I'd be curious to see a translation/paraphrase that went full in on following the structure and styles for the whole text.
You turn to psalm 119 and get an acrostic (ideally about the law) or culturally equivalent poetical form, where Paul writes bad greek, bad English.
I don't know about Hebrew; but one of the problems with many translations of the NT is that they follow the Greek structure too closely. This is especially true of the Pauline epistles which include lengthy sentences with many dependent and subordinate clauses. These "work" in Greek but can be ambiguous and confusing in English, so IMO it's better to break the sentences into smaller units.
I’m way away from such formal education I had on scripture. But I vaguely remember three questions to apply to any portion of scripture.
What does it say?
What did it mean?
What is its current significance?
These were for me a kind of antidote to the evangelical nostrums I grew up with. That scripture, as translated, has a plain meaning which remains constant regardless of culture. Intellectuals make it too complicated because they seek to ignore the challenges of the plain meaning.
Well, I grew out of that stuff and am glad that I did. And am grateful for any processes which illuminate those basic questions.
In that context I doubt whether it is possible to produce a translation which can eliminate the first question entirely. The answer to what does it say must inevitably open up issues of original language, source variations. And the second question, what does it mean, opens up both literary and cultural issues as discussed here.
I think we need to get away from the whole idea that scriptural texts are perspicuous. Whichever original texts or translations we may have to hand. Getting at meaning and relevance is hard work and should always be subject to self-critical awareness.
I think we need to get away from the whole idea that scriptural texts are perspicuous. Whichever original texts or translations we may have to hand. Getting at meaning and relevance is hard work and should always be subject to self-critical awareness.
What a great paragraph! Thank you.
One danger though (if I may be so bold) is that "lay" people stop reading the Bible as they think it can only be understood and interpreted by an "expert".
Of course! I’m the classic nonconformist! But not anti-intellectual either. Nor anti-clerical
The notion that scripture is perspicuous came out of the reformation and was always an oversimplification at best. People want it to be perspicuous so they can make up their own minds. Hence protestant fragmentation. .
Intonation is well intended, to remove the risk that the reader’s emphases add to or distract from the text as it stands. But I can’t say I like it much! I prefer the reading to be done by someone who enters into the text.
Alec McCowen’s tour de force one person rendition of Mark’s Gospel is a good illustration of the virtue added by a good, gifted, story teller. Of course there is a risk in that. But intonation can be very boring and effectively remove meaning.
My former church held joint Palm Sunday services with the Anglicans. The whole Passion story (which I don't want to Palm Sunday, anyway!) was intoned, with everyone standing. People hated both the approach and the length of time it took, so paid it no attention; ultimately many ceased to attend.
When the New Vicar came, he turned it into a multi-voiced reading with the congregation taking the part of The Crowd. Much, much better!
My former church held joint Palm Sunday services with the Anglicans. The whole Passion story (which I don't want to Palm Sunday, anyway!) was intoned, with everyone standing. People hated both the approach and the length of time it took, so paid it no attention; ultimately many ceased to attend.
When the New Vicar came, he turned it into a multi-voiced reading with the congregation taking the part of The Crowd. Much, much better!
The semi-dramatised reading of the Passion Gospel is one of my favourite service components, especially when everyone stands at "Golgotha" having previously been seated.
I can't remember if we stood or sat - I suspect the former, as they usually stood for the Gospel reading. Mind you, there were quite a few Elderly and Infirm members in the congregation who must have stayed seated.
"Mary was a pick-me girl for God and was simping for him in prayer when the angel Gabriel appeared to her and said a-yo, you're the real one and the top-G is feelin' you. But she thought his compliment was high key suss and gave him the side eye. So he said, babygirl, chill. God sent me to tell you you've passed his vibe check and low key he wants you to be the mother of the main character, the son of the top G. You'd name him Jesus and they will say he's HIM, the one prophesied in the divine dad lore who solos all and whose crushing it never ends. He will take the W from all his ops and his kingdom will go hard forever. She said how can this be since I promised him my body count will always be zero, respectfully. He said this ain't about cuffing season for the Holy Spirit will live rent free in you, and your boi Jesus will be a divine bro. Besides, your cousin Elizabeth is with chile, she who is already older than a boomer, and whose husband is way past beekeeping age. For God doesn't even know how to take an L, he's just built different. So Mary said bet, and Gabriel left her on read, and she let the Holy Spirit cook."
