Malcolm Jones wrote:
In England, the expression Authorised Version, often simply AV. certainly
means the version published in 1611,
(also known as the King James Bible) irrespective of the religious
denomination of the speaker/writer.
Others more familiar than I can speak of N. American usage, but I have
always understood that the above practice
was common throughout the English speaking world.
Thanks, so my assumption (as a non-native speaker of English) was correct.
Is not the German issue one of orthography? In German, nouns must have a
capital letter, but adjectives may not.
Quite. To bring out that the words "autorisierte Version" are to be read
as a title and not as a mere descriptive phrase, it should have read
"Autorisierte Version", or, even better, "King-James-Bibel", which is a
common way of calling it in German. But I suspect that there was a
misunderstanding during translating and it simply wasn't realized that
"Authorized Version" is the title of a specific version of the bible.
The examples given are all in German (e.g. "Bibel. Esra" and "Bibel.
Offenbarung"). So what we see here decidedly is not the "the brief
citation form of the Authorized Version".
Hence it is impossible to translate the English usage without creating the
ambiguity, at leat to an anglophone mind.
German speakers may tell us whether or not it is an issue there.
It would be possible to remove the ambiguity in German and render the
exact meaning of the current rule (see above). But the real issue lies,
of course, deeper, as we Germans do not want to use English titles for
the books of the Bible, but German ones. The current wording of the rule
doesn't seem to allow this.
I think one possibility would be to make a proposal for a change to the
rule itself (as suggested in my first mail), and the other would be to
follow the lead of the French and daringly (but certainly in the spirit
of RDA 0.11) adapt the German version of the text. But before I start a
discussion on this here in Germany, I really wanted to make sure it
wasn't me who had the misunderstanding ;-)
Heidrun
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Prof. Heidrun Wiesenmueller M.A.
Stuttgart Media University
Wolframstr. 32, 70191 Stuttgart, Germany
www.hdm-stuttgart.de/bi
