Beginning C++ in FreeBSD

Chris Pressey cpressey at catseye.mine.nu
Wed Apr 21 12:50:06 PDT 2004


On Wed, 21 Apr 2004 21:04:00 +0200
Brad Knowles <brad.knowles at skynet.be> wrote:

> At 7:28 PM +0100 2004/04/21, Colin Percival wrote:
> 
> >>I challenge you to defend this (Sapir-Worfian) claim with a specific
> >>example.  :)
> >
> >    I'm not a biblical scholar, but I've been told that the word in
> >  Isaiah 7:14 which is often translated as "virgin" was used at the
> >  time to mean both "virgin" and "young woman".  Presumably the
> >  original author knew which he (or she) meant, but the precise
> >  meaning was lost in translation.
> 
> 	Actually, the original meaning was "unmarried".  For someone who
> has never had sex before, the word used was translated as "chaste".
> 
> 	Unfortunately, no one ever uses chaste anymore, and the mis-use 
> virgin to mean something quite different.  Kind of like the way the 
> word "hacker" has been abused.

Sure.  And the history of the word "silly" is equally interesting...

But unless someone can show that it is actually *not possible* to
distinguish between "unmarried" and "chaste" in Aramaic, I think the
challenge still stands.  :)

-Chris


More information about the freebsd-chat mailing list