#117 Reading the Bible in English

I mentioned in blog #114 that we had 22 Bibles in the house. Now we have 23. Yesterday I bought Tyndale’s New Testament in paperback (Wordsworth Edition, Ltd., 2002). The English spelling has been updated, but the words and rhythm are original. I had printed off a few pages of a photocopy of an early edition from the Internet, and because I learned to read phonetically, I had no problem reading it aloud. The marginal notes of Tyndale and the introduction by Priscilla Martin enhance this new updated translation, for which Tyndale suffered and died.

In reading McGrath’s “In the beginning,” I learned that the use of thee, thou, thine and ye was already old-fashioned in 1611 when the King James version was completed. The archaic forms were continued because the translators were instructed to change only those parts of the older English translation that were inaccurate, so they included pronouns that were no longer in use, but which were not inaccurate.

Also, in 1611 use of the word “his” was just beginning to be replaced by “its” when referring to neuter nouns like cubits, or wood, or any inanimate noun. The translators went the conservative route, thus giving us some incredibly awkward sentence constructions not unlike what we have today with “his or her” following a singular noun describing people.

But most interesting was learning that the verb forms ending in “-eth” were most likely pronounced as “s” in the early 17th century. English isn’t phonetic in many words (through, tough, plough), and although the people were pronouncing “sayeth“ as “says” and “giveth” as “gives,” a hundred years later when the 1611 version really became almost universally used, no one corrected the pronunciation while reading. There are no recordings of how people spoke. The closest we have to English as spoken in the 17th and 18th century is our own Appalachian people in the U.S., since it is no longer spoken in England.