My former church held joint Palm Sunday services with the Anglicans. The whole Passion story (which I don't want to Palm Sunday, anyway!) was intoned, with everyone standing. People hated both the approach and the length of time it took, so paid it no attention; ultimately many ceased to attend.
When the New Vicar came, he turned it into a multi-voiced reading with the congregation taking the part of The Crowd. Much, much better!
Is outrage! 😉
Seriously, I don't like intonation much either - tell it not in Gath - but am getting used to it. I tend to read the lectionary readings before I attend services so I generally know what's coming at.
I once attended an ecumenical conference where the Anglicans led an antiphonal reading of the Psalms. The Orthodox laity immediately turned to their clergy and demanded why they couldn't have the same.
I once attended an ecumenical conference where the Anglicans led an antiphonal reading of the Psalms. The Orthodox laity immediately turned to their clergy and demanded why they couldn't have the same.
(a) If you did the full Psalmody of the Bysantine services in that way you would be in chirch all day.
(b) Some of the fixed Psalms in Matins and Vespers should be read antiphonally by two solo readers (rather than congregationally). Many churches omit those verses.
(c) Most of the sung variable parts of Matins and Vespers are explicitly set for antiphonal singing. Russian "tradition" since the eighteenth century has often prioritised harmonized chant over antiphnal chant.
I just posted this in another thread, but maybe it will resonate here:
We don't know exactly what Jesus actually said, for example. One is perfectly able to believe that the Bible tells us that with reasonable precision, but to me that's a faith exercise. Are the Biblical accounts of Jesus' words enough to understand something about his ethos? Sure. Is that more important, at this point, than his exact Aramaic grammar? Arguably. We don't know exactly what Socrates said either, but we have had his method handed down to us, for which many are grateful, and would prefer to have more than his explicit verbiage. Maybe that's a human tendency -- appreciating the imperfect utility of something good more than the perfect understanding of its origin. Someone else's next thread topic, perhaps.
I find spoken Shakespeare nearly as hard to follow as Chaucer. If I have a written script I'm fine but I can't process it fast enough spoken; I only hear every third phrase or so because my brain is too occupied understanding one phrase to even hear the next two.
This is why I'm very strong on the language in church being very comprehensible.
I'm surprised, because I find Shakespeare to be so close to modern English as to be practically the same language - albeit with some archaisms slipped in here and there. It makes a bit of a difference to me if what I'm hearing is a Laurence Olivier-style declamation in RP, or an "OP" production - for the latter, it takes my ear a little while to tune in.
Whereas Chaucer - well, I can read Chaucer, or hear him read, but I typically need a reference or a gloss to follow more than the general gist.
But that only goes to show that people aren't the same.
Someone mentioned the challenges presented by the Pauline epistles. IME, if you exclude the long lists of begats with the names nobody knows how to pronounce, Paul's epistles are the things that lectors most often mess up in church, because they don't understand the structure, and put the emphasis in all the wrong places. And all that wonderful rhetoric gets reduced to gibberish.
Forgive me if this is a tangent.
This thread has got me wondering if English changed more in the 20 century than in previous times, hence the desire to produce more contemporary language bibles and liturgies.
Forgive me if this is a tangent.
This thread has got me wondering if English changed more in the 20 century than in previous times, hence the desire to produce more contemporary language bibles and liturgies.
I think there's more willingness to accept that it's changed.
This is in part down to the development of linguistics as a science, and in part changing social attitudes to language (and of course these two themselves are not unrelated).
There might be another element as well - while churchgoing was the norm and people were familiar with the Bible and the Liturgies from a young age, their archaism was less of a barrier. As society got more secular this familiarity dropped and therefore there was a gap between what people could understand with less inherited familiarity with the archaic language and what the church wanted them to understand - a gap into which modern language translations and liturgies drop quite neatly.
The number of different modern versions, and the frequency of their being reissued in slightly different iterations makes me suspect the main drivers are commercial. The Anglophone world, especially in North America, is a tempting market. I suspect there have been fewer new and latest versions in C21 Irish Gaelic or Finnish.
The number of different modern versions, and the frequency of their being reissued in slightly different iterations makes me suspect the main drivers are commercial. The Anglophone world, especially in North America, is a tempting market. I suspect there have been fewer new and latest versions in C21 Irish Gaelic or Finnish.
There is a difference between commercially viable and commercially motivated.
