Sacred & Content Languages

Several traditions maintain a scriptural or liturgical language distinct from the everyday speech of the people who practice them, and resist translating out of it for reasons that differ tradition by tradition while producing the same practical result. Classical Arabic keeps its authority in Islam partly through the doctrine of i'jaz al-Quran, the Quran's own inimitability, which has traditionally left a translation standing as a work of interpretation rather than as the Quran itself. Sanskrit held a comparable status in Hindu ritual as a learned, carefully preserved language distinct from the vernaculars most worshippers actually spoke, its grammar fixed by Panini centuries before the common era and treated ever after as a standard rather than as a living, drifting tongue. Ge'ez, no longer anyone's spoken vernacular for many centuries, remains the liturgical language of the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox churches, which conduct their services in it while their congregations speak Amharic or Tigrinya at home.

Latin held the same place in Western Christianity until the Second Vatican Council's 1963 constitution on the liturgy opened the door to vernacular Mass, ending a run of well over a thousand years during which the liturgy and the congregation's own language had parted ways. Biblical Hebrew followed a related but distinct path, kept for prayer and scripture across the centuries in which Hebrew was nobody's daily speech, then joined rather than replaced by the modern spoken Hebrew a nineteenth century revival built alongside it.