The Translation and Exegesis of the Religious Texts and the Need for Religious Linguistics

Abstract

Linguistics, the science which studies the humanitarian languagesscientifically, tackled from its beginning in the 19th century certain linguistic aspectssuch as, Phonetics, Syntax, Morphology, and Semantics. In the course of time, thisscience has witnessed continuous developments so as to include other lingualdisciplines and secondary lingual sciences, like Historical Linguistics,Psycholinguistics, Contrastive Linguistics, not to mention the other lingual sciencesand theories, such as Language Acquisition and Learning, Discourse Analysis,Stylistics and others. In spite of the fact that all these disciplines have come aboutfrom General Linguistics, still there is a field which needs a great deal of study andconcern, namely the effect of the religious texts or religion in general on language. Itis a well-known fact that different religious interpretations and exegeses, especiallythose dealt with Divine religions, created sectarian outlooks which led to blood shedsin European Christian communities since the middle ages and recently amongstArab and Muslim peoples. This can be attributed to the lack of understandinglanguages since they are pregnant with rich heritages of their own, something whichrequires the need of dedicating a new branch of linguistic study, namely ReligiousLinguistics. The oriental linguists, whether Muslims, Christians and Jews cancontribute greatly in this field of studies since these Jewish, Christian and Islamicholy books were basically written in their Hebrew, Aramaic/Syriac and Arabicrespectively, and had different translations and exegeses. Such a new field, then, willlead to revise the holy books, their exegeses, rhetoric, idioms, style and all theirlingual aspects scientifically, and to more understating, harmony and rapprochementbetween all the followers of these religions.