11. The Bible And The Shaping Of Modern English
11
THE BIBLE
AND THE SHAPING
OF MODERN ENGLISH
No other book has so penetrated and permeated the hearts and speech of the English race as has the Bible. What Homer was to the Greeks, and the Koran to the Arabs, that—or something not unlike it—the Bible has become to the English.” Thus wrote Albert Stanburrough Cook, Professor of English Language and Literature at Yale University in the 1920s. Few would quarrel with his judgment over the historical influence of the English Bible on the shaping of the English language. Yet one of the greatest paradoxes linked to the King James Bible is that it achieved literary excellence precisely by choosing to avoid it. Literary elegance was not even mentioned in the translation criteria set before its seventeenth-century team of translators.
The King James Bible, along with the works of William Shakespeare, is regularly singled out as one of the most foundational influences on the development of the modern English language. It is no accident that both date from the late English Renaissance, when English was coming into its own as a language. Samuel Johnson liked to speak of this as the period of “Revival of Learning in Europe,” and dates what he terms “the golden age of our language” from “the accession of Elizabeth” in 1558. In the preface to his Dictionary of the English Language (1755), Johnson asserts that “every language has a time of rudeness antecedent to perfection, as well as of false refinement and declension.” For Johnson, there was no doubt that the Renaissance marked the beginning of the linguistic perfection of English, and that this period was of critical importance in shaping the contours of the new language.