this entry
Qui habet aures audiendi audiat, Audible!
It’s time for me to say publicly how unhappy I am about this policy of not allowing me to participate in some of the daily deals because I live in a different EU country to the UK. I am from the UK, I travel and work all over Europe and live in Poland, but in Europe we have a special law (ironically in this context) called the Treaty of Rome which grants us four freedoms, including freedom of the movement of people and of services and of goods.
Nothing can override these freedoms as they are lex specialis. The problem is of course, that the EU in its current form is full of good thoughts and ideas which are applied on a selective basis. When they want our votes we are told we have these rights, but afterwards there are 1001 ways in which they are limited, if only by resources but also by all the special interests which really pull the strings. How can it be that in the EU a publisher can release books in one country but not in another? I understand there can be good reasons to limit that. I understand for example “Mein Kampf” being illegal in Germany, but Mary Beard? What has she been saying that would stir shit up in Poland? Read the rest of this entry
To Polish people and others who use the term “Ms Amy”, “Mr David”, etc in English
Just for your information, a title plus the first name is decidedly old-fashioned in English now. We use it for people with very high titles, such as Sir Cliff (Richards), Dame Edna (Everage) but not Lord and Lady. Mr, Miss and Mrs were used only with surname already before Ms was revived in the 20th Century. Ms plus first name is recorded in the seventeeth century. Ms then went out of use for two centuries, (because it is actually short for “mistress” which took on a risqué meaning).
The use of any title less than Sir or Dame plus first name seems decidedly quaint now. One is put in mind of that traditional old Texas oil baron Jock Ewing, who persisted in calling his wife “Miss Ellie” even after they were married and even just before his funeral. I understand that this is a bit of a Texas thing.
Meeting his Dick(Whittington)ness Mr Boris Johnson, at least, a plasticine avatar of the same.
In the English-speaking world, first names seem to be in general use now and in the main people do not even ask for permission to switch to it. However there are still situations where deference is called for, such as to a client or a teacher, in which case Mr/Miss/Mrs/Ms or a professional/academic title like Dr or Professor are used with the surname. More highly honorific titles still, such as Excellency for embassadors, highness or majesty for royalty are not usually combined with names at all in direct address. It is also usually appropriate to use the term once in a meeting and then default to “sir, ma’am” after this. The use of first or second name after foreign titles used in English will follow the usage in the language of origin. Examples include Don Giovanni, Sheikh Yamani, Mufti Menk and Imam Bayildi.
I came, I sawm, I conquered…
No, that isn’t a typo in the title. Yes, it is another one of my trademark painful interlingual puns.
Fasting – known as “sawm” – during Ramadan is one of the so-called five pillars of Islam, or obligations described in Islamic texts, which many Muslims follow, alongside actions such as prayer, giving alms and making the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca.
Thus spake today’s article on the topic in the Daily Telegraph. They seem to have missed one of the five pillars, as I can only count four there, but such errors have never been known to bother the modern journalist. For the sake of completeness I will provide the whole list of these so-called “pillars”: shahadah (or “testifying” which means stating their belief that Allah is the name of the only God and his messenger is Mohammed as if it were fact) prayer, fasting, almsgiving and pilgrimage to Mecca. Read the rest of this entry
2015 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 45,000 times in 2015. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 17 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
The Son of Man hath not where to lay His head…
Recently on Facebook a friend by name of John who has a tendency to challenge people about faith questions, taking basically it would seem an opposing view to traditional Christian theology linked me in the course of a discussion about a series of photos I had uploaded showing our Christmas meal to the following article.
http://exploringfortruth.blogspot.com.es/2009/04/nativity-myths.html?m=1
He also gave other links and each article had a numer of bones to pick with traditional Christian understandings of Scripture. In particular there wwas the old chestnut about “almah” not necessarily meaning a Virgin. I wrote the following rebuttal of that point:
I will take just one point for now, about Mary being just “a young woman” – clearly there is more meanings to almah than just “virgin” – one is reminded of Jungfrau in German – it means literally a young woman but is also the standard German word for virgin. There is no paucity of Germans and their literature in the world today so no room to get confused about that one, but clearly there is room for people to get confused about the semantic map of a word in classical Hebrew in an age where little Hebrew existed outside the remaining religious texts and even the Talmud is rather Aramaic than Hebrew.
The article argues that if Isaiah had meant virgin he would have used betulah not almah. But the same problem exists with betulah – all it really means is a woman who is to be married. Her chasteness is a societal presumption. There were no words in Hebrew of a medical or biological import describing intact hymens etc that have at any rate survived in the corpus of Hebrew writing. Therefore the self same objections could have been raised to betulah.In the Bible almah never is used in the sense of a woman about to be married, it is always about young women in a society where extramarital chastity and intactness of the young is presumed.
But the biggest argument of course is why would Isaiah make a big deal about messiah being born of an almah if that simply means a young woman? Would anyone have expected a firstborn to be born of an old crone or of a man? The verse simply becomes absurd with this reading.
Another point is that a pregnant woman would have been honoured and not left with whatever was left, the claim of the article about the manger. This is all very well but as an argument it barely stacks up in a situation where foreign government has sent people around the country to the place the man was born in in order to register for tax there. This was a typical case of an ill thought-out government imposition of duty on citizens with the resultant usual chaos compounded by the fact that the Roman rule had no love for the Jews and probably were having a great laugh at the logistical nightmare they had created.
