62 lines
2.9 KiB
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62 lines
2.9 KiB
BibTeX
From: cindy@solan10.solan.unit.no (Cynthia Kandolf)
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Subject: Shakespeare and the KJV
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It seems i've been called upon again to drag out my books one more
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time before the holidays... so here is a summary of what i was able to
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find about the King James Version:
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The only connection Shakespeare has to the KJV is that he was alive
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when it was published in 1611. (No connection to the KGB has ever
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been proven.) He had no part in the preparation of it.
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Now for a surprise: the men who worked on the KJV depended more on
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previous English translations of the Bible than on the texts those
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translations had come from, despite the fact that most of them read
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Latin and Greek. Also, they were told to consider readability and
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literary merit to be as important as scholarly accuracy, to make the
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Bible accessible to the common man (a radical concept at the time). I
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find it somewhat humorous, based on this point, that some people
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claim the KJV is the only "inspired" translation of the Bible into
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English - but i digress.
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Anyway, most of the English Bibles in existence then had been
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published between 1535 and 1568, when no less than five versions were
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first printed. However, versions as early as William Tyndale's 1525
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translation were used in the preparation of the KJV. (Ironically,
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Tyndale was put to death for translating the Bible.)
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Tyndale's Bible in fact was extensively used as the pattern for the
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KJV, and it is because of this that we say the KJV was written using
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language that was old-fashioned already at the time. Normally, one
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century makes a noticeable though not large difference in a language
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(provided you know what you're looking for, of course!) At this time,
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however, English was undergoing a period of rapid change, and much of
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the change was grammatical. So much of the language Tyndale used in
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1525 already sounded old-fashioned in 1611 - not archaic, but somewhat
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out of fashion. The use of "thou", for instance, was common in 1525,
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but by 1611 was falling out of use - but it was used in the KJV none
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the less, mostly because it sounded good.
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As far as the "archaicness" of Shakespeare vs. the KJV, i don't want
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to sound snobby here but... you can't just take two pieces of
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literature and say "they both sound equally archaic to me, therefore
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they are equally archaic." Scholars that work on this sort of thing
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have to have a deep and broad knowledge of the history of the language
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they're working on. They look at individual words and grammatical
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structures, to find ones that can be dated - either when they came
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into use, or when they largely dropped out of use. It's not the sort
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of thing that can be done simply be reading them to see which one
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sounds older.
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Sources used:
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McCrum, Robert, William Cran, and Robert MacNeil. The Story of
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English (American Edition). New York, NY, USA: Viking Penguin Inc.
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(c) 1986.
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Strang, Barbara M.H. A History of English. London, UK: Methuen & Co,
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Ltd. (c) 1970
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-Cindy Kandolf
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cindy@solan.unit.no
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Trondheim, Norway
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