Garzo, in the event
Anders desires a collaborator, I'd be willing to help with the Swedish, and possibly with the Norwegian translation as well. But one can't (or at least shouldn't) translate what one can't understand, and I found myself in some difficulty with the biographical sketch of the good William Longspee :
... By marriage, he gained the title of the first Earl of Salisbury.
How can one gain a title by marriage, and yet be the first to hold that title ? Or does the above period mean indicate that William Longspee gained the title of someone else who was the first Earl of Salisbury, presumably by marrying his widow ?...
Henri
PS : By the way, there's nothing tautological in the Swedish «
domkyrka» for «cathedral», as you seem to understand :
The word church (and kyrka) comes from the Greek κυριου οικος (kyriou oikos), meaning Lord's house, or κυριακος (kyriakos), meaning 'dominical'.
If the former version is taken, the addition of a Latin 'domus' seems repetitious.
What has happened is that the
οικος in
κυριου οικος has been replaced with the Latin equivalent
domus, which was then transposed to the front of
κυριου and then agglutinated with the latter to form a single word. Our confusion arises from the fact that words like «church» have rather come to refer to a building, to the exclusion of other things «appertaining to the Lord»....
PPS (added 2005.04.05) : While on the subject of «church», the following, taken from Thomas Cahill's
OpEd in today's
New York Times, might be of interest :
Back then, the church called itself by the Greek word ekklesia, the word the Athenians used for their wide open assembly, the world's first participatory democracy. (The Apostle Peter, to whom the Vatican awards the title of first pope, was one of many leaders in the primitive church, as far from an absolute monarch as could be, a man whose most salient characteristic was his frequent and humble confession that he was wrong.) In using ekklesia to describe their church, the early Christians meant to emphasize that their society within a society acted not out of political power but only out of the power of love, love for all as equal children of God. But they went much further than the Athenians, for they permitted no restrictions on participation: no citizens and noncitizens, no Greeks and non-Greeks, no patriarchs and submissive females. For, as St. Paul put it repeatedly, "There is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female; for all are one in Christ Jesus."
