Geoffrey Hosking, in his superb Russia: People and Empire, 1552-1917
An integral part of Alexander‘s concept was the idea of making the scriptures available to all the peoples of the empire in their various languages. For this purpose he encouraged the establishment of the Imperial Russian Bible Society in December 1812, as a branch of the British and Foreign Bible Society, to undertake the work of translation, publication and distribution… The extent and coverage of the Society‘s work is demonstrated by the fact that in its first year it published or bought and distributed 37,700 New Testaments and 22,500 complete Bibles in Church Slavonic, French, German, Finnish, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Armenian, Georgian, Kalmyk and Tatar. For the purpose it set up new printing presses and imaginatively used retail outlets, such as apothecaries’ shops, which had never previously been used for selling books. By 1821 the New Testament and Prayer Book were starting to appear in modern Russian.
Significantly, the language which aroused the greatest opposition when it came to translation was none other than Russian itself. The Bible existed in a Church Slavonic version, and many churchmen felt that only the Slavonic tongue, consecrated by ancient usage, possessed the dignity to convey adequately the meaning of the scriptures. The Society’s view, on the contrary, was that the Slavonic text was readily understood only by those who had been brought up on it since childhood, and that it was therefore unsuitable for evangelism. At Alexander’s express wish, work was started on a translation into modern Russian, in order ‘to give Russians the means of reading the word of God in their native Russian tongue, which is more comprehensible to them than the Slavonic language in which the scriptures have hitherto been published.’
From the outset, some Orthodox clergymen had opposed the Society’s activities… The resistance reached its apogee in 1824 with a denunciation of the Society by the abbot of the Iur’ev Monastery in [Novgorod], Arkhimandrit Fotii… In a memorandum presented personally to the Emperor, Fotii warned of certain ‘Illuminists’ — Freemasons — who were plotting to install a new worldwide religion, having first destroyed ‘all empires, churches, religions, civil laws and all order’. The Bible Society, he maintained, was preparing the way for this revolution…
Alexander was certainly susceptible to Fotii’s insinuations… In the last years of his life, [his fears of sedition] were intensified by the growth of secret societies inside Russia. He naturally associated them with the societies in Germany, Italy and Spain which threatened European peace and stability as guaranteed by his cherished Holy Alliance… He had hoped that the Bible Society would arm the ordinary people against atheism and sedition. Now he was being warned that, on the contrary, the Bible Society was part of the conspiracy… In the event, he drew back from actually closing down the Bible Society, but he dismissed Golitsyn as head of it, replacing him with the irreproachably Orthodox Metropolitan of [Saint Petersburg], Seraphim…
He also appointed to the Ministry of Education… Admiral Shishkov, the principal protagonist of Church Slavonic. Shishkov lost no time in putting pressure on Seraphim to stop the Russian publication of the Bible. ‘What! Who among us does not understand the divine service? Only he who has broken with his fatherland and forgotten his own tongue… And can this supposed necessity [of publishing the Bible in modern Russian] do other than degrade the Holy Scriptures and thus implant heresies and schisms?’
Seraphim did not take much persuading. Publication of the catechism and the scriptures in ‘the vernacular’ (prostoe narechie) was terminated… Remarkably but characteristically, the continued publication of the scriptures in other ‘vernacular’ languages did not bother the Orthodox hierarchy, but the Holy Synod ordered the burning of thousands of copies of the Pentateuch, which were already being printed in Russian.
The halting of the Russian Bible was fateful. It delayed by a fatal half-century the moment when ordinary Russians could have access to the scriptures in a language which they could read and study with ease. Peter the Great had carried through a kind of Protestant revolution in the church, but a dangerously incomplete one, since it had never been supplemented by mass reading of the scriptures among the population. Without that the domination of the state within the church always threatened to hollow out its spiritual life. The situation had been created where the postman hero of Leskov’s story Odnodum (The One-Track Mind) could be seen as a laughable and possibly dangerous eccentric merely because he was in the habit of regularly reading the Bible for himself.
The Archimandrite’s attitude is still maintained in some Orthodox quarters; this page on the Elder Nilus says “Archimandrite Photius of the Yuriev Monastery… passed into history as a true confessor who battled with the enemies of the Orthodox Church: the Protestants, Masons and the ‘ecumenists’ of that time – the Bible Society.” And you can get a different perspective (from a Jehovah’s Witness point of view) on the history of the Russian Bible here [link no longer works, and there does not appear to be a search function on the site].
It’s interesting to compare this to the reaction occasioned in American Protestantism by the New International Version, which has more or less replaced the venerable King James.
Even so, there are still denominations out there who assert as an article of faith that the KJV translators, unlike any other translators before or since, were divinely guided. And outside of those denominations, there are many people who will pray only in King James English. Or what they think is King James English.
