Isn’t it wonderful that they’re so flush that they can start spending buckets of money on frivolities and casual whims for the school system? No shortage of teachers, the teachers all well-paid and satisfied, the schools all well-supplied, and such a surplus that the government can publish and send out a special little present to every school.
The Times Educational Supplement is reporting this morning that the Prime Minister is planning to send a King James Bible to every school in the country, complete with a foreword by Michael Gove, the Education Minister.
Mr Gove is quoted as saying that the King James Bible was the most important book written in the English language. “It‘s a thing of beauty, and it‘s also an incredibly important historical artefact. It has helped shape and define the English language and is one of the keystones of our shared culture. And it is a work that has had international significance.”
Man, I wish the American educational system was so well-funded that we could start dumping random books on school libraries like that.
Although…aren’t there plenty of other books of historical and literary significance that could benefit the schools a little more? I suspect that the Christian schoolchildren already have access to copies of the Bible, and the non-Christian ones aren’t going to be very interested.
Oh, hey, what am I saying? I’m sure the government has already provided all the schools with all the science books and history books and literature and art and other such wonderfully useful works, so I shouldn’t cavil at them generously adding one more text to the bounty, right?
Hey! They can send a copy to my local library! (Degree of difficulty: Nine of my local libraries are closing due to spending cuts)
I think I should perhaps point out that the National Secular Society – AGM tomorrow – has suggested that Mr Gove provides a copy of The Origin of Species to all schools as well. Perhaps he would like to write a foreword as well?
Gordon
Yes, and the many people who have never encountered one need to know about it.
Oh, it’s not quite that unknown?
Gee, why not send out volumes of the Twilight saga? Because, you know, you can never have too much of anything.
Glen Davidson
Since I started reading the KJV (I’m currently bogged down in 1 Samuel), the biggest surprise has been how poor it is as literature. Compared with Shakespeare or Milton, whose work brackets it in time, it’s mostly dross. Large chunks of it are unutterably tedious descriptions of religious laws, rituals and artefacts, genealogies, and accounts of how many warriors the various tribes and smaller groups contrbuted to armies.
Mr Gove, “The Origin of Species” has a far more robust claim to being the English language’s most important book. You should send that out to every school, if you’re feeling so generous. Make sure it’s not the one Ray Comfort goobered all over.
Like UK schools don’t have access to this via the Internet already?
What do they expect schools to do with this? Are they going to include it in the English lessons, to discuss the beauty of the language? Are they going to look at in in History to see just how the translation has changed over the years? Where is this going to fit in with the National Curriculum? Who do they seriously expect will do anything with this – other than shelve it in the darkest, dustiest part of the library?
At a time when the government is in dispute with the unions about pensions, this seems to be particularly inappropriate.
That religious goober Gove is busy promoting schools with a religious ethos, to indoctrinate innocent kids & build stronger divisions in British society.
I’m from the UK and this is the first that I’ve heard about this, admittedly I haven’t read my NSS newsletter yet. It seems strange to me that our politicians are so blissfully unaware of what a bunch of heathens we all are. The Origin of the Species was the first book that I thought of as being more important than the KJV but I could probably come up with a whole list. There are probably a whole load of science books from the time of Newton onwards without which we wouldn’t have any technology whatsoever. I think that they would be more important than a bad translation of a book of bronze age barbarism.
Or, if Gove wants a thing of beauty which has helped shape the English language, how about Shakespeare’s collected works? (I hope school libraries already have those, though.)
oh, i get it — this Grove fellow hasn’t been told that there have actually been other books written in the English language, yet. seriously, i don’t bother finishing books unless they’re a good deal better (and/or more insightful) than the bible, in any of its translations.
(well, alright, the song of solomon is decent softporn. and revelations is a good object lesson in why eating shrooms isn’t good for you. but other than that…)
Do they know you can get it online for free? And if any student wants a hard copy they can take home to keep forever, there are any number of religious organizations who will happily mail them one for free?
I’m not denying that the act of translation of the KJV was a noteworthy historical event for England, it just seems… suspicious… to pick that one thing out of all the books that have been written in England, and say all schools must receive a fresh copy of that one, especially when it’s already the singly easiest book in the western world to find.
I think I’ve been playing Skyrim too much. “That’s like saying you’re gonna send everyone a free copy of History of the Empire, Volume 1. We need more copies of The Real Barenziah.”
