As I sought feedback on the Swahili lyrics of Baba Yetu recently, one of the most crucial kinds of feedback I received was of the sort that said “X rather than Y sounds more natural to a native speaker.”
As Bill Mounce pointed out in a recent blog post, this is the kind of instinctive knowledge that only comes with great proficiency in a language. And it is why people who look up words in Strong’s Concordance and pretend to be offering an informed decision about the Biblical texts in their original languages are an abomination – in the original underlying sense of the Hebrew word, of course.
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