Jack Chick (author of insane reactionary evangelical comic book tracts) used to link to an article that claimed the KJV of the bible is actually now more authentically the word of God than the original texts (God’s plan apparently involved choosing English as an international language).
The sanest version of this theory is that the surviving MSS are corrupt but the divine inspiration of the KJV has restored the now-lost perfect original. This deals neatly with both claims of mistranslation and contradictions raised by relatively recently discovered sources like the Dead Sea Scrolls.
A similar process caused all the LXX translators to produce identical translations independently.
Is there a word for the percieved need of using a special language when addressing the deity? I suppose the answer to my question is obvious — “liturgical language” — but what I’m trying to get at is the fascination, for me, of the spontaneous folk impulse to have such a thing. “Liturgical language” connotes for me something like (my uninformed idea of) ecclesiastical latin, rigidly maintaned by a strict orthodoxy and kept out of the hands of regular people, almost the definition of an artificial social construct.
The good, unsophisticated people in the United States who say things like “Thee” and “Thou art” in both public and private prayer, but in no other context, and take pleasure in the habit of doing so, strike me as an interesting linguistic and/or psychological phenomenon.
Re: liturgical langauges, I think it’s worth remembering that they aren’t limited to literate societies. Many traditionally oral peoples have a priestly langauge that may be either a more archaic version of their own or a completely foreign language, such as Yoruban for Candomble, Ekoi-Efik for the Cuban Abakwa society, or Keresan for some of the medicine societies at Zuni.
I imagine that you appreciate that “thee” and “thou” are familiar forms from a time when “you” was formal, chosen deliberately for their intimacy, as a more or less direct Protestant reaction to that Latin orthodoxy. Just like Luther’s Deutsche Messe and the vernacular translations themselves.
Aha! Right! Like the other archaic technologies (e.g. flint knives for sacrifice) that can be conserved by religious practice. Thanks Dave!
Even in cases where, as MMcM observes, the technology originally got a foothold on the grounds of needful innovation …
Of course, in Milton’s time many English Puritans considered the King James to be a Royalist (if not “Popish”) translation and would only use the Geneva Bible. I believe that the Massachusetts Bay Colony commissioned its own translation of the Psalms.
As Zenkovsky in “Medieval Russia’s Epics, Chronicles and Tales,” so aptly illustrated, Russian letters flourished in comparison to Czech and Polish largely as a result of the fact that Greek Orthodox clergy allowed the gospel and liturgies to be translated into Russian; Roman Catholic-influenced Czechoslovakia and Poland in which ecclesiastical documents were kept primarily in Latin lagged centuries behind Russia in developing their own literatures. The Catholic church’s insistence upon Latin, however, fostered in large part the development of the influential Romance languages.
If one were to seek evidence of divine participation in the drama, it is likely that any language is enriched having experienced the stewardship of the gospel. Such claims however that Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, King James English or others are divine tongues are likely misguided. Jesus Christ spoke Aramaic; it is interesting that we haven’t heard the argument put forth that His was a divine tongue as many conservative Muslims claim the Quran is written in 100% Holy utterance from Mohammed. The language of the Quran is studied by many as quintessintal style, grammar and usage of Arabic.
I have often wondered if the whole idea of the Biblically prophesied “speaking in tongues” situation was in actuality a reference to the study of foreign language and not a mysterious and magical thing in contrast to the Bible passage which says the apostles spoke and they were heard in the various languages of all present, despite the apostles’ assumed lack of scholarship in those languages.
From Henry Soames’s A History of the Reformation of the Church of England (1826):
Sir Thomas More famously flamed Tyndale for getting the distinctions between yes and yea, no and nay wrong in his translation, showing that the distinction was then breaking down — but More actually explains the distinction backwards, showing that his own grip on it was none of the best, an early example of Hartmann’s Law of Prescriptive Retaliation.
I did not know about the four-form system — thanks for that!
Oh, that explains a lot. 🙂
Just thought I’d point out that the Internet Archive of the page exists.
Citing a bit from there:
Is it, now. . .
And would a Russian really say “Jehovah” rather than “Иегова”? (via Google Translate, so I’m not sure if that’s quite the right form)
I wonder what is meant by “vernacular” (prostoe narechie)?
Peasant dialects of Great Russian language?
Or standard literary Russian?
Surely the latter: but one man’s literary language is another man’s non-standard vernacular.
The Bible (in whole or parts) has been translated into many local languages by missionaries, often before said missionaries had acquired sufficient knowledge of the languages to do a good job. As a result, many such translations read awkwardly if not ungrammatically or erroneously in the local languages in question, but they are still accepted by local people, since it would be inappropriate to expect that Almighty God used everyday human language.
