Featured Riplinger the Faux Linguist

Here is an excellent essay on Riplinger's "linguistic" theories. (The quotes there mean there is nothing at all linguistic about Gail R. )--
http://watch.pair.com/TR-1-textus-receptus.html
Note that I am not recommending the website as a whole, not knowing much else about it other than this article. But the author does a good job of exposing the secular thinkers behind Riplinger's theories.

So the Margaret Magnus that Riplinger thinks so much of is a weird unbeliever who thinks that letters have spirits in them. The other one she depends a lot on is Isaac Mozeson, who has come up with a weird theory he calls Edenics, which is the idea that all languages come from Hebrew, which he says was the language of Adam and Eve. He is a literature prof, not a linguist (though Riplinger calls him one), and all he and his cohorts do to prove their theory is find similar sounds in similar words in different languages. (I got a real kick out of the supposed Japanese parallels in Edenics. :laugh The Edenics "scholars," however, miss a minor point, which is that grammar is incredibly different in different languages! Guess what: God really did mix up the languages at Babel!

A few examples of how different grammar can be: Japanese has no articles; Chinese has no verb tenses; Japanese and Chinese both use particles to indicate possession, but English and Greek use word endings for possession, though in a very different way; Greek and English have infinitives, but Asian languages usually do not; Japanese word order always has the verb last--always, but Indo-European languages seldom do, except for Latin, which often does. So with all of these differences (and many more), it is about as likely that all languages came from the same source as that apples grow on banana trees! Riplinger resorts to some bizarre people for her theories!

 

Back at ya, JKD dude! :wavey::wavey:

 

Here is one place where Riplinger gives an example of what she means when she speaks of finding the meaning of a word exclusively through the KJV, without lexicons or dictionaries: http://www.hacalumni.com/howtodefineaword.shtml

Note first of all her statement, "Linguists do not define words; they simply demonstrate how they are used in various contexts." To see how ridiculous this statement is, simply keep reading: " Dictionaries are therefore descriptive, not prescriptive. The unique context of a writer or a speaker identifies which 'definition' (linguists would never use the word 'definition' ) of the sometimes several definitions a word may have." So linguists don't define, but dictionaries give definitions? Huh? And a linguist would never use the word definition? Oh, really? :tongue3:

In the first place, the proper word for those who compile dictionaries is lexicographer, not linguist. Lexicography is a separate discipline from linguistics, and a lexicographer may not know linguistic theory, or even another language! This is one more proof that Riplinger does not know language, is not a linguist nor even a lexicographer, nor is she even familiar with basic knowledge in either field.

It would take several more long posts to take apart this essay by Riplinger. We'll see if I want to do that. Let me point out something basic though. She is somewhat right about how a linguist or lexicographer defines a word. The process includes examining the contemporary usage of a word--that is, the way the word is used at the time it is being examined. For NT Greek this means examining how the word is used in the Greek NT itself as well as in the secular world of the day. You know, lost people read the Bible, so it is important to know how it communicates to them. The Bible is not in some special spiritual language that only Christians can understand.

So, in light of this, here is a huge mistake Riplinger is making in the linked essay. She is advocating using 21st American English to understand and define the words in the King James! Here is a key error of many who love the KJV as I do: they try to understand it in the light of modern English instead of 1611 British English. The word "mansion" in John 14:2 is a key example of this. In 17th century Britain it simply meant a dwelling place. A friend objected to my Japanese rendering in this passage until I pointed out the fact that the Japanese loan word manshon (マンション), coming from British and not American English, means a nice apartment!

 

True, she is not trained or qualified in textual criticism or linguistics. It is possible to train yourself in these disciplines, so I don't reject out of hand someone just because they are not formally trained. William Pierpont, co-editor of the Byzantine Textform Greek NT, was self-trained in both Greek and textual criticism. (The other editor, Dr. Maurice Robinson, has a PhD in textual criticism.) Many others who have their degrees in Greek have become credible textual critics, such as Dr. David Alan Black, who has written a good basic book on textual criticism. The caveat here is that in order to train one's self in textual criticism, one has to learn Greek first, making it a doubly hard discipline to self-train in.

Having said, that, Gail Riplinger is a fake pretending to be a linguist and textual critic, when she doesn't even have basic knowledge in either discipline.

I have seen what it took for my son to become a PhD in NT Greek linguistics: a BA, MA, MDiv, and then a huge amount of work for the PhD, not to mention various articles published in the journals and his dissertation being published soon. He's a genuine liguist by anyone's standard. (Not to mention fluency in Japanese and knowledge of Hebrew, German and French.) For my own part, as I said earlier: two years full time studying Japanese, over 3000 hours of formal study, not counting hundreds of hours on my own after that. So I resent someone like Riplinger claiming to be a linguist simply because she taught English as a 2nd language for a short while. She is arrogant in the extreme.

 

Got it! And she can also probably cook sashimi (raw fish). :laugh:

 

Really! I'm impressed. :thumbs: That takes a special license over here, as you probably know, and is very expensive. So I haven't ever had it--as far as I know. I've had many UFOs though (Unidentified Frying Objects), as well as the UROs (Unidentified Raw Objects). Japan has some strange dishes.

 

Who knows how long I could go with this. There are so many statements from Riplinger proving how little she actually knows about linguistics. On her website she advertises her new book by saying, "The King James Bible gives a transparent view of the Greek and Hebrew vocabulary, grammar and syntax" (https://shop.avpublications.com/product_info.php?products_id=100).

This statement is patently ridiculous for several reasons. First of all, syntax (sentence structure) is part of grammar, not some separate subject. Secondly, you can't get a "transparent view" of the vocabulary of the original from a translation. (For example, the word for "church" in the KJV has a different range of meaning from the Greek word ekklesia.) Finally, Riplinger doesn't know Greek or Hebrew (as she has admitted on a radio show), so how would she know!?! :tongue3:

 

You hit the nail on the head! :laugh: