Hobbes: “Leviathan” in Modern English – Introduction | Hacker News Reader

Hobbes: “Leviathan” in Modern English – Introduction

whatisthequestion.wordpress.com

47 pointsjohngossman18 comments

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This has already been done—and by Jonathan Bennett, an expert in early modern philosophy.

https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/authors/hobbes

If you aren't familiar with the site (and you are interested in philosophy), I highly recommend it.

https://www.earlymoderntexts.com

https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/faqss

Thanks. I had seen other versions but this is particularly well done. Honestly, I'm doing this as a form of in-depth note taking. It's not that hard to read in the original either.

> Honestly, I'm doing this as a form of in-depth note taking.

Yup. I saw your post about Gilgamesh, and I figured.

I added a TOC and introduction to the project https://whatisthequestion.wordpress.com/2022/12/22/hobbes-th...

Typo in the second sentence of your intro.

Have had this book on my shelf for a while now, with a false start due to the archaic language. Have subscribed to the blog, and am exited to see where this goes!

Reminds me of the recent effort to translate the Tanakh (The Jewish Bible, Old Testament) into Hebrew, from Hebrew. Modern Hebrew is close enough to Biblical Hebrew that its speakers feel reasonably confident in reading and understanding it. But their actual comprehension, in terms of the original meaning, is something of a controversial point. Modern Hebrew is in fact different. It's enough difference some academics believe Biblical Hebrew has to be translated to be properly understood; or at least approached as a foreign language and studied as such. That can be hard for people who understand it automatically (but perhaps incorrectly).

Semantic shifts are the worst offender, probably. Constant and ongoing. For an historic English example, sensible. Able to sense. Sensitive. "He's very sensible." once meant he's neurotic or passionate. But it shifted in meaning "able to sense with wisdom" or something like that. Now it means he's wise. And a possible ongoing example: just the other day, a young acquaintance misinterpreted "I appreciate how you feel" as "I am happy about how you feel" rather than "I understand how you feel." (And since he felt bad, he was quite offended.). Native English speaker! The other 20-somethings in chat understood the meaning, but to use their words, that sense is "old-fashioned" and "formal". They've heard "We appreciate your business" and such their whole lives. Little wonder that sense is coming to displace the others.

Hm. I read this in college and found the English and spelling very interesting, I would hope there is not too much lost in a 'translation'. Sometimes I felt like I understood exactly the point being made but I could never remember in those same terms. It's satisfying, almost like listening to a cousin language and understanding but not being able to repeat exactly.

The copy I read in college had Nouns Capitalized (as they are in German to this day, though I didn’t know that at the time). A girl in my class said “it’s like reading the dictionary.”

I think your comparison to a cousin/sibling language is very close to the truth. Historic forms of a language are nearly the same thing as that.

For example, Norwegian and Swedish were once the same language, that was about 800 years ago. We can think of Swedish as being separated from Old Norse by 800 years of language change. But we can also think of Swedish and Norwegian being separated by 1600 years of language change, 800 years on each side, linked through Old Norse at the half way point. (Of course it's not quite that simple, since Swedish and Norwegian have been in contact, not isolated, all this time, among other things. Still, I find it an interesting perspective.)

The interesting thing to me about this is it's a very recent phenomenon. English from 1900 has much more in common with 1600s English than 2020s English. There's been a massive shrinking in vocabulary, a reduction in the sense of individual words, and average sentence complexity has gone way, way down.

You read something from the 1600s, 1800s, or early 1900s, and it's not uncommon for a single sentence to cover half a page. Nowadays, that is practically unfathomable.

I read a lot of old books, so this is a little depressing to me. I'm not sure what the solution is, other than to encourage children to read lots of old books.

I sympathize enormously. There is something more thoughtful and challenging about a very long sentence, like you get in philosophy books from the 17th century, or a newspaper article from the 1800's.

The one thing that is perhaps depressing, but also a law, is that languages tend to simplify over time. So it's frustrating when people write things like, "He be upset about ... " or "The client's ask here is ..." but both are grammatical simplifications. Yes, they have a grammatical historical context, but simplifications nonetheless. English used to have a much more complex grammar, where you needed to inflect (if that is the right term) not just the verb but also the pronoun, direct object, etc. like modern Russian and some aspects of German.

There are some interesting linguistics channels on YouTube that I find quite appealing. One is Simon Roper who studies Old English among other languages, NativLang which is more into historical linguistics and presents it in a pop way, and Langfocus which is more comparative linguistics.

I also found the English and spelling interesting, but also very hard to get through. I never finished the book. It's not just the (now archaic) vocabulary and spelling that make it difficult, but also also the length of sentences – they never seem to end! I thought KJV could be difficult, but that's easy compared to Leviathan.

This book is on the wanted list for Standard Ebooks:

https://standardebooks.org/contribute/wanted-ebooks

They do some modernisations of old timey phrases to make things easier to read, and some are semi-automatic, but I'm not sure exactly how far they go for this kind of thing.

However, if you're handy with git then it would be fairly simple to keep the changes in seperate commits, in the same way they keep their editorial changes seperate from typos and other fixes (because some people prefer the raw original text).

Correction: At SE we don't "modernize old timey phrases". We perform sound-alike spelling updates only. For example clew -> clue, chuse -> choose. Changes are mostly conservative and obvious. People hear "modernize old timey phrases" and they go nuts thinking we're turning Macbeth into Hunger Games. That's just not accurate.

This linked version of Leviathan is a fun project but it's emphatically not the kind of thing we do at SE.

As long as you're leaving the circumflex on rôle, I see nothing wrong with this approach :-)

Sorry to disappoint you, but https://github.com/standardebooks/tools/blob/184056d3112cef8...

I recently came across this book cover again and immediately thought that’s More Joel on Software. Which made me appreciate it even more.

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