This attitude may be reinforced if sacred texts or formulae in local traditions preserve archaic features which are no longer fully understood.
To expand Marie-Lucie’s point somewhat: I know of at least one (creole) language where a specific “Church register” arose as an imitation of (European) missionaries’ (very distinctive) pronunciation of the language in question. I strongly suspect that such L1 transfer from missionaries’/priests’ speech played a major role in the diffusion of various SAE (Standard Average European) structural features in Dark Age Europe. In this light I recall a very interesting study of an L2 register of Estonian, used by German priests, which along with poor command of Estonian morphophonemics showed very German-like use of the numeral “one” and an Estonian demonstrative as indefinite article and definite article, respectively.
I suspect a comparative analysis of all of the above contact situations might prove to be a fascinating exercise.
IIRC, the Turkish features in Cappadocian Greek (a separate language from Standard Greek), like vowel harmony and loss of gender, got there by elite dominance from imperfectly Greek-speaking priests sent to Cappadocia by the Ecumenical Patriarchate, which perhaps didn’t want to waste its native Greek-speakers on a backwater. So what began as a priestly register became everybody’s language.
Etienne, JC: very interesting! There might be more instances of the German-Estonian type discoverable not only from translations of sacred texts but also from things like the “catechisms” and “confession manuals” comopiled by Spanish missionaries in California, and the like.
The few passages I’ve read of Wulfila’s bible look like word-by-word translations from Greek.
There are many features in modern Norwegian, especially in urban dialects (and hence in Bokmål), that are said (pejoratively, by those who pejore) to be klokkerdansk “Sacristan’s Danish”. While the Danish features clearly are superstratal, I don’t think the sacristan is the real culprit, since the sociolinguistic position of the sacristans must have been higher in rural parishes, where they chiefly served as schoolteachers.
I think this is no longer the case, but when I was a boy in West Virginia, some of the older teachers had some pronunciations never heard elsewhere–I remember “poor” with the vowel of “poo”–that I think were part of a special teacher-speak, a distant rumor of prestige dialect from pre-radio days. Some of these pronunciations, I think, may have been imitated from New England missionaries late in the previous century.
The CURE lexical set (cure, sure, pure, tour, fury, manure, lure, endure, secure, mural, who’re, etc.) was always small and is losing words in different ways in different English accents, In some cases it merges with FORCE (poor-pore merger), in some with NURSE (cure-fir merger), and in some accents, some words go one way and some the other. The original sound can also break up into two separate syllables. I’m guessing that in your local accent one of these changes had happened. The U.S. Northeast is fairly conservative in this respect, and I for one preserve all of these intact except in “Sure!” and surely, where I use a NURSE vowel.
(There is also the question of whether the historic /j/ before the vowel is lost outright, merges with the preceding consonant to palatalize it, or is preserved, which complicates things further.)
Re Rodger C.’s point. My pretty much favorite English teacher growing up (10th grade) was from West Virginia but had learned (if she did not have it natively – I don’t know where in the W Va social hierarchy her family fell) perfectly fluent standard/prestige dialect with probably just a trace of non-standard (and not our own local regional variant) phonology – so little that it made her sound charming without any hint of rusticity/yokelness. I did learn at least one arguable hypercorrection from her (pronouncing harass and harassment with first-syllable stress, which is not more “correct,” but merely a British variant) which has stayed in my idiolect even though I now in theory disapprove of it.
Re clerical registers, one of the weirder accents I’ve ever heard out the mouth of a native-born white American was in a sermon given by an Episcopal priest in a parish in North Carolina a bit more than two decades ago. It transpired that he was a West Virginia boy who’d gotten a graduate degree in England (either Oxford or Cambridge), the combination of which disparate regional influences influences conspicuously failed to average out to standard/prestige American pronunciation (although he also sounded nothing like either stereotypical Appalachian *or* stereotypical Oxbridge, or even quite the fake “Mid-Atlantic” accent once used in Hollywood). But for all I know he was influenced in boyhood by some local W Va theory about what prestige pronunciation ought to sound like. (For weird accents by Anglican clergy I’ve heard, this is probably second place to a black priest I once heard preach in the Bahamas — maybe it was just that local Bahamian accents can diverge quite a bit from general West Indian English but he had /v/ for /w/, just like a Cockney character in a Dickens novel.)
“I know of at least one (creole) language where a specific “Church register” arose as an imitation of (European) missionaries’ (very distinctive) pronunciation of the language in question.”
I suspect that a special form or register of religious texts is just another way of differentiating the divine from the mundane, not unlike special ‘church’ attire, stained-glass windows, etc., etc. I think this contributes to the reverence given King James language.
