Forthright
Registered User
I had a maybe a bit crazy idea I wanted to try out on folks and see what they thought.
We have all of these very old texts in the Fraternity (just to pick an example, Anderson's Constitutions) that contain very old language that's prone to misinterpretation. Arguably part of the fun of learning the ritual and the Fraternity is getting underneath of this meaning, but it also seems to me sometimes that the older language makes things inaccessible for newer brothers.
At an extreme, in another few hundred years we could be at the point where the Catholic Church was for a while, which did ritual in a language (Latin) that most of the lay people didn't even understand.
So there's got to be some give and take between the old, sometimes flowery & complex language, and the new language that's more accessible, but which might run the risk of diluting or losing meaning (as any translation can).
What would you think of an "English to English" translation of certain bits of key Masonic documents, to update them from 1700s British English to modern usage?
We have all of these very old texts in the Fraternity (just to pick an example, Anderson's Constitutions) that contain very old language that's prone to misinterpretation. Arguably part of the fun of learning the ritual and the Fraternity is getting underneath of this meaning, but it also seems to me sometimes that the older language makes things inaccessible for newer brothers.
At an extreme, in another few hundred years we could be at the point where the Catholic Church was for a while, which did ritual in a language (Latin) that most of the lay people didn't even understand.
So there's got to be some give and take between the old, sometimes flowery & complex language, and the new language that's more accessible, but which might run the risk of diluting or losing meaning (as any translation can).
What would you think of an "English to English" translation of certain bits of key Masonic documents, to update them from 1700s British English to modern usage?