Nephi is talking to his children before he dies. He warns them of priestcraft, which is basically preaching for money. He says that it is forbidden. He tells his children,"the Lord God hath given a commandment that all men should have charity, which charity is love. And except they should have charity they were nothing." He says that the way to know if you have charity is by your willingness to support others around you who are trying to build up the kingdom of God.
In the Czech translation of the Book of Mormon, the word "charity" here is translated as "pravá láska" and love is "láska."
Sketch Engine is a tool that can perhaps give some really deep insight to how these words are used and what they mean.
I used the Czech Web 2012 (csTenTen12 v9) corpus to look up the word láska and collocates of láska that are one word to the left.
Top 10 collocates of the word láska in Czech are:
God's
your/his
great/big
live/life <--hmm. Why?
with
true
confession, declaration
yours/his
true
I guess I would categorize these collocates this way:
Having to do with God/faith
Having to do with belonging to someone
Having to do with philosophical ideas, qualities
I guess the real question which I have is whether or not "pravá láska" ("true love") can exist in non-religious contexts. I don't know.
I think I could probably play around with these concordancer tools for a while to try to find an answer, but it would be much easier to simply ask a Czech person. I will try to gather some answers from several different people and report back my answer next week.
The reason this is interesting to me is because the word "charity" in English does not collocate strongly with "love" yet they are supposed to be the same idea. When I think of charity, I do not think of "true love." It is meaningful to me that this idea is captured so saliently in Czech.
Because that's what charity is. It is the true - or pure - love of Christ.
"But charity is the pure love of Christ, and it endureth forever; and whoso is found possessed of it at the last day, it shall be well with him." (Moroni 7:47)
TO BE CONTINUED...
"I've been dreaming of a charity kiss..." Bwahahahaha
ReplyDeleteour old catholic priest would use word GOODNESS instead of charity. He always said: be good and do good is the basic of basics rules which covers even the commandments.
ReplyDeleteThat is a great response. I love it. It also is so much less pejorative somehow than the word "charity."
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