I love English, and it loves me. And the English I speak has been shaped profoundly by the man whose new and nerdy linguistic biography I now hold in my hands: William Tyndale. It is a special year for Tyndale, because this is the 500th anniversary of his translation of the New Testament—a translation that he ultimately gave his life to produce.
William Tyndale’s English is the subject of this new book by world-famous English expert David Crystal, whom I’ve quoted on this channel before. It is called, fittingly, William Tyndale and the English Language. And I want to share with you what I learned from it.
I will offer in this video eight quick lessons or facts or points or whatever floats your moat. It was going to be ten, but new limits YouTube has placed on redheaded nerds forced me to drop two. To get those you’ll just have to read the book. Now, I can’t avoid the fact that the lessons that stuck out to me stuck out in part because of the background hum of my adult life, the KJV-Only debate. But I’m not talking about the KJV-Only debate in this video. As I’ve stated, I will do so again at the end of the year when my own two books come out on the topic.
Ok, here we go. Eight lessons.
1. Tyndale had to do his work in part because of language change.
Crystal makes a simple observation about why Tyndale had to produce a translation of the New Testament when Wycliffe’s Bible already existed. It was language change:
The growing linguistic distance between Wyclif and Tyndale was undoubtedly a major factor that motivated the undertaking of a new translation. (10)
Wycliffe was practically illegible to the people of Tyndale’s day, or so I would judge.
And let me not fail to note that Crystal knows whereof he speaks. He is a recognized expert in English linguistics who was the author of multiple editions of the the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (1995, 2003, 2019), as well as quite a few other nerdy linguistic books—more books than you are legally allowed to shake a stick at in Britain. He even knows where the “more x than you can shake a stick at” phrase comes from.
2. Tyndale didn’t take vernacular translation for granted.
The Catholic leadership in England forbade Bible translation in the time of Tyndale. Crystal speaks of one of Tyndale’s books, a book many people who know Tyndale have never heard of, The Obedience of a Christian Man. This is a book teaching Tyndale’s warm-hearted, learned, heavily Lutheran and Reformational theology. Crystal says:
Tyndale’s arguments for a mother-tongue translation permeate several of his writings. In Obedience especially, we are given a series of reasons why ‘the scripture ought to be in the mother tongue’. In several places, he appeals to biblical precedent:
First, God gave the children of Israel a law by the hand of Moses in their mother tongue; and all the prophets wrote in their mother tongue and all the psalms were in the mother tongue. … Came Christ to make the world more blind? The sermons which thou readest in the Acts of the apostles and all that the apostles preached, were no doubt preached in the mother tongue. Why then might they not be written in the mother tongue?
Saint Jerome also translated the bible into his mother tongue; why may not we also?
Tyndale is making multiple arguments:
First, the Old and New Testaments were given in the language—or at least a language—of the people who wrote them and to whom they were addressed.
Second, previous legendary, trusted translations were made into the language of the translators and the people for whom they translated.
Third, doesn’t Christ want the world to know what he said?
So why can’t the Bible be in our mother tongue? That’s what Tyndale is saying. The reasons for Tyndale’s martyrdom are a little more complex than his conclusions on this question of vernacular translation. His Lutheran theology played a role. But I read David Daniell’s huge biography of Tyndale, and I’m willing to say that Tyndale gave his life for these simple truths we should not take for granted.
3. William Tyndale was thoughtful and careful about picking an English style.
This point is the one where I’m most tempted to bring up the KJV-Only debate. I’m still going to resist. But I will come perilously close by insisting that what I’m about to say does not differ from what I’ve thought or said before about English Bible translation. And I appreciate David Crystal affording me an opportunity to speak to this topic.
Crystal raised a question Tyndale had as he entered into his work translating the New Testament:
What stylistic level to aim for? ‘The vernacular’ is a very broad concept, consisting of formal and informal levels, technical and colloquial styles, regional dialects, literary norms, proverbial traditions, personal attitudes and more, with choices at this point in history very much influenced by theological considerations. (16)
Tyndale stood at the center of a whirling linguistic vortex. Even today, England is known for distinct regional accents and even distinct regional words. Back in the early 1500s, in a day before mass communication, those regional variations were even more pronounced.
Tyndale could not have known that his work would end up putting roots in the soil for certain linguistic forms. He had to choose from a menu of different words for “egg,” for example. English was something recognizable, but it came in distinct forms.
And levels: it really is important to recognize that the vernacular can handle different literary forms. A good translation will sound a bit different in Old Testament poetry than it does in the personal letter to Philemon.
Crystal says very carefully,
It would have been unwise of him to opt for a variety of speech that a ploughboy would really use, if he wanted his translation to be widely understood. There was no common ploughboy variety of English, only a huge number of regional dialects, and a great deal of uncertainty about usage. … The spirit of his point about ploughboys is more general: the use of English as opposed to Latin.