New versions tend to come out when research means things need changing or the language changes enough. A version from the sixties would probably need up d language. Yes publishers need to make a profit. In some ways it is like medicine. There are a lot of up front costs. You need to be sure of sales.
The number of different modern versions, and the frequency of their being reissued in slightly different iterations makes me suspect the main drivers are commercial. The Anglophone world, especially in North America, is a tempting market.
Dare I suggest that this also applies to worship music?
The number of different modern versions, and the frequency of their being reissued in slightly different iterations makes me suspect the main drivers are commercial. The Anglophone world, especially in North America, is a tempting market. I suspect there have been fewer new and latest versions in C21 Irish Gaelic or Finnish.
Scottish Gaelic, certainly, translations are pretty rare (though a new NT translation was published in 2017). Part of the challenge, I think (aside from cost) is having enough scholars sufficiently fluent in both Gaelic and the languages of the Bible (and well-informed about scholarship in English). I doubt there are more than a handful, and possibly now only Donald Meek.
How does one measure the rate of language change? I'm sure there are people who claim they can do it, but how? Do we look at the rate of overall vocabulary growth? Do we look at the rate at which older words are abandoned? Do we look at grammatical and syntactic change (probably a lot slower)? Do we look at the number of distinct dialects of a language?
Forgive me if this is a tangent.
This thread has got me wondering if English changed more in the 20 century than in previous times, hence the desire to produce more contemporary language bibles and liturgies.
I think there's more willingness to accept that it's changed.
This is in part down to the development of linguistics as a science, and in part changing social attitudes to language (and of course these two themselves are not unrelated).
There might be another element as well - while churchgoing was the norm and people were familiar with the Bible and the Liturgies from a young age, their archaism was less of a barrier. As society got more secular this familiarity dropped and therefore there was a gap between what people could understand with less inherited familiarity with the archaic language and what the church wanted them to understand - a gap into which modern language translations and liturgies drop quite neatly.
You talked about the complex structures in Shakespeare's language. I'd say similar levels of complexity were routinely present in writings up to the middle of the last century or so, but would argue that since then, we've seen a fairly significant simplification of the structure of the language that is in routine written use.
Perhaps it has to do more with complex structure than archaic vocabulary? (In your quote from the Tempest, the only word that isn't in current use is welkin, and if you don't know what a welkin is, I don't think it really conceals much of the meaning.)
Nothing per se. It depends on the translation. I use the 'Lexham English Septuagint' and the 'EOB: New Testament' (Eastern Orthodox Bible). They are both excellent.
How does one measure the rate of language change? I'm sure there are people who claim they can do it, but how? Do we look at the rate of overall vocabulary growth? Do we look at the rate at which older words are abandoned? Do we look at grammatical and syntactic change (probably a lot slower)? Do we look at the number of distinct dialects of a language?
I get the impression that historical linguistics doesn't seek to put precise numbers on this sort of thing.
Rather you use the corpus to date specific changes you know occurred. In English this would include new words' first attestations, loss of noun inflection, loss of grammatical gender, flattening of the plural system and a shift from strong to weak verb forms. If you find points in language history where there are lots of such feature changes you have identified a period of faster language change.
Changes in pronunciation are harder to date - you can deduce a certain amount from rhyming poetry and spelling changes - especially spelling mistakes - at least in periods of a language that has a standardised spelling - and also from the forms loan words in and out of the language have taken.
For example - English Wine has a wubblewoo because it was borrowed into Germanic before the W - V change occurred in Latin. That and the fact that English is the only Germanic language that didn't experience a W - V shift itself gives us a fossilised Latin initial V sounded as W. So we know that the Latin sound change occurred after cultural contact with Germanic tribes.
When the New Vicar came, he turned it into a multi-voiced reading with the congregation taking the part of The Crowd. Much, much better!
That was standard in my CinW church in the 70s and 80s. Several of the readers were leading lights in the local (and very good) am-dram society, so it was done well.
There might be another element as well - while churchgoing was the norm and people were familiar with the Bible and the Liturgies from a young age, their archaism was less of a barrier. As society got more secular this familiarity dropped and therefore there was a gap between what people could understand with less inherited familiarity with the archaic language and what the church wanted them to understand - a gap into which modern language translations and liturgies drop quite neatly.
Also, when churchgoing was the norm, perhaps there was less emphasis on understanding. You didn’t need to understand, just turn up. Quite rightly, things have changed.
