and prologues accurately within six months of arriving in Germany. He had no other Englishman – Roye arrived when the work was almost ready for the press – off whom to bounce phrases and idioms. Unus vir nullus vir , Luther said of the task of translation – one man is no man.
Tyndale’s primary source was Erasmus’s Greek New Testament, already in its third edition by 1524, together with the Latin translation and notes, which accompanied the Greek text. He also had the Latin Vulgate, and Luther’s 1521 September Testament. He had no Lollard Bible with him. He said that he had no man to ‘counterfeit’ or imitate; ‘neither,’ he added, ‘was help with English of any that had interpreted the same or such like thing in the scripture beforetime’.
His words seem timeless now – ‘eate, drynke and be mery … the salt of the earth … the powers that be … gretter love then this hath no man, then that a man bestowe his life for his frendes’ – but he wrote at the infancy of the written language. At this time it was common for people to read aloud, even when alone; and it is this habit, and Tyndale’s studies in rhetoric at Oxford, that accounts at least in part for the charm and thunder that soar from the English Bible when it is spoken from the lectern. Tyndale’s prose sounds as well as it reads.
The richness of his vocabulary, his use of verbs in place of nouns and adjectives, his free sentence constructions, his ear for vivid sayings – ‘as bare as Job and as bald as a coot’ – and his sense of rhythm profoundly affected the language of the English-speaking peoples – the global language, now – as his Testament,incorporated almost whole into the King James or Authorised Version of the Bible in 1611, deeply influenced the religion of England and her colonies.
He said that English gave the sense of the original Greek of the Testament better than Latin, and he was right. Latin puts its verbs at the end of sentences: it is a subject–object–verb language. Greek, and particularly the koine , or the common Greek of the NT, is flexible in its word order. Its verbs can be placed at the beginning or end of the sentence, or, as in English, in the middle. A subject–verb–object sentence is better balanced to the English ear, and Greek is easier and more natural than Latin to English speakers. Greek makes more use of verbs than Latin, which prefers nouns. Spoken English also chooses a verb instead of a noun where possible, making it simpler and more vigorous. Written English can follow the spoken word and use verbs, if it pleases; but more often – in business, the law, government and literature that strives to impress – it is heavy in nouns.
Tyndale used verbs where less flowing writers use nouns and adjectives. Thus in I Peter 1: 23, he writes of ‘the word of God, which liveth and lasteth for ever’. The King James Version remains with Tyndale’s verbs, although it drops the attractive alliteration of ‘ liveth and lasteth ’ by changing ‘ lasteth ’ to ‘ abideth ’. Modern committee translations replace the verbs with adjectives – ‘the living and enduring word of God’ in the New English Bible, ‘the live, permanent word of the living God’ in the Phillips Modern English, ‘the living and eternal word of God’ in Today’s English Version – and strip out the cadence and the sense of immediacy that verbs bring to Tyndale’s prose.
Three verbs create pace and urgency in a Tyndale passage in Mark’s gospel: ‘the uncleane spirite tare him, cryed out with a loud voice, and cam out of him …’. The New English Bible has two: ‘the unclean spirit threw the man into convulsions and with aloud cry left him’ (Mark 1: 26). As Peter heals the lame man in Acts, Tyndale writes that the man ‘sprange, stode and also walked, and entered with them into the temple, walkynge and leapynge and laudynge god’ (Acts 3: 8). The lack of clutter in Tyndale’s prose is clear by
Tyndale’s primary source was Erasmus’s Greek New Testament, already in its third edition by 1524, together with the Latin translation and notes, which accompanied the Greek text. He also had the Latin Vulgate, and Luther’s 1521 September Testament. He had no Lollard Bible with him. He said that he had no man to ‘counterfeit’ or imitate; ‘neither,’ he added, ‘was help with English of any that had interpreted the same or such like thing in the scripture beforetime’.
His words seem timeless now – ‘eate, drynke and be mery … the salt of the earth … the powers that be … gretter love then this hath no man, then that a man bestowe his life for his frendes’ – but he wrote at the infancy of the written language. At this time it was common for people to read aloud, even when alone; and it is this habit, and Tyndale’s studies in rhetoric at Oxford, that accounts at least in part for the charm and thunder that soar from the English Bible when it is spoken from the lectern. Tyndale’s prose sounds as well as it reads.
The richness of his vocabulary, his use of verbs in place of nouns and adjectives, his free sentence constructions, his ear for vivid sayings – ‘as bare as Job and as bald as a coot’ – and his sense of rhythm profoundly affected the language of the English-speaking peoples – the global language, now – as his Testament,incorporated almost whole into the King James or Authorised Version of the Bible in 1611, deeply influenced the religion of England and her colonies.
He said that English gave the sense of the original Greek of the Testament better than Latin, and he was right. Latin puts its verbs at the end of sentences: it is a subject–object–verb language. Greek, and particularly the koine , or the common Greek of the NT, is flexible in its word order. Its verbs can be placed at the beginning or end of the sentence, or, as in English, in the middle. A subject–verb–object sentence is better balanced to the English ear, and Greek is easier and more natural than Latin to English speakers. Greek makes more use of verbs than Latin, which prefers nouns. Spoken English also chooses a verb instead of a noun where possible, making it simpler and more vigorous. Written English can follow the spoken word and use verbs, if it pleases; but more often – in business, the law, government and literature that strives to impress – it is heavy in nouns.
Tyndale used verbs where less flowing writers use nouns and adjectives. Thus in I Peter 1: 23, he writes of ‘the word of God, which liveth and lasteth for ever’. The King James Version remains with Tyndale’s verbs, although it drops the attractive alliteration of ‘ liveth and lasteth ’ by changing ‘ lasteth ’ to ‘ abideth ’. Modern committee translations replace the verbs with adjectives – ‘the living and enduring word of God’ in the New English Bible, ‘the live, permanent word of the living God’ in the Phillips Modern English, ‘the living and eternal word of God’ in Today’s English Version – and strip out the cadence and the sense of immediacy that verbs bring to Tyndale’s prose.
Three verbs create pace and urgency in a Tyndale passage in Mark’s gospel: ‘the uncleane spirite tare him, cryed out with a loud voice, and cam out of him …’. The New English Bible has two: ‘the unclean spirit threw the man into convulsions and with aloud cry left him’ (Mark 1: 26). As Peter heals the lame man in Acts, Tyndale writes that the man ‘sprange, stode and also walked, and entered with them into the temple, walkynge and leapynge and laudynge god’ (Acts 3: 8). The lack of clutter in Tyndale’s prose is clear by
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