Day: January 21, 2016
What is the name for the ‘condition’ that sometimes occurs when people wake from a coma and can speak a foreign language without any prior study?
There is indeed Foreign accent syndrome . And the simplest explanation is the easiest: people wake up with a kind of speech disorder, which listeners match to whatever accents they are familiar with. It does not mean they are speaking a different languages, or that they have been exposed to another accent natively. Pareidolia, the Wikipedia page politely calls it.
As the Wikipedia article adds,
Despite an unconfirmed news report in 2010 that a Croatian speaker has gained the ability to speak fluent German after emergence from a coma,[5] there has been no verified case where a patient’s foreign language skills have improved after a brain injury.
So “speaking a foreign language” outright doesn’t happen. And if someone was going to wake up from a coma speaking German, Croatia is more plausible than I dunno, Madagascar. Like John Nurse’s answer says, you don’t know a new language out of thin air.
What is the best Greek New Testament?
- The Textus Receptus is the traditional Orthodox Greek bible, as passed down from Byzantine copyist through Byzantine copyist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/By… ), into one particular manuscript that Erasmus got hold of, and missing one page that Erasmus translated from the Vulgate. It is distinguished for being the first widely disseminated Greek text in the age of printing. It is the authoritative text of the Orthodox church, but noone involved was making an attempt to reconstruct the original text.
- The other two major families of New Testament manuscripts are the Alexandrian text-type and the Western text-type.
- Textual critics, who are trying to reconstruct the original text, tend to prefer the Alexandrian type, at least for the Gospels. But this is reconstruction, and reconstruction based on sometimes subjective criteria (which nonetheless make sense when you think about them.)