I sat next to a dear old lady who, every Sunday, responded “It is not the communion of the body of Christ” (instead of the clunky and confusing “Is it not…”). She also had some wonderful alternative words in hymns - for instance “How great the condensation” rather than “condescention”. She was a frequent visitor to the vicarage where we knew all about condensation…!
She also introduced me to “At the cross, at the cross
Where the Kaiser lost ‘is ‘oss
And the eagle on ‘is ‘elmet flew away”
And she hated the reading “Death is nothing at all” with the part about only being in the next room. “If I thought our Emrys was hanging around the kitchen I’d never go in there again!”
Forgive me if this is a tangent.
This thread has got me wondering if English changed more in the 20 century than in previous times, hence the desire to produce more contemporary language bibles and liturgies.
There were plenty of versions before 1600.
The kjv (and douey Rheims) changes also for the first century. So some of that gap closes.
Some of its got to be state authorisation of some kind.
And changes in printing technology, probably have an effect.
Another factor is both batches coming when you have a notable increase.in greek/Hebrew texts.
I sat next to a dear old lady who, every Sunday, responded “It is not the communion of the body of Christ” (instead of the clunky and confusing “Is it not…”). She also had some wonderful alternative words in hymns - for instance “How great the condensation” rather than “condescention”. She was a frequent visitor to the vicarage where we knew all about condensation…!
She sounds lovely. I had one like her who used to quote me cheeky comments from the 1940s that my family still uses today in memory of her.
The number of different modern versions, and the frequency of their being reissued in slightly different iterations makes me suspect the main drivers are commercial. The Anglophone world, especially in North America, is a tempting market.
Dare I suggest that this also applies to worship music?
The number of different modern versions, and the frequency of their being reissued in slightly different iterations makes me suspect the main drivers are commercial. The Anglophone world, especially in North America, is a tempting market.
Dare I suggest that this also applies to worship music?
And there is a word which has changed meaning. Saying Jesus showed ‘condescension’ is pretty rude now. Not as bad as ‘not abhorring’ the Virgin’s womb, but not great.
I've always liked the Good News version, for two main reasons:
1. It's in simple language wot I can understand;
2. It has those amazingly vivid drawings by Annie Vallotton.
I wonder if any readers here remember 'The Winebibber' starring 'Gordon Bews (out of the good news)?'. It was styled like a Viz annual and contained a lot of church-going jokes, one of which was a comic strip featuring the man from the GNB along with other friends including King James (a cartoon old king who spoke in Gothic font). Example - swoopy-pen line-drawing Gordon is sitting down looking perplexedly at his bible, when King James approaches and (in gothic) says something like 'verily, Gordon, whysoever dost thou appear in such perplexion?'. And Gordon replies 'I'm, like, reading the bible, man, but it's just not speaking to me...'. And so on.
It was actually rather good. Also rather good are the reviews on Amazon, here. I won't spoil it by telling you why they're good.
Our church hosts a tenant congregation on Saturdays and Sundays - they're a conservative evangelical independent outfit which seem to draw their congregation from folks who have not been here so long, from Africa. I was cleaning mould off the ladies loo ceiling this afternoon to the sound of fervent speaking in tongues (Belinda Bongues, she etc etc) - it reminded me of Peter O'Sullevan's racing commentary - whilst a presentation to the Youth (there were quite a few - so I am not mocking all this seriously, only poking gentle fun) used a quote from the KJV on the projector screen. It took me back to UCCF days in the late 80s, where people quoting (and praying) in KJV-ish language generally gave me the feeling they were trying to 'do one' on me.
Anyway, I generally agree with most of what @Enoch writes on here, but I really dig The Message. Man.
I've always liked the Good News version, for two main reasons:
1. It's in simple language wot I can understand;
2. It has those amazingly vivid drawings by Annie Vallotton.
I wonder if any readers here remember 'The Winebibber' starring 'Gordon Bews (out of the good news)?'. It was styled like a Viz annual and contained a lot of church-going jokes, one of which was a comic strip featuring the man from the GNB along with other friends including King James (a cartoon old king who spoke in Gothic font). Example - swoopy-pen line-drawing Gordon is sitting down looking perplexedly at his bible, when King James approaches and (in gothic) says something like 'verily, Gordon, whysoever dost thou appear in such perplexion?'. And Gordon replies 'I'm, like, reading the bible, man, but it's just not speaking to me...'. And so on.