I am in slight disagreement with Crystal here, because I fully grant his first point: that there was no precise ploughboy variety of English. You had to ask: which ploughboy? But Tyndale’s famous saying, ““If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the Scripture than thou dost”—that saying only makes sense if he intended to do more than English the Hebrew and Greek of the Bible. He intended to make it accessible. And, by all accounts, he succeeded.
This did not mean that he dumbed the Bible down. As Crystal says,
Although the informal ploughboy-related element in Tyndale’s vocabulary and discourse style is important, it would be wrong to assume that his general writing was always downmarket.
Crystal explains:
There would still be difficult words that would need to be explained by teachers and preachers – as he does himself in tables … [tables that Crystal discusses in the book—fascinating stuff] – but if these were embedded in an everyday style of discourse, that would be half the battle. We thus see him working towards a standard … that was much closer to daily speech rhythms and grammatical constructions.
This is right. And I think it stands in minor tension with what Crystal said earlier: Tyndale wasn’t just moving into English but into as-accessible-as-possible-given-the-constraints-of-accurate-translation English.
Crystal also says,
Tyndale was well aware that many of the technical terms required in translating early Jewish religious practices would be challenging even to his educated readers – let alone ploughboys. The evidence lies in a glossary that he adds to the prologues to some of his books, which includes features that would come to be routine in later dictionary compilation, such as alphabetical order, single-word glosses, succinct definitions, analogies and examples of usage.
Tyndale established a tradition for English speakers that I uphold to this day: the tradition of a balance between accessibility and accuracy, contemporary readability and historical distance. I, to this day, preach and teach from a Bible squarely in the middle of the Tyndale tradition—the ESV—in large part because I want to honor the wisdom of the basic choice he made to use familiar speech patterns but to still require today’s readers top make some measure of travel from our day into the day of the biblical writers.
This was the longest point. Let us move on.
4. Tyndale had to invent words.
Crystal is very interested in Tyndale’s contributions to the English language.
As one of the most prominent writers of his time, Tyndale was an important source, and there are 2,739 citations from his works in the dictionary, including 822 instances where he is listed as the first user of a word or idiom in a particular form or meaning.
Crystal is speaking of the Oxford English Dictionary, of course. And imagine this: imagine being a writer who gets cited as the first user, if not the inventor, of 822 new words! I tend to think this could happen only for a Bible translator, and for two reasons: only a Bible translator needs to invent quite that many words, because he is tasked with bridging a language gap that doesn’t always have bridges established at any given place. And only a Bible translator can have any reason to believe that his work will be read by enough regular people to see his coinages, his neologisms, his new words actually gain currency.
Tyndale didn’t have to start from scratch as missionary translators sometimes do. Crystal says,
Most of the vocabulary in Tyndale that is specific to Christianity has antecedents, echoing its presence in England for almost a thousand years. Nevertheless, there are over a hundred words or expressions that find their first recorded use in his general writing or New Testament translations.
One of Crystal’s big points in this book is that Tyndale deserves more credit than he’s previously been given for his influence on English as we speak it today. We’ll talk a bit more about that in the last point.
Of course, however, …
5. Not every word Tyndale invented stuck.
There are some inventions or usages of Tyndale that I wish had stuck. Crystal says that Tyndale “describes people as work-holy who thgink their own actions, rather than God’s grace, will justify them before God.” We need that. I’m bringing it back. He calls original sin “birth poison.” That’s a good one. But “egalness” instead of “equality” sounds funny to my ear, and words like this do make some verses in the Tyndale New Testament difficult for modern readers:
2 Corinthians 8:14 reads there,
that there be egalness now at this time, that your abundance succour their lack.
Tyndale had a huge impact on English, but not everything he did and said left an indelible mark. Some of the marks have since been delled.
6. Some of Tyndale’s English is archaic to us, just as Wycliffe’s English was archaic to Tyndale.
Do you realize that Tyndale was a lot closer to Wycliffe in time than we are to Tyndale? Tyndale was just over a century removed from Wycliffe; we are five centuries removed from Tyndale.
Crystal is deeply attuned to language change in English, and he observes some of the things that changed in English between Tyndale’s day and ours:
Several verbs are no longer used in particular senses. We’d recognize jest today, but not in the sense of ‘scoff, jeer’, as it occurs in 3 John (1.10), when he writes of Diotrephes ‘jesting on us with malicious words’. It’s not recorded in this sense after the seventeenth century. Utter is also a familiar verb, but not in its meaning of ‘reveal, make known’, as in Mark (3.12): Jesus ‘straightly charged them that they should not utter him’. Roll up is another, meaning ‘recite rapidly’, used disparagingly of clerical practices in Obedience: ‘It is enough if thou canst roll up a pair of Matins or an Evensong and mumble a few ceremonies.’ These verbs aren’t recorded after the sixteenth century. And in Luke (3.14) we see demand followed by of, meaning ‘ask, inquire’: ‘The soldiers likewise demanded of him //[Jesus], saying: And what shall we do?’ It’s common in Shakespeare, and citations reach as far as the King James Bible in 1611, but there’s nothing recorded thereafter.
