Original scientific paper
Simplicity and complexity of John's Gospel vocabulary
Zrinka Jelaska
orcid.org/0000-0001-6189-2485
; Faculty of Philosophy, University of Zagreb
Valentina Baričević
; Salesian Sisters of St John Bosco, Daughters of Mary Help of Christians, Zagreb
Abstract
The author discusses some lexical features of the Gospel of John, in general and based on the most frequent nouns in Croatian translation (Duda, Fućak 1973, 1985), the mostly used in Catholic liturgy. After an introduction, the tokens from all four Gospels are compared in Greek, Croatian and English (King James Bible), as well as their percentage within the gospels as a whole. The Croatian translation of John has more lemmas than Greek: (1487 vs. 1001) and has a somewhat higher lexical variation than in Greek (in Croatian it is 0,1045, while in Greek it is 0,0656), as John in Greek has more tokens (14226 vs. 15240). The very fact that the Croatian translation has approx. 48,7% more lemmas than in Greek shows that John in Greek has many polysemic words. Lexical density of John in Croatian is 0,5074 compared to 0,5832 of synoptic gospels (Luke 0,5747, Mark 0,5793 and Matthew 0,5949), mostly due to the much lower number and proportion of adjectives and much larger number and proportion of pronouns. While all gospels are lexically simple (they are less variable and less dense than two primary school Croatian readers of similar size), the Gospel of John is much simpler. That and other linguistic and stylistic features contribute to the simplicity of the fourth gospel: repetitions, explanations, oppositions make it easier to understand, while polysemy and metaphors, especially symbolic meaning work in the opposite direction. It is argued that simplicity is in contraposition to complexity of John's meaning. All simplifications are pedagogically appropriate as they make for semantic complexity of the text - if some language level is very complex, simplify the rest. In the final part of the paper the most frequent fifty in John are compared to the most frequent fifty nouns in synoptic gospels, as well as in the whole Bible and Croatian in general. John shares most of his noun vocabulary with other gospels, the whole Bible and Croatian in general, but sometimes he has absolutely or relatively higher frequency than the rest. However, there are some nouns that appear as the most frequent in his Gospel only, all of them are polysemic: Židov `Jew', ovce `sheep', istina `truth', blagdan `holiday', zakon `law', pismo `scripture', slava `glory', svjetlost `light', znamenje `sign', svjedočanstvo `testimony'. Hence, one should speak about lexically simple but semantically complex vocabulary of John not only in Croatian.
Keywords
John's Gospel; Croatian translation; quantitative linguistics; language features; vocabulary
Hrčak ID:
103760
URI
Publication date:
24.10.2012.
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