So we have no idea how many married couples with pregnant ladies were turning up in Bethlehem and of course Joseph had no way of booking ahead, I am sure he did what he could, but as for consulting tripadvisor off of a mobile phone, well I doubt his donkey was equipped with that. So he got the leftovers. It’s hard to imagine turfing out rich clients who have already paid top shekel for the good rooms or asking them would you mind budging over for a pregnant lady when there probably were already quite a few pregnant ladies wrapped up in the chaos.
But the real reason Jesus was placed in a feeding trough was again, prophetic. You see the feeding troughs such as they were resembled the ones you probably saw in the forests in Poland when food is laid out for deer. It is basically a trestle – two cross beams making X shapes at either end standing each on the bottom two feet while planks of wood join together the upper part of the X in a V shaped trough. In this goes straw, and the wrapped baby who is the Maker of each piece of mass or each photon or other unit of any physical force in this Universe is carefully placed inside it. You see Him between two crosses – just as he was on the day of His crucifixion. This is why He was born in this way.
“Leave the virgin birth out for the moment. We could have a long debate about it but let’s not. I should perhaps have trimmed the two articles to exclude it but I always prefer, if possible, to present complete articles rather than risk taking things out of context.
What I was really wondering was what you think of the suggested confusion of the words for inn and guest room and suggestion that the manger would have been located inside a house rather than in a barn. You may have relevant linguistic knowledge and I’m sure your opinion will be informed”.
So, what are we to make of the “no room at the inn” and the manger portion then? Well, he goes on to describe the common living quarters at the time, which was common place since the time of David through even the twentieth century time frame. Most common folk had small living quarters that consisted of mainly three sections in a house. The main room, the family room, was the large area where all daily life living took place, from eating to sleeping. There was usually a second room attached in the back, or sometimes on the roof, which was considered basically a guest room.The family room portion was most often a few steps higher, off of ground level. As you entered into a home, on ground level, you had a small pinned off area, like a modern day “foyer” we’d have today, and then you would step up a few steps into the actual living area. That entrance was foyer area was where common folk brought in and stored their few family animals at night for warmth and protection. In the morning, they were taken outside and tied up in a courtyard area of the property, and that nightly stable area was cleaned for daily use.
At the edge of the living room area, within reach of the stable area, were elongated circular pocket style recesses in the floor where food for the animals could be stored and easily reached by them at night. These areas were referred to as mangers. So, if Joseph and Mary were staying in the house of someone that took them in, and Jesus was born in the family room and laid to rest in this recessed manger area, that would perfectly match the cultural scenario of the living quarters.
When it comes to the idea of the “inn” the original language gives us much insight on it’s own, but the cultural understanding makes it even more clear. Most understand this verse in Luke to be referring to a common hotel type place that had the no vacancy sign lit when Joseph arrived. However, the Greek word used here does not refer to a public lodging place. A public lodging facility, a lodging place for strangers, was a pandocheion (see Luke 10:34). The word used here in Luke 2:7 is the Greek word kataluma, which more properly means the guest chamber (and is translated as such in the Young’s Literal translation). We see this same word being used exactly as that in Mark 14:14 – and wherever he enters, say to the master of the house, ‘The Teacher says, Where is my guest room, where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?’ (see also Luke 22:11).
This guest room was, as mentioned before, the second major room of a common dwelling. So, in this case, if the family that took Joseph and Mary in, already had additional guests in the guests room, then we find Mary and Joseph sharing the front family room with their hosts, and therefore, when Jesus was born, he was laid in the manger portion of that family room, because the guest room was already taken.
There is so much more detail and historical as well as biblical backing for this explanation in his book, but this in essence is the overview of what would have been culturally understood at the time of Luke’s writing. All of this to say that Jesus wasn’t necessarily born in a barn, out in the cold, rejected by all the local living places, but was rather, born in the family room of a family who already had additional guests in the guest room.
This is basically at issue as earlier on in our discussion I had spoken of Jesus Christ as being the maker of every atom and yet placed in a feeding trough. I hadn’t actually made an issue of whether the manager was a separate barn or incorporated into an area where people also lived. I am fully aware that in earlier agricultural settings quarters could be shared with animals. To this very day the Chinese and Japanese character for a house or home
家
What would be less moot is that the kalatyma in question that they were turned away from was unlikely to have been a single room for the simple contextually obvious reason thatit says “διότι οὐκ ἦν αὐτοῖς τόπος ἐν τῷ καταλύματι” or “because not was to/for them space/place in the katalyma”.
This makes it clear – they came with a reasonable expectation of using the katalyma, but there was no space left in it. If it were a single guest room there wouldn’t be a issue of space being in it. A guest room is for one person unless it’s like a dormitory or a hostel where people are sleeping in an open space who do not know each other. The point at issue was that they expected to stay there but there was no space for them. Talking about whether the Greek should have used “pandocheion” instead of “katalyma” is as pointless as arguing whether instead of an “inn” that could not accommodate them it was a B&B, or a hostel, or a motel, or a hotel, or a hostelry, a karczma, or a zajazd, or a Logis de France, or how many jolly Michelin stars the place had. Every language has a whole bunch of interchangeable terms for places that offer a night’s rest as their business. Getting into what the culture of it was back then is as irrelevant as trying to work out what Joseph’s budget was and if he was getting ripped off.
The point of all of this is summarised later on by the Lord Himself when He spoke of His position in earthly terms:
“And Jesus said unto him, Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.” (Luke 9 v 58).
