PARTIALITY alert: I revere David Crystal — as a scholar of the English language and as a communicator. He draws people into his delight in language, not by promoting stylistic one-up-personship puffed off as “grammar”, but with imagination and wisdom. I admire him in the same way as I admire James Barr as a scholar of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible. But where Barr was tart, acerbic, Crystal manages to be laugh-out-loud funny as well as astonishingly learned and perceptive. He has a reliable eye for what will attract the reader.
Crystal admits the challenges of the task that he has set himself. This year brings the 500th anniversary of William Tyndale’s New Testament translation from Greek into English. So, it is a good moment for a book about Tyndale’s language; and, given his influence on the 1611 translation, it promises much of interest. An often quoted “fact” about him is that “80 per cent of the King James Bible shows the influence of Tyndale.” Testing that “fact” is one purpose of the book. So. at certain points in the text, tasty word-morsels give way to technical linguistic analysis. People dedicated to football statistics are known as “stattos”: well, Crystal is a language statto, but never at the expense of an overall engrossing read.
Most readers will probably be (like me) more excited by the tasty word-morsels than the bread-and-butter linguistic analysis. As far as calculations and analyses are concerned, we can be happy to stand on Giant Crystal’s shoulders to survey the Tyndalian landscape as he arranges it. This is not unlike the way in which we read scripture. The analysis that could be done is infinite. But, at some point, we make a decision to accept the text as a whole, on the grounds of our conviction that what it contains is trustworthy. Otherwise, we constantly run the risk of straining at gnats and swallowing camels (Matthew 23.24). I am grateful that Crystal has done for me the statistical spadework that I am not competent to do for myself.
When Tyndale was writing, he had not only to master Greek, but also to construct pukka English. English as a language fit for weighty matters, as dignified scholarly prose, barely existed. The writing of artistic prose in English was a radical innovation, and the materials at hand were promising, but rough-cut. Not that Tyndale stood alone in this endeavour: Crystal reveals the 16th century as a time of intense verbal experimentation.
To whet potential readers’ appetites, here are a few of the 822 words and idioms recorded in The Oxford English Dictionary for which, Crystal notes, Tyndale is listed as the first user: “birthright”, “seashore”, “stumbling-block”, “busybody”, “Passover”, “sorcerer”, “unbeliever”, “weakling”, “landlady”, “intercession”, and “scapegoat”. As for his phrases, we have him to thank for “signs of the times”, “the powers that be”, “filthy lucre”, “bottomless pit”, “fat of the land”, “old wives’ fables”, and plenty more. In addition to what has been absorbed into modern vocabularies, it is fun to learn what was tried but never “took” in daily usage — words such as “slow-bellies” (Titus 1.12), “famishment”, and “snivelled” (as an adjective for a mucus-smeared hankie).
Some of Tyndale’s verbal inventiveness is in the service of religious debate. He mocks a style of biblical interpretation by turning “tropological” (a way of doing exegesis) into “chopological”. John Foxe records Tyndale’s promise that “he would cause a boy that driveth the plough to know more of Scripture than the pope”. Tyndale’s plough-boy stands for what counted as “ordinary”, “bog-standard” (we might say), in his day.
The 20th century replaced Tyndale’s plough-boy with the “man on the Clapham omnibus”, to indicate an ordinary person with no particular expertise. A holy book, like holy theology, that embraces “chopological” argumentation and is stuffed with “ink-horn” words (a brilliant Tyndale term that Crystal uses repeatedly), but which has nothing to say to plough-boys or bus passengers, will never speak to everyone in the way that King James’s version does, or Tyndale’s did before it.
If readers have their vocabulary enriched by “ink-horn words”, an appreciation of “landladies” and “busybodies”, and a horror of “chopology”, then, for Crystal, that will be a job well done. And the answer? Should Tyndale have the credit for influencing 80 per cent of the King James Bible? Every author has the right to deliver his own conclusions in his own way. So, readers of this review, if they want to know Crystal’s conclusion, must buy the book to find out.
The Revd Dr Cally Hammond is the Dean of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.
William Tyndale and the English Language
David Crystal
Bodleian Library £25
(978-1-85124-665-6)
Church Times Bookshop £22.50