Correlation of the Concepts truth, vérité, pravda, istina in Bible Versions: quantitative indicators

The paper is not about translation of the Bible into Russian, English or French, although its versions are widely presented in the research material. The goal is to compare the biblical discourse on truth and vérité with that of the post-truth era, its modern counterpart signified by the emblematic opposition of fact vs lies. Studying verbalizations of the above-mentioned concept has always been very important for the three cultures, but now, with a post-truth political ideology rising, its relevance for the English language and culture has increased noticeably. We study correlation of the words truth and vérité, pravda (often righteousness), istina (verity) in a number of Bible versions, old and new, to show that semantic consistency between the three cultures may be still achieved indirectly (that is without source texts) in this important area. Taking into account the factor of multiple versions has become essential for English-speaking cultures, it is quite important for the French community, and instructive for the Russian culture in terms of evaluating its consequences. The article presents only quantitative data on the density/variance (or dispersion) of concepts in the same biblical verse and the frequency of lexical ways of its verbalization in different versions of the Bible. The diagnostic value of frequency indicators for a meaningful interpretation is revealed, first, between the three languages; second, between the Old and New Testaments, and third, between their various books. To understand the functional load of the concepts under study in different versions, it is essential to know the frequency of their verbalizers, which sometimes differs greatly even within the same language for many reasons, including a new one – the task to produce a version easy to comprehend. It has been found that, as a rule, the degree of semantic correlation between the concepts under study is high, but in the “easy to read” versions a variability of lexical and syntactic means in the same contexts is significant as well as the intricacy of their refractions. This conclusion is valid, first of all, for the correlations of PRAVDA with its foreign-language counterparts. The form truths, which was not used in the early versions of the Bible, is now admitted by the most recent ones. This probably has to do with the secular philosophy of truth. And, finally, in the latest English-language versions, the word fact – the main competitor of truth in the discourse of the post-truth era – began to appear. This, however, does not refer to the word-combination fact-checking which still seems to be radically hostile to the Bible Truth discourse.

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