I've hit upon a marvelously introverted way to learn the local language. I found the translation of the New Testament online and I'm doing a [very poor] back-translation into English. I have to look up most of the nouns in each sentence but that's okay, I learn vocabulary that way. After I have all of the words in the sentence translated I try to shape them into some kind of sensible order- not always easy because the local grammar is very different from English. Once I have some sort of a sentence formed, I compare it to the ESV to see how close I got.
Recently I was in Matthew chapter 2. When I got to verse 11, I kind of got confused. This is what I had:
"They entered the house, they saw the child and Mary his mother, they stopped and knelt, they worshiped him. They opened their boxes of possessions, [and] give him gold and incense and ____ which smelled good and which made them talk dizzily."
That third gift must have been something pretty strong! Finally I realized the problem. The last word is "miir," which means "to be dizzy." It is pronounced a bit like MIR, the old Russian space station. But after saying it to myself a few times and playing with the vowel sounds, I suddenly heard "myrrh." Aha! So it was something that smelled good and which they called "myrrh".
So there you have it, folks. No hallucinogenic presents were present at the first Christmas after all.
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