Reply To: Artscroll Shas – English vs. Hebrew editions

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akuperma
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If one is able to comfortably read Hebrew, the Hebrew is always going to be preferable to English. Torah is in Hebrew (or Aramaic), and those languages do not translate well into English. It has to do with the very substantial differences between Indo-European (Aryan) language and Semitic languages, e.g., verb tenses, sentence structure, etc. While not agreeing with the classic phrases ” Traduttore, traditore” (translators=traitors), there are good reasons why our classic literatures have never been written in an Indo-European languages (of which English and Yiddish are, today, the most important).