Fascinating idea!
Etienne, which creole language is that?
Y: Sranan Tongo, the dominant creole of Surinam. The register in question, “Church Sranan”, no longer enjoys the prestige it once did, however.
GeorgeW: of course, in religious matters the birth of a separate linguistic register is unsurprising. But there is a difference between a religious register created by and for native speakers which maintains archaic features (the case of the King James Bible, and many others) and a religious register whose creation is due to prestigious outsiders’ poor command of the subordinates’ language (as in the case of Sranan, and doubtless in other parts of the world as well…including Dark Age Europe, if I am right).
Marie-Lucie: I agree, I’m more than certain that Sranan-like Church registers exist(ed) in many aboriginal language communities in the Americas. In the case of extinct languages, where the only documentation we have left consists of missionaries’ writings, it seems to me that some caution should be called for: too many scholars seem to treat such documents as though they had been written by native speakers.
David: glad you like the idea. Since we are both scholars, here’s my question to you (and to anyone else who is interested). How could my idea (I daren’t call it a theory…yet) be proven wrong?
@JWB: Interesting. I should have mentioned that these teachers spoke with an intonation that resembled neither local speech nor media speech, but iirc had some relation to what might be called “Downton Abbey speech.”
Etienne: In the case of extinct languages, where the only documentation we have left consists of missionaries’ writings, it seems to me that some caution should be called for: too many scholars seem to treat such documents as though they had been written by native speakers.
I agree with the caution. But there may be some traces of Spanish or other missionary adstrate (?) recognizable in such writings, for instance constructions which seem odd compared to other samples of texts in related languages.
Conversely, in at least one sample of religious translation that I am familiar with (in BC), the main (most active, longest-lasting) missionary, who was reputed for his excellent command of the language, seems to have done a better job than later native speakers who tried to produce more “faithful” translations by keeping as close as possible to English word order.
I know far too little about the early Middle Ages to suggest any concrete details. 🙁 If enough documents exist, which I don’t know, comparing such things as church history the timing of when and where various features first appear where might help.
Reminds me of this quote from Pozdneev:
“All this literature is mostly translated from the Sanskrit, Tibetan, Chinese and Manchu and is stored as manuscripts. Study of this literature led to a new view of the literary language of the Mongols: the Mongols did not know of any other form of translation, but word-for-word-translation- slavishly following the original text, the translators thus are perfectly willing to sacrifice features of their native language and distort it beyond recognition. So, if you know that the verb requires dative in Chinese, then the Mongolian translator puts it in dative, even if the verb in his language required an instrumental case. Thus Mongolian literary language disintegrated into several branches, which can be called the Mongol-Tibetan, Mongolian-Chinese and Mongolian-Manchu. Each of these branches are so different from one another, that the European scholar mainly engaged in the study of, say, Buddhist writings of Mongol-Tibetan branch, is not always able to read an essay of Mongol – Chinese branch; thorough study of the modern Mongolian literature is unthinkable without the knowledge of Tibetan, Chinese and Manchu.”
Word-by-word translation also was applied in the OCS bible translations by Cyril and Method and their disciples. This is a known problem in studying OCS syntax. This is sometimes obscured by the fact that we don’t have the exact Greek originals used for the translation – as any look at the variants attested for e.g. the Greek gospel texts shows, there was wide variation, and we can never be sure that deviations of the OCS texts from e.g. the Byzantine imperial version of the gospels is due to a “free” (= not word-by-word) translation or due to the translators using an unattested Greek text variant.
Unattested variants obviously existed; whole apocryphal books are only known in OCS, like most of the Second Book of Enoch.
And then I forgot about it for over two years. *sigh*
Etienne: In this light I recall a very interesting study of an L2 register of Estonian, used by German priests, which along with poor command of Estonian morphophonemics showed very German-like use of the numeral “one” and an Estonian demonstrative as indefinite article and definite article, respectively.
Do you remember the cite for this study?
Ilse Lehiste found increasing German influence on Estonian syntax (including the use of üks ‘one’ and see ‘this’ as quasi-articles) in six successive translations of Schiller’s An die Feude, spanning about one-and-a-half centuries.
Ilse Lehiste. 1999. Successive translations as source of evidence for linguistic change. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 139: 39-48.
Fijian is a good example of missionaries’ imperfect grasp of the language becoming consecrated. Dixon’s grammar of Boumaa Fijian talks about the “Old High Fijian” of the BIble translation; while he politely doesn’t quite come out and say directly that some of its peculiar features arose from missionary error, he implies it pretty clearly.
Schiller’s An die Feude
I never knew that Schiller wrote a poem about feudalism.