Review: William Tyndale and the English Language, David Crystal, Bodleian Library Publishing
Even David Crystal, the linguistics expert and author of numerous books about the history of the English language, was surprised, he says, when he looked into the extent of William Tyndale’s influence on English. In this book, in a typically intricate detective exercise, Crystal confirms previous claims that almost eighty percent of the King James Bible is influenced by Tyndale’s translation. Since the KJV is often cited as having the most influence of any English literature, this makes Tyndale the most influential writer/translator in English, even more than Shakespeare or Samuel Johnson.
It’s easy to assume a kind of timelessness to both the phrases of the Bible and English language, but language changes, and translation has to keep up with it. Tyndale’s translation is a good example: so many words and phrases appear first with Tyndale to be simply astonishing. In Crystal’s book, building on his earlier study of the KJV, Begat, Crystal notes more than two hundred expressions seemingly created by Tyndale, such as ‘signs of the times, ‘salt of the earth’, ‘act of faith’ and ‘forever and ever’. Of course, the meaning was there in the original text, but Tyndale was a master at translating into memorable phrases, some of which one can’t imagine not being in the language.
Tyndale lived in an age where the English language was evolving rapidly, in spelling, pronunciation and grammar, becoming much closer to its modern iteration, and Tyndale’s writing is a long way from the likes of John Wycliff, whose English is now so hard to read it may as well be a different language. This fluidity, says Crystal, meant translations had to keep up, but the Church didn’t want unauthorised translations, as they were worried these would contain errors and would therefore contribute to heresies. (One assumes a level of elitism here too.)
It is hard to imagine it being otherwise now, but Tyndale was bold, like Luther, in arguing for a translation in the ‘mother tongue’, so that the laity could learn the Word of God by reading it. He pointedly quoted Jesus to Peter: ‘feed my sheep’. Not only did he want the Bible in the vernacular, but Tyndale wanted a simplicity of prose for the widest understanding, and in a way, Crystal says, Tyndale was looking forward to the KJV, which fulfilled his wishes. (Tyndale never completed his translation of the Bible.)
Tyndale was articulate in explaining his choices. Crystal calls him ‘among the first great lexicographers in English’. Tyndale was familiar with very technical terms, but he preferred plain text, for clarity, or, we might even say, elegance, as opposed to words making encumbrance and unnecessary decoration.
Crystal makes the point that at a time when most people heard, rather than read, the Bible, simple, memorable phrases were important. Tyndale does this by translating using the natural rhythms of speech and the rules of rhetoric. Unlike his contemporaries, he aims for words with fewer syllables. And his style shows that, again unlike his contemporaries, he downplayed Latin and insisted Hebrew and Greek were better suited to the English language, leading to a simplicity of style that equated to readability, precisely because it sounds more like spoken speech and was accessible, famously, even to the ‘plough boy’.
This was difficult, as there were arguments at the time as to what the vernacular meant and who the audience was, and there were distinct regional variations in the language, more so than today. Crystal demonstrates how the process of translation involved choosing phrases, coining words and shifting meanings. Tyndale used hundreds of phrases for the first time in print, mostly everyday expressions that everyday readers would understand, and many common terms that have an earthy tone, one of which is, appropriately, ‘earthish’.
C S Lewis called Tyndale the best prose writer of his age, and innovation was part of his genius. It is not always clear how many of Tyndale’s choices were common expressions or neologisms, but a distinctive feature of Tyndale’s writing is his creation of compound words, an economic way of conveying meaning, and he uses dozens of them, examples of which are ‘thanksgiving’, ‘birthright’ and ‘seashore’. ‘Scapegoat’ is possibly one of his, as is ‘Passover’. He liked to create nouns using ‘ness’: ‘childishness’, and verbs using ‘ing’: ‘departing’, ‘christening’. He was fond of using ‘un’ to create words like ‘untoward’.
Some of these words have gone out of style, like ‘unforbidden’. He uses ‘humbleness’ whereas we would say ‘humility’ – except perhaps for football commentators, who regularly mangle English, but who might operate unintentionally in the spirit of Tyndale.
Nick Mattiske blogs on books at coburgreviewofbooks.wordpress.com and is the illustrator of Thoughts That Feel So Big.