In my Jewish though (very) secular school in Israel, the school used to receive hundreds of free bibles, complete with both the old and new testament, from missioners and hand them to the kids (I still have one of them). We studied only the old testament, but I guess the missioners hoped that we might pick at the second part and be swept by Jesus’s wisdom and divinity. To my knowledge this never happened, but at least they could feel they are doing an effort,and we all were quite happy not to have to pay for the books. Some of us (me included) were also glad of the opportunity to be exposed to the stories of the new testament, that are part of Western culture but, growing up in a Jewish society, were never told to us as kids. win-win, you could call it.
It all stopped when parents of one student in my class decided to be outraged about it. For a while the school had the very strange idea of actually cutting the second part of the book out, so the student’s sensitive eyes will not see it. It was pointed out to them that they are trying to protect the “holiness” of the old testament by destroying another religion’s holy book. They eventually just got read of the bibles – a sad ending, in my opinion. not only the students now have to pay more, but they are enclosed even more in this “protective layer” that doesn’t let any other opinions go through.
Oh yay! Free paper, conveniently bound in book form! It’s perfect for anybody needing paper to roll, to make paper airplanes, to light tinder, last resort toilet paper, write reminders, etc. Thank you, UK govn’ment, your generosity is most appreciated! I just hope you don’t expect to take that laughably bronze age fairytale written by desert dwelling goat shaggers seriously…
Wha? Firstly, when I was at school in the UK (10 years ago now) the Gideons gave us all New Testaments anyway, and I’m sure the KJ Bible was included in the Millenium collection (250 books sent to every school in the country in 2000/2001, mostly the greats of literature. Responsible for my Russian lit phase when I was 14!). The millenium books can’t have worn out already, they were thick hardbacks and very few people read them…
I know handing out Gideons wouldn’t be allowed at US schools, but my school did fairly well at the not-pushing-religion thing, despite the silly legal obligation for ‘an act of daily worship’ we have in this country. ‘Religious Education’ was mostly factual ‘this is what these people believe’, later morphing into general ethics. Personally my Gideon got used as a doorstop at home, and I think some of my fellow students took full advantage of the ultra-thin paper…
Wow, one book per school. Generous.
I should point out that the biggest influence on our language was when we were invaded and conquered in 1066. Not everyone at the time thought THAT was a good idea either.
I’m actually a little surprised by this since these things were given away free all the time by the churches when i was a lad. It mystifies me why they didn’t ask the churches to hand out “their” own bloody materials instead of whining to the government to do it for them. Perhaps they aren’t allowed near the children now…
I had been given 3 before I left school. but… TL:DR and the fact that i was 10 when i got the first one and it was realllly small print, and dull, and not relevant or particularly well written.
Hey,my Baptist Separation of Church and State tendencies do not want religion taught by the government either. However the King James Bible is history and literature. There is few other books that have influenced the English language the way this Bible has. As long as they teach about it as literature and history, I have no problem.
Perhaps to appease atheists, they could also teach about King James’ book on demonology and his vendetta to kill witches. :)
P.S.
“Written in the English language”?!
Can you really say that about a translation?
I think y’all should just learn Hebrew. Than we could have debates about the literary value of the Bible.
(OK, yes, you should also learn ancient Greek to read the new testament. But Hebrew is more important… Because if anybody spoke Hebrew, I wouldn’t have to speak in English all the time…)
Interesting, though, that a King for whom English is his second or third language arranges a new translation for entirely political reasons which, with hindsight, we recognise as recording the English language at a moment of great strength. This was the end of a process when the language of the common people proved it was more than equal to the Latin and the French to which many of the nobs still clung and totally trounced them. Hooray for that and it’s just a pity it had to be a religious book.
You can bet your life, though, that if Michael Gove had been alive in 1611 he’d have been on the other side of this argument. You only have to look at all the other daft and medieval ideas he is determined to introduce.
If it is the KJV in the original language, it isn’t going to be read much.
IIRC, it is written in archaic English, meaning it is full of thee’s and thou’s and sleepeths and goeth and so on.
As a kid, that really threw me. I had to sort of mentally translate it into modern English while reading it. It was an additional effort for something that was already pretty boring and confusing.
Anyway, they are just pandering to the xians. There are zillions of bibles circulating and the missionaries give them away often.
