The King James Bible

Having grown up hearing the King James translation of the Bible read out almost every week and often enough reading portions of it myself I still find myself unconsciously using Bible metaphors in my language. Not long ago I led our little Episcopal book club in reading a book on the history of the translation. It is a powerful force in the shaping of our language and for me and my fellow Episcopalians our faith.

So I was pleased today to read this little essay in praise of the King James Bible. In the godless New York Time no less.

since King James was a notorious homosexual it has always amused me to see the anti-gay crowd thumping their King James translation while fulminating.

Old English

Not really, but 19th century English. We are beginning to move so far beyond it that some of us find difficulty reading it. A member of our Episcopal book club once told me that he had trouble reading The Screwtape Letters by C S Lewis because the writing was so old-fashioned. Fifteen years ago I could force students to read a few chapters of Gibbons Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and after some adjustment they could appreciate his style, even enjoy it. Last year I did the same thing with a reasonably bright class of juniors and seniors and they simply found his prose impenetrable.

I was amused this morning to find a writing guide published in 1883 for writing English clearly. It is fascinating to see how things have changed, and how some things have not. Here are the first few rules:

1. Use words in their proper sense. [my favorite]

2. Avoid exaggerations.

3. Avoid useless circumlocution and "fine writing."

4. Be careful in the use of "not ... and," "any," "but," "only," "not ... or," "that."

4 a. Be careful in the use of ambiguous words, e.g. "certain."

Here are some rules specific to brevity.

46. Metaphor is briefer than literal statement.

47. General terms are briefer, though less forcible, than particular terms.

47 a. A phrase may sometimes be expressed by a word.

48. Participles may often be used as brief (though sometimes ambiguous) equivalents of phrases containing Conjunctions and Verbs.

49. Participles, Adjectives, Participial Adjectives, and Nouns may be used as equivalents for phrases containing the Relative.

50. A statement may sometimes be briefly implied instead of being expressed at length.

And as self-criticism, I pick this one:

51. Conjunctions may be omitted. Adverbs, e.g. "very," "so." Exaggerated epithets, e.g. "incalculable," "unprecedented."

I am going to have to dip into this some more. I am always interested in style. It is a mistake to assume that nineteenth century people were somehow less intelligent or less sophisticated than we.

and so, adieu, I am off to hunt me some metaphors quick as a bunny.

Unprecedentedly incalculable!

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What does English sound like?

[from a link on Andrew Sullivan, this is dedicated to Jack, for what I think are obvious reasons]

Ever wonder what English must sound like to non-English speakers? Like, say, Italians?


now, about that choreography

English as a legal language

There is a column by Jawed Naqvi in Dawn newspaper of Pakistan that focuses on what the writer believes is the latest piece of obstructionism in the investigation of the terrorist attack on Mumbai:

If Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has read any of these [Marathi] writers, it must be in Urdu or English, the two languages we know he knows.

It is highly unlikely that Home Minister P. Chidambaram, whose mother tongue is Tamil, would be able to read the Marathi or even the Hindi version of any of the fabled writers. His English is good though.

Given the inherent difficulties of dealing with diverse languages, it is baffling that authorities in Pakistan have been asked to decode Hindi and Marathi, the two languages in which India has given them Ajmal Kasab’s confession about his involvement, and that of his other Pakistani accomplices, in the November terror attack on Mumbai.

Pakistan requires the statement in Urdu or English if its judges are to proceed against the few suspects rounded up for the heinous act.

That's right. He angry that the Indian authorities didn't have the decency to use ... English. Apparently that would be much better than having to wade through Marathi or worse, admitting that a speaker of Urdu might be able to stumble through something written in Hindi.

He then calls for a solution:

Which means the confusion created by a surfeit of languages the subcontinent is gifted with must be overcome. This is a bold measure that could only be predicated on political will. A new lingua franca of peace is required, one that can be readily understood and accepted across the region – from Kathmandu to Colombo from the Chittagong Hill Tracts to the Panjshir Valley via Jaffna, Kashmir, Nagaland and Swat through Kandahar and Quetta.

Notice that he doesn't say what this language ought to be. There's always Esperanto though.

The Anglophone world becomes stronger every day.

The Anglosphere marches on

This afternoon I had a brief conversation with one of my new colleagues - she told me that her native languages were Hindi, Marathi, and English. Meanwhile I have been listening to a book on my new MP3 player* called Think India, which touts the importance to America that India speaks, in large part, English. This last point may be exaggerated but it does bring up the importance of the Anglosphere** - that part of the world, especially the Internet world, that uses English as its main means of communication and shares other characteristics.

Now England's Prime Minister Gordon Brown has published an article in the Wall Street Journal calling for an enlargement of the Anglosphere.

In the last half-century the English language has become not only the language of Shakespeare and Twain, of J.K. Rowling and Cormac McCarthy, but of science, commerce, diplomacy, the Internet and travel.

So, finally, I propose that together Britain and America strive to make the international language that happens to be our own far more freely available across the world. I am today asking the British Council to develop a new initiative with private-sector and NGO partners in America, to offer anyone in any part of the world help to learn English.

Very interesting.

* And you thought I was a technophobe

** best book to read: The Anglosphere Challenge: Why the English-Speaking Nations will Lead the Way in the 21rst Century by James Bennett.

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Peter Sellers Explains British Accents

As an international language there are countless varieties of English. Yesterday I listened to a section of Tom Friedman's The World is Flat where he describes visiting a class for Indian employees of a telephone service center where they were being taught how to imitate American, Canadian, or Australian accents. And thus hide their perfectly native "Indian accents."

These differences in English are fascinating. Just listen to this piece of You Tube video of Peter Sellers speaking English in all its British flavors.

English in Europe

It has always struck me as a little odd that just as much of the world seems to be adopting English for certain purposes, Americans are getting worried about the status of English in the United States. Here's the situation in Europe, according to Tony Judt in Postwar:

To one side stood a sophisticated elite of Europeans: men and women, typically young, widely traveled and well-educated, who might have studied in two or even three different universities across the continent. Their qualifications and professions allowed them to find work anywhere across the European Union: from Copenhagen to Dublin, from Barcelona to Frankfurt. High incomes, low airfares, open frontiers and an integrated rail network ... favoured easy and frequent mobility. For the purposes of consumption, leisure and entertainment as well as employment this new class of Europeans traveled with confident ease across their continent --communicating, like medieval clercs wandering between Bologna, Salamanca and Oxford, in a cosmopolitan lingua franca: then Latin, now English.

Sounds very much like the world our friend Joey Sobrino travels in when he is in Europe.

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