This is what happens to languages.
Crystal spends a bit of time on one specific example of language change that you might find memorable. It’s the word “juggler.” Listen for it in the full title of Tyndale’s book: The obedience of a Christian man and how Christian rulers ought to govern, where in also (if thou mark diligently) thou shalt find eyes to perceive the crafty conveyance of all jugglers.
The proper response of modern readers is: wha?
Crystal says,
For most people, jugglers are entertainers who are proficient in continuously tossing a number of objects into the air, keeping at // least one of them aloft while holding on to the others. This is actually a very recent meaning: its first citation in the OED is 1897. But juggle has a long history. In the fourteenth century it was being used in a general sense to refer to jesting and buffoonery, often with overtones of magic and witchcraft. It then developed a darker meaning: someone who plays tricks in order to cheat or deceive. That appealed to Tyndale.
He’s the first we know to use the verb in this negative way. … In [Tyndale’s book on the Lord’s] Supper, he uses it transitively (with an object), talking about how God lets the devil ‘juggle our eyes to confirm us in blindness’. He also uses juggling as a noun and an adjective, as in More: false juggling, the juggling spirits.
One more fascinating example of language change since Tyndale comes from Tyndale’s book Mammon:
After working with a Franciscan friar, William Roye, who went off to Argentina … When that was ended. I took my leave, and bade him farewell for our two lives, and (as men say) a day longer.
But the country of Argentina didn’t begin to be called that until the year of Tyndale’s death. And William Roye never went there. Crystal comments that Tyndale was actually referring to Strasbourg, a city now in France, whose Roman name was Argentoratum.
You never know what might trip you up in older English.
7. Crystal has modified the famous count regarding how much Tyndale is still in the KJV.
I’ll keep this short: a famous paper did some mathing and claimed that the KJV New Testament is 84% Tyndale. Crystal did his own count via his own method, and after a lot of careful—and tedious to all but the nerdy, I must say—counting, Crystal says,
All things considered, I conclude that a figure of 70% is likely to be a better answer to the question: How much of the Bible is Tyndale’s?
Crystal has special interest in idioms that are invented or popularized by Bible translations, and he does some more mathing with regard to those. But this is the money quote: the KJV, in both testaments where possible, is 70% Tyndale.
8. Tyndale deserves a more prominent place in the history of English.
If there is an upshot to a book which is more nerdy tabulation than narrative, it’s that Crystal thinks now is a good time to give Tyndale his due. He writes,
Although the motivation for this book was the 500th anniversary of Tyndale’s Bible translation in 1526, my aim has been wider: to reflect on his role in relation to the development of English as a whole. He’s always mentioned in accounts of the history of the language, but perhaps with not sufficient recognition being given to the scale of his achievement – and I include in that rider my own previous accounts in The Stories of English and The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. He deserves as much presence in linguistic reviews of the sixteenth century as Johnson receives in the eighteenth.
In a way, the facts speak for themselves. No one else in the 1500s – a significant period in the development of the language from Middle English to Early Modern English – matched his lexical impact, in terms of the number of first recorded uses attributed to him; and few exceed that total of 822 in later centuries. It’s a figure which … is probably an underestimate. … Anyone reading through it is bound to be struck by some of the entries. They include items that have been frequently referenced in Tyndale studies, such as atonement, intercession, mercy seat, scapegoat and Passover, as well as ones that most people are unaware of. When I began to research this issue, I wasn’t expecting to encounter landlady, full house, good luck, town clerks, great deal and busybody, to name just a few.
Let us end there, my friends, with the knowledge that Candace Cameron and the Olsen Twins became famous in a show named by William Tyndale. Without William, there’s no Wanda. That’s Ward on Words.
And if you want to see Crystal’s list of the first recorded uses of abstract nouns in Tyndale—sign up for Ward on Words newsletter at Ward on Words.com.
Extra
Here’s the page from Crystal in which he gives the first use of abstracts nouns in Tyndale’s writings, including not just the Bible but other writings. He is the origin of “bottom,” “chaos,” and “pleasure”! Wow! But also of “achange,” “swinge,” and “visure,” words that didn’t stick.
And note that “bottom,” “lecture,” and (arguably) “nurture” don’t mean now what they meant for Tyndale. Language changes over time, which is something I may have mentioned in my previous writings.
Crystal has many appendices with all kinds of nerdy lexicographical information for the truly dedicated. I read the whole book but admit to skimming these for tidbits. If you like such tidbits, I know of no better source than William Tyndale and the English Language.