Mr. Gove has quite the opinion of himself, if he thinks the Bible needs him to write a foreword for it.
raven #19: Abeka Books (of Pensacola University) textbooks have the audacity to claim that the KJV, in its original, non-updated form, is the easiest translation of the Bible to read in the English language, and in fact God specifically intended it to be the last translation of the Bible into English ever made, forever. They base its readability purely on the ratio of adjectives and adverbs and to nouns and verbs, iirc (thank no god it’s been years since I had to read that trash), based on patterns of modern children’s literature vs. modern adult literature. They COMPLETELY ignore the fact that the entire thing only just barely qualifies as the modern English language. I’ve even read claims by literature nuts that it would have been difficult for the non-highly-educated to understand the very day it was published.
katjo:
The KJV? Not legally, no. Preposterously it is still protected by copyright in the UK.
And PZ spake unto the multitude, saying, ” Yea, though I complete my sentences, each having unto it a subject that begets a verb as the Lord intended, I do walk through the valley of the shadow of the participles sore afraid that the Lord in his infinitive wisdommay split me asunder if he waxeth wroth at my prose.
So let us go forth and assemble a committee of Godly divines and grammarianss, and appoint them as Editors over the preterite Pharyngulenes, that henceforth there shall be but one voice in the land,that pronounceth as our late King James listeth, and let it be called The King James Pharyngula, and be heard in the land like the voice of the turtle that maketh about as much sense as most blog comment threads.
+ + +
I just remembered that I once sent an NIV Bible to the UK government. It was during the period when the Labour government were thinking about introducing vaguely defined and draconian laws against “incitement to religious hatred” which everyone except Tony Blair and his lackeys could see was a really bad idea. I sent it with a covering letter pointing out that the Bible and the Koran were full of encitements to religious hatred and would have to be banned or heavily censored if this stupid law was passed. I bookmarked and highlighted this Bible with lots of examples which proved that there isn’t a single person on the planet that God does not hate.
In the end the government lost by one vote because the labour whip* screwed up, and what was passed was a heavily diluted version of the bill which was quickly forgotten about.
*The whip is a guy who encourages MPs to vote the way that their party wants them to and also makes sure that there are enough of them present to carry an important vote, unfortunately there is no actual whipping involved. As I recall, in this case he miscounted and told Tony that he could go home early and as a consequence the vote was lost. Mysterious ways indeed.
The KJV is indeed a valuable and useful text in the study of the history and structure of the English language. The exact same can be said of Fanny Hill, but I don’t see anyone using taxpayer money to dump a free copy of that in every school.
The quality of the prose in a text has no goddamn bearing on the acceptability of the content for a given audience.
The Bible? But even as a piece of literature, it isn’t that good. Things either happen too quickly or too slowly, character development is often lost, continuity is a nightmare and though it contains some striking imagery it has nothing on Shakespeare.
You know what book should be given? Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. I’m serious. Most often part of the Tales is only studied by older students who have taken English Literature as an option, but it would be a good idea for more advanced younger students to have a go as well.
Chaucer was one of the best early poets we have, and nobody could ever accuse him of, saying, skimping out on character development.
@Russell #23
Had you said Pharyngulites that would have sounded like a very typical bunch of Old Testament villains. Those cast as villains in the OT basically qualify by worshipping the wrong god and not being the chosen people.
YHWH doesn’t seem to have a problem with people who don’t worship any god at all, apart from calling them fools and really bad people. It is worshipping the wrong god that gets you a smiting, or sometimes you get to smite the chosen if they are showing wrong god worshipping tendencies themselves.
Don’t forget that senior members of the UK government think that this stuff makes sense and should be taught to our young.
“It‘s a thing of beauty, and it‘s also an incredibly important historical artefact.”
I prefer the clinical use of the word “artifact” in this
context – along the lines of “is that cellular, or just crap?”
This Bible give-away is blatant prolefeed. It’s a low-cost inconsequential sop to paranoid fundamentalist types, who are convinced that gays not being locked up is a form of religious persecution.
I’m OK with kids having a reference for all the shitty stuff christiinanity stands for.
Nothin’ll turn ya atheist quicker than reading the bible.
I can only hope this is some sort of joke. I had the misfortune of being put through catholic primary and secondary school, and always felt a certain envy for the kids who got sent to the secular schools. The idea that they’re equating the King James bible with the works of Shakespeare or Orwell, not to mention many others, turns my stomach.
