David Crystal
© Penguin Press

In his book The Stories Of English (Penguin), David identifies examples of expressions from the King James version of St Matthew's Gospel that are familiar phrases in the English we use today. Here are a few of them:

man shall not live by bread alone (4:4)

the salt of the earth (5:13)

an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth (5:38)

turn… the other [cheek] (5:39)

our daily bread (6:11)

O ye of little faith (6:30)

cast your pearls before swine (7:6)

seek and ye shall find (7:7)

straight… and narrow (7:14)

[wolves] in sheep’s clothing (7:15)

built his house upon the sand (7:27)

lost sheep (10:6)

the blind lead the blind (15:14)

the sign of the times (16:3)

suffer little children (19:14)

den of thieves (21:13)

out of the mouth of babes (21:16)

render… unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s (22:21)

thirty pieces of silver (26:15)

Transcript

Can you explain how a language can be fluid? How does it change? How can it get fixed?

Well, all languages change. It is the nature of language to change. The only languages that don't change are the dead ones. That's the definition of a dead versus a living language, that it changes. Language changes to keep pace with society. It is a reflection of society. Language has no life apart from the people who use it. Language is in the mouths and the ears and the eyes and the hands of the users. So therefore, it is an inevitable process. At some periods in history it changes more rapidly than others. At some times it's a very slow process. In the 21st Century, we are engaged in a very rapid process of language change. With the Internet and everything, language is changing faster than ever before. The previous period where language really moved very, very fast was in the Renaissance and in Shakespeare's time.

What is “Standard English”?

Well, a language develops as standard language when problems of intelligibility come up. The purpose of a standard is to make people understand each other. If you spoke your regional dialect and I spoke mine, we might not understand each other at all. Indeed, it is the case, isn't it, that as you go around the country you sometimes hear people speaking a local dialect, you just can't understand what they are saying. Now, in the Middle Ages, the language had evolved many, many dialects, and these different dialects had begun to be written down. There's a lot of manuscripts in the middle English period, and each of these manuscripts reflected the dialect background of the writer. So, as time went by, the different spellings that you would get in the manuscripts were just so different from each other that people were finding it difficult to  understand the different texts. For instance, the  word might - M I G H T - in Chaucer's time, in about 1400, was spelt in about 30 different ways, depending upon which part of the country you came from. Now that couldn't go on forever, so there was a real pressure then to standardize. Let's have one spelling for everybody. One grammatical system for everybody. Let's have certain words that everybody's supposed to know. This process started off in around about the 14th Century, became more important as Caxton came along with the printing and that was a very important pressure to standardized as reading grew around the country, and more and more people wanted to read the same texts, and now the publishers were printing them and distributing them, and so on. It took about 400 years for standard English to actually evolve. It started in the Middle Ages and by Shakespeare's time it was well on the way to being a standard language, but it hadn't reached there yet.

How was the English in 1611 different to the way we speak now?

The 16th Century was a transition period between middle English, which is very different from modern English - the language of Chaucer and so on, and modern English. It's nearer to modern English than to middle English. So people talk about the 16th Century and the early 17th Century not as late middle English, but as early modern English, because it's nearly at modern English but not quite. When you actually look at the language that was around in the 1600s, you find that the grammar is not identical with modern English grammar but it's pretty close. It's 80 per cent or more identical with modern English. When you look at the vocabulary, if you take the whole of Shakespeare for instance, and add up all his difficult words, every word in Shakespeare that you and I might not understand today, the total is only 5 per cent of the whole vocabulary of Shakespeare. 95 per cent of Shakespeare's vocabulary is the same as in modern English. In pronunciation too, although it was different at that time, still anybody listening to a piece of early 17th Century text, Shakespeare or the Bible or any anything, spoken as it would have been at the time, you'd understand it without too much difficulty. So in the early 17th Century the language was still quite distinct in many respects from modern English, but it was moving rapidly in the direction of modern English, and of course, many of the texts at the time were fundamental in helping to shape that move towards modern English, such, of course, as the Bible.

In what ways did the King James Bible influence the language?

Well, when you think of a language and you ask "what is a language?", well, the kind of English I'm using to you now consists of about 40 odd sounds, vowels and consonants. These vowels and consonants combine into about 200 or 300 different types of syllables, and the syllables make up words, and there are, of course, hundreds of thousands of words in a language like English. These words then combine into grammatical constructions, and there are about 3000 or 4000 grammatical constructions that make up a language like English. Now, you see, the area of greatest influence is therefore going to be the vocabulary simply because there's more of it. You wouldn't expect the Bible to have any particular influence on the vowels or the consonants would you really? In fact, there is none that one can cite. Grammar, well the grammatical system has hardly changed in the last few hundred years. The Bible doesn't have much influence on the grammar of the language, but when you come to vocabulary of course, that's where it shows its influence most. I think the King James Bible did something that nobody else had done, or nothing else had done in the history of the language previously. Not even Shakespeare had managed to do as much, in this respect, as the Bible did, and that is increase the idiomatic range of the language. The range of idioms, semi-proverbial expressions, proverbial expressions at times which might have come from everyday usage but they had never been made prominent in the way that the Bible made them prominent. Now there are just hundreds and hundreds of examples. If we talk about 'the salt of the earth' for instance, a classic piece of Biblical phrasing which is now widely used. 'The signs of the times', 'a den of thieves' 'oh ye of little faith'. There are just dozens and dozens and dozens of these things. What has happened is that the original Biblical reference in modern English is now lost. If I say to you "Oh she's a whited sepulchre", then, you and I might not remember what in the Bible was the whited sepulchre, but that's not important any more. What has happened now is that the phrase 'whited sepulchre' has come to be used with reference to non-Biblical contexts and that's what I mean when I say a Biblical phrase has entered the language and become very generally used. Now there are hundreds of these idiomatic, semi-idiomatic expressions in modern English that have achieved their fame solely because of the King James Bible, and no other text in the history of the English language has done as much as the Bible to shape our modern idiom, and that's its claim to linguistic fame.

What part did the King James Bible play in creating Standard English?

Well, very little in terms of actually shaping the forms of standard English apart from the idioms and a few phrases here and there, and a certain amount of vocabulary of course. It's not a very innovative language in the King James Bible. On the contrary, the King James Bible's language is very conservative, they are looking back rather than looking forward. Not like Shakespeare, who was looking forward all the time and inventing words all over the place. King James's Bible wasn't a very inventing Bible at all. It rather wanted to consolidate what was there. So to take an example, the early 17th Century was a period when the verbs ending in 'th' like 'goeth' and 'sayeth' and 'doeth', that sort of thing, was being replaced by 's', 'goes', 'says', 'does'. That change was taking place during that time. Now, the King James Bible uses the older forms, the 'th' forms. Shakespeare uses the modern forms as much as anything else. So you don't expect to find much modern usage in the King James Bible. So what happened was that the Bible actually brought before the people a variety of standard English, of this emerging standard English, and made them encounter it. You see this was a Bible that was authorised to be used in all the churches of the land. So whereas previously, you might never have encountered standard English very much - I mean, most people couldn't read after all - now, suddenly there it was on the stand every week, you'd see it there, this new kind of English - at least new to them. So what the Bible did was bring standard English, or this emerging standard English, into the forefront of people's attention in a way that had never happened before and it really shaped their consciousness, and so many people said at the time - and say these days still - that the idiom of the English language, the general style of the English language has been so influenced by the Bible because of this public presence it had at the end of the 17th Century and has had ever since.