It was actually rather good. Also rather good are the reviews on Amazon, here. I won't spoil it by telling you why they're good.
Our church hosts a tenant congregation on Saturdays and Sundays - they're a conservative evangelical independent outfit which seem to draw their congregation from folks who have not been here so long, from Africa. I was cleaning mould off the ladies loo ceiling this afternoon to the sound of fervent speaking in tongues (Belinda Bongues, she etc etc) - it reminded me of Peter O'Sullevan's racing commentary - whilst a presentation to the Youth (there were quite a few - so I am not mocking all this seriously, only poking gentle fun) used a quote from the KJV on the projector screen. It took me back to UCCF days in the late 80s, where people quoting (and praying) in KJV-ish language generally gave me the feeling they were trying to 'do one' on me.
Anyway, I generally agree with most of what @Enoch writes on here, but I really dig The Message. Man.
Well, you can have ChatCBT do a translation for you. And, the neat thing is, you can have a translation that fits a particular audience.
Someone posted how AI would translate Mark 10:32-52 for a Gen Z audience (note: I am not sure if this is from the original language or just a paraphrase of an English translation. Still, it does give you an idea of how future translations may sound.
On their way to Jerusalem, Jesus took the Twelve aside and told them what was going to happen.
32 "Yo, heads up! We're headed into the lion's den. They're gonna hand me over to the authorities, and they ain't gonna play nice."
33 "They'll mock me, spit on me, whip me, and then kill me. But hey, don't lose hope, cuz I'm comin' back in three days."
34 The disciples were shook. They had no clue what he was talkin' 'bout.
35 Then, James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came up to Jesus.
37 "Boss, hook us up with a favor," they said. "When you're sitting on the throne of glory, can you put us on the VIP list?"
38 Jesus looked at them like, "Seriously?"
39 "Can y'all even handle the heat that's comin' my way?"
40 "Yeah, we're down," they boasted.
41 The other disciples were not cool with this.
42 Jesus pulled the homies aside and laid it down straight. "You know how it is out there. The big shots lord it over the people, and the leaders flex their power like it's goin' out of style. Not gonna be that way with us, though."
45 "Even I, the Son of Man, didn't come to be served. I came to serve and give my life as a ransom for many."
46 Then they cruised into Jericho.
47 As they were rollin' out, a blind dude named Bartimaeus was sittin' by the roadside.
48 He heard that it was Jesus and started shoutin', "Hey, Jesus! Have mercy on me!"
50 Jesus called him over. "What you need, dawg?"
51 "I want to see, Master!" he said.
52 Jesus was like, "Believe, and you shall."
BAM! Sight restored.
It reminds me of Carl F Burke’s God is for real, man, Trest me cool, Lord and God is beautiful man which were around in the late 60s and early 70s, coming out of his ministry as Chaplain of Erie County Jail Buffalo, New York.
I looked it up to see if the full name would help me remember the initials correctly- Generative Pre-trained Transformer. I dint think that’s going to help much.
Comments
You turn to psalm 119 and get an acrostic (ideally about the law) or culturally equivalent poetical form, where Paul writes bad greek, bad English.
What does it say?
What did it mean?
What is its current significance?
These were for me a kind of antidote to the evangelical nostrums I grew up with. That scripture, as translated, has a plain meaning which remains constant regardless of culture. Intellectuals make it too complicated because they seek to ignore the challenges of the plain meaning.
Well, I grew out of that stuff and am glad that I did. And am grateful for any processes which illuminate those basic questions.
In that context I doubt whether it is possible to produce a translation which can eliminate the first question entirely. The answer to what does it say must inevitably open up issues of original language, source variations. And the second question, what does it mean, opens up both literary and cultural issues as discussed here.
I think we need to get away from the whole idea that scriptural texts are perspicuous. Whichever original texts or translations we may have to hand. Getting at meaning and relevance is hard work and should always be subject to self-critical awareness.
One danger though (if I may be so bold) is that "lay" people stop reading the Bible as they think it can only be understood and interpreted by an "expert".
The notion that scripture is perspicuous came out of the reformation and was always an oversimplification at best. People want it to be perspicuous so they can make up their own minds. Hence protestant fragmentation. .
Alec McCowen’s tour de force one person rendition of Mark’s Gospel is a good illustration of the virtue added by a good, gifted, story teller. Of course there is a risk in that. But intonation can be very boring and effectively remove meaning.