One book per school probably doesn’t cost much as a donation to an individual school but if you added the cost of the Bibles together I bet there are some schools that could really do with an extra LSA or teacher for a year.
Also, with no official or de facto separation of church and state, even non-religious British state schools are considerably more religious than American or Canadian ones. School prayer is almost universal, as is the ubiquitous Baby Jesus play at Christmas.
I would be surprised if there were many schools that *didn’t* have a KJV or at least a c’s KJV derivative. This is just an exercise in self-congratulation for the Education Minister.
Hey, Mr. Gove, why not abolish the remaining 11+ tests instead?
What.
That’s it. It’s Letter To My MP time. This coalition is barmy enough without engaging in biblical nonsense.
My nine-year-old son informs me his school (UK, state) already has “personal bibles” donated by a local church. They don’t read them. I’ve advised him to maintain this tradition.
This year is the 400th anniversary of the publication of the KJV, so it’s not *quite* as random as it may first appear.
There is no doubt of the impact of the KJV on English language and culture: The God Delusion contains a whole page of nothing but expressions and figures of speech.
Plus the archaic language gives a certain extra edge to the parts most likely to put someone off religion — the genocidal bits, the dirty bits, and some of the frankly weird shit that Jesus gets up to (like cursing fig trees).
Having said all that, I don’t remember anything similar being done for the 150th anniversary of The Origin of Species, two years ago.
Sigh. And I previewed it, too.
If the Bible (any version) is so influential, surely it follows that the texts influencing the Bible itself must be even more so.
Thus: the Epic of Gilgamesh.
The earliest known prose from the generally accepted earliest civilisation, containing the earliest known global flood legend, which was handed down to and incoporated in the Bible via dozens of intermediary cultures.
The Epic of Gilgamesh is the Ur-book. The Bible is a trashy pulp novel by comparison.
Maybe it is actually part of a clever long-term plan to head off the linguistic creationists. By distributing the KJV bible with its archaic English, the truth of linguistic evolution since King Jimmy’s time will be evident. Their own holy text will have disproved the “theory” that all languages were created by god when he destroyed the tower of Babel and have remained unchanged since that time.
Or maybe it is just a waste of money.
@Duckorange:
Either you have an enhanced definition of local, or you have too many libraries. I have two (a big one and a teeny one) and both remain open.
Richard Eis #15
Willie the Conk thought it was an excellent idea.
Richard Eis #15
Pedantry time: I was led to believe that the Danish Viking invasions of the 9th century had a greater influence. You had two languages with similar vocabularies (e.g., “shirt” vs “skirt” — originally both words referred to the same unisex tunic) but different syntax in close proximity, encouraging the development of a simplified common tongue: which is why English no longer has the complicated inflections retained by German.
They think we don’t already have Bibles? My (secular) school has at least 5 in the Sixth Form library, and most likely there are more in the Lower School library. And whenever we had Religious Studies there was always a Bible each, so that’s at least 20 more.
We also have two creationist textbooks, but my Biology teacher bought that for the sole purpose of laughing at them.
We also had a Bible each given to us by a Church group when we started school. I think we’re covered.
The King James Bible is indeed a historical artifact, but it’s importance is much overstated. Personally I find the collected stories of the brothers Grimm far more interesting and historically relevant than the KJB (fortuitously pronounced ‘K-G-B’ by the French).
Oh, and, @Duck, you’re an offensive simpleton:
http://scaryduck.blogspot.com/search/label/guns
(not the link, the content)
@MadScientist, That should be kay-zhay-bay, right?
—
*sigh*
This is probably a non-story. I can’t tell if Michael Gove is really going to write an introduction to a KJV bible that’s going to be sent to all UK schools. We have no evidence. All we have is reports.
As my Dad says: “Never believe anything you read in the papers.”
However, should the King Gove Bible appear, I’ll let you know.
Stonyground –
Now let’s be honest here; this is the Tory party we’re talking about (right now – I realise your point was relating to the Era of the Blair Itch) and whipping is certainly involved. Possibly things have changed in the years since I left the shores of Old Blighted but the general run of things was that Tory scandals were sex, Labour scandals were money. Male Tory MPs are traditionally found dead in ladies underwear, Labour MPs get caught fiddling the finances.
