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Thursday, May 12, 2022

Tyndale’s biblical archaism

For his translation of the New Testament, William Tyndale revived archaic pronoun and verb ending usage. Here is a quote from The Diachrony of Written Language Contact: A Contrastive Approach by Nikolaos Lavidas (Brill Academic Publishing, 2021, p. 41), which I think makes the same point.

“Tyndale’s texts, translations and polemical texts, contains examples of syntactic archaisms (Canon 2016), that is, borrowings and re-introductions of obsolete forms from an earlier period of the language—what one would characterize as evidence of a type of written contact with earlier forms of English. One such example is the use of the early/archaic second person singular and plural pronouns in Tyndale’s texts: the second person plural pronoun had begun to appear in all, singular and plural, contexts in Early Middle English. Tyndale used the verbal forms for second singular and plural number productively, as well as the distinction between the subject pronoun ye and the object pronoun you, following earlier texts. However, the first attestations of the nominative you, instead of ye, appeared in the 14th century and was productively used in the literary language by the 1540s.”

This settled into English Bibles the precision of grammar present in the Greek New Testament (and later, Old Testament Hebrew as well). The valuable decision of Tyndale remains for our benefit in the King James Version.

[Note: The “Canon” reference is to a journal article: Elizabeth Bell Canon, “Buried Treasure in the Tyndale Corpus: Innovations and Archaisms,” Anglica, an International Journal of English Studies, 2016, 25/2, pp. 151-165.]

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