When the New Vicar came, he turned it into a multi-voiced reading with the congregation taking the part of The Crowd. Much, much better!
The semi-dramatised reading of the Passion Gospel is one of my favourite service components, especially when everyone stands at "Golgotha" having previously been seated.
"Mary was a pick-me girl for God and was simping for him in prayer when the angel Gabriel appeared to her and said a-yo, you're the real one and the top-G is feelin' you. But she thought his compliment was high key suss and gave him the side eye. So he said, babygirl, chill. God sent me to tell you you've passed his vibe check and low key he wants you to be the mother of the main character, the son of the top G. You'd name him Jesus and they will say he's HIM, the one prophesied in the divine dad lore who solos all and whose crushing it never ends. He will take the W from all his ops and his kingdom will go hard forever. She said how can this be since I promised him my body count will always be zero, respectfully. He said this ain't about cuffing season for the Holy Spirit will live rent free in you, and your boi Jesus will be a divine bro. Besides, your cousin Elizabeth is with chile, she who is already older than a boomer, and whose husband is way past beekeeping age. For God doesn't even know how to take an L, he's just built different. So Mary said bet, and Gabriel left her on read, and she let the Holy Spirit cook."
Is outrage! 😉
Seriously, I don't like intonation much either - tell it not in Gath - but am getting used to it. I tend to read the lectionary readings before I attend services so I generally know what's coming at.
I once attended an ecumenical conference where the Anglicans led an antiphonal reading of the Psalms. The Orthodox laity immediately turned to their clergy and demanded why they couldn't have the same.
(a) If you did the full Psalmody of the Bysantine services in that way you would be in chirch all day.
(b) Some of the fixed Psalms in Matins and Vespers should be read antiphonally by two solo readers (rather than congregationally). Many churches omit those verses.
(c) Most of the sung variable parts of Matins and Vespers are explicitly set for antiphonal singing. Russian "tradition" since the eighteenth century has often prioritised harmonized chant over antiphnal chant.
It works the other way too, of course. Plenty of non-Orthodox want icons, prayer ropes and The Jesus Prayer.
I'm surprised, because I find Shakespeare to be so close to modern English as to be practically the same language - albeit with some archaisms slipped in here and there. It makes a bit of a difference to me if what I'm hearing is a Laurence Olivier-style declamation in RP, or an "OP" production - for the latter, it takes my ear a little while to tune in.
Whereas Chaucer - well, I can read Chaucer, or hear him read, but I typically need a reference or a gloss to follow more than the general gist.
But that only goes to show that people aren't the same.
Someone mentioned the challenges presented by the Pauline epistles. IME, if you exclude the long lists of begats with the names nobody knows how to pronounce, Paul's epistles are the things that lectors most often mess up in church, because they don't understand the structure, and put the emphasis in all the wrong places. And all that wonderful rhetoric gets reduced to gibberish.
By the time my brain has made some sense of
She's already said
and I've completely missed it.
This thread has got me wondering if English changed more in the 20 century than in previous times, hence the desire to produce more contemporary language bibles and liturgies.
I think there's more willingness to accept that it's changed.
This is in part down to the development of linguistics as a science, and in part changing social attitudes to language (and of course these two themselves are not unrelated).
There might be another element as well - while churchgoing was the norm and people were familiar with the Bible and the Liturgies from a young age, their archaism was less of a barrier. As society got more secular this familiarity dropped and therefore there was a gap between what people could understand with less inherited familiarity with the archaic language and what the church wanted them to understand - a gap into which modern language translations and liturgies drop quite neatly.
There is a difference between commercially viable and commercially motivated.
Scottish Gaelic, certainly, translations are pretty rare (though a new NT translation was published in 2017). Part of the challenge, I think (aside from cost) is having enough scholars sufficiently fluent in both Gaelic and the languages of the Bible (and well-informed about scholarship in English). I doubt there are more than a handful, and possibly now only Donald Meek.
Personally, I stick to the Geneva Bible, which doesn't fawn to the absurd pretentions of James Stuart.
You talked about the complex structures in Shakespeare's language. I'd say similar levels of complexity were routinely present in writings up to the middle of the last century or so, but would argue that since then, we've seen a fairly significant simplification of the structure of the language that is in routine written use.
Perhaps it has to do more with complex structure than archaic vocabulary? (In your quote from the Tempest, the only word that isn't in current use is welkin, and if you don't know what a welkin is, I don't think it really conceals much of the meaning.)
I get the impression that historical linguistics doesn't seek to put precise numbers on this sort of thing.
Rather you use the corpus to date specific changes you know occurred. In English this would include new words' first attestations, loss of noun inflection, loss of grammatical gender, flattening of the plural system and a shift from strong to weak verb forms. If you find points in language history where there are lots of such feature changes you have identified a period of faster language change.
Changes in pronunciation are harder to date - you can deduce a certain amount from rhyming poetry and spelling changes - especially spelling mistakes - at least in periods of a language that has a standardised spelling - and also from the forms loan words in and out of the language have taken.
For example - English Wine has a wubblewoo because it was borrowed into Germanic before the W - V change occurred in Latin. That and the fact that English is the only Germanic language that didn't experience a W - V shift itself gives us a fossilised Latin initial V sounded as W. So we know that the Latin sound change occurred after cultural contact with Germanic tribes.
That was standard in my CinW church in the 70s and 80s. Several of the readers were leading lights in the local (and very good) am-dram society, so it was done well.
Also, when churchgoing was the norm, perhaps there was less emphasis on understanding. You didn’t need to understand, just turn up. Quite rightly, things have changed.
I sat next to a dear old lady who, every Sunday, responded “It is not the communion of the body of Christ” (instead of the clunky and confusing “Is it not…”). She also had some wonderful alternative words in hymns - for instance “How great the condensation” rather than “condescention”. She was a frequent visitor to the vicarage where we knew all about condensation…!
Where the Kaiser lost ‘is ‘oss
And the eagle on ‘is ‘elmet flew away”
And she hated the reading “Death is nothing at all” with the part about only being in the next room. “If I thought our Emrys was hanging around the kitchen I’d never go in there again!”
I miss her.
There were plenty of versions before 1600.
The kjv (and douey Rheims) changes also for the first century. So some of that gap closes.
Some of its got to be state authorisation of some kind.
And changes in printing technology, probably have an effect.
Another factor is both batches coming when you have a notable increase.in greek/Hebrew texts.
She sounds lovely. I had one like her who used to quote me cheeky comments from the 1940s that my family still uses today in memory of her.
Of course.
And paperback books (or audio ones these days).
It's not long ago that an elderly neighbour told me that it was good that the twanglets go to church as they will learn humidity.....
And there is a word which has changed meaning. Saying Jesus showed ‘condescension’ is pretty rude now. Not as bad as ‘not abhorring’ the Virgin’s womb, but not great.
I wonder if any readers here remember 'The Winebibber' starring 'Gordon Bews (out of the good news)?'. It was styled like a Viz annual and contained a lot of church-going jokes, one of which was a comic strip featuring the man from the GNB along with other friends including King James (a cartoon old king who spoke in Gothic font). Example - swoopy-pen line-drawing Gordon is sitting down looking perplexedly at his bible, when King James approaches and (in gothic) says something like 'verily, Gordon, whysoever dost thou appear in such perplexion?'. And Gordon replies 'I'm, like, reading the bible, man, but it's just not speaking to me...'. And so on.
It was actually rather good. Also rather good are the reviews on Amazon, here. I won't spoil it by telling you why they're good.
Our church hosts a tenant congregation on Saturdays and Sundays - they're a conservative evangelical independent outfit which seem to draw their congregation from folks who have not been here so long, from Africa. I was cleaning mould off the ladies loo ceiling this afternoon to the sound of fervent speaking in tongues (Belinda Bongues, she etc etc) - it reminded me of Peter O'Sullevan's racing commentary - whilst a presentation to the Youth (there were quite a few - so I am not mocking all this seriously, only poking gentle fun) used a quote from the KJV on the projector screen. It took me back to UCCF days in the late 80s, where people quoting (and praying) in KJV-ish language generally gave me the feeling they were trying to 'do one' on me.
Anyway, I generally agree with most of what @Enoch writes on here, but I really dig The Message. Man.
Ah the winebibber
Someone posted how AI would translate Mark 10:32-52 for a Gen Z audience (note: I am not sure if this is from the original language or just a paraphrase of an English translation. Still, it does give you an idea of how future translations may sound.
Source: The Narrative Lectionary, Facebook.
“Yo, heads up”? “Boss, hook us up with a favor”? “Then they cruised into Jericho”?
I’m guessing ChatCBT doesn’t know any actual Gen Zers.
I suspect you both mean ChatGPT.