It’s a bit like the observation in the US that the more a congress critter shrieks about how bad homosexuality is, the more likely they are about to tumble into a scandal due to behaving like the caricature of gays they rant against.
They should send the Brick Testament version.
Tim at 47. Brown paper bags stashed behind the bogs stuffed with dosh come to mind thinking of a tory scandal some years back, no sex, despite the location. Remember Martin Bell, the chap in a white suit who replaced the sitting tory as an independent due to financial scandal. No, Labour produce financial scandals and tory’s produce financial and sex scandals.
@Andy Breeden, I’m getting my kids to do *just that*. We have the Lego. We will prevail …
—
On the other hand, I’m actually really pissed off that David Cameron (centrist, basically atheist) is taking a bashing from people who supported Tony Blair (centrist, closet Catholic). Faith schools? Fuck’em. There’s one trying to open where I live. I say no.
I am quite grumpy about this. ;)
I often wonder how many talibangical Bible-huggers know that James I & VI was g-g-g-g-gay. He made no attempt to hide it, and everyone at court knew it, and there’s no shortage of contemporary references to it.
He’s right that the KJB is a key-stone of Western culture. But so is Hitler. Is he sending out copies of Mein Kampf? Granted, Hitler’s seminal work calls for much less genocide than the KJB, doesn’t go quite so far in justifying slavery, and doesn’t get Ann Coulter to orgasm at the thought of an End Times orgy of murder against all those smarty pants that raised their frackin’ hand at every damned question the teacher asked…ahem. Still, if we’re going to go with giving children fictional books, I must prefer ones that don’t include the protagonist ordering the most inhumane acts imaginable for his own amusement, because that’s just so much post-modernist bullshit.
God.
Win.
Thread over m-/
So, Gove is allegedly sending every school a bible with a foreword written by him…and Andrew Lansley (health secretary) is showing a 3 minute video of himself talking up his NHS “reforms” (i.e. privatisation) on a loop on bedside TVs in hospitals (unless the captive
customerpatient pays a fiver for proper telly).Somehow it all feels a little worse than simply continuing the state sponsored promotion of religion which has been so notably
successful over the years!
So the KJV was “written in English”? That would have greatly surprised the scholars & clerics who spent seven years working over those Hebrew & Greek manuscripts.
For a monumental and influential book “written in English,” I would nominate the Oxford English dictionary.
Dictionary
peterh
The KJV (and other versions) were translated from the original languages and the translations were written in English.
How about the complete works of Shakespeare?
My secondary/high school invited that christian group who give out the little red (NT only!)bibles after their talks, mine ended up on the nextdoor church roof… Hey I told the guy I didn’t want it(and had READ IT, thank you christian run STATE primary school) but he pushed it into my hands and said something about me needing it more than others and GORD BLESS. Ffff.
I don’t have a problem with Bibles in schools or libraries or stores.
What I do have a problem with is their being sold as or taught as something besides Mythology or Literature or Comparative Religion.
IMHO, the KJV is the most poetic of the English translations on offer, so I don’t even have a problem with people studying that version first or with more emphasis than others.
It’s just that it shouldn’t be elevated to anything more than what it actually is: a compilation of stories, myths, laws (most of which are irrelevant and/or wrong), and a little bit of actual history (usually embroidered upon, similar to how other ancient works contain false or exaggerated claims).
It most certainly is not.
In content and intent it is ugly.
Ugly, with a capital ugh.
I’m surprised that no-one has gone to the “original” source for this and found that while this is being reported, simultaneously, the minister claims this state of affairs.
This blog’s story could have been a bit more interesting given the disjoint.
What Gove didn’t say is that the KJV was mostly taken from William Tyndale translation made in the mid 16th century.
And the church executed him for heresy for translating it!
Can you imagine the clamour when thousands of children converge on school libraries; all of them desperately seeking to borrow a copy of the bible (or maybe not).
@13
“…desert dwelling goat shaggers…”
Wow, atheist and anti-Semitic; what a combo.
Pedantry Time part duex: It depends how you slice it, i’m going on word count since many more french words are still in our language compared to german. Thus implying a stronger overall influence.
Actually I remember picking up the Gideons bible in a hotel room once. If I had had a red pen with me at the time, the only foreword I would have done was “F – see me”. There were at least 10 factual errors on the first page… and that was only the introduction.
Actually, there’s a good case that you are the one being antisemitic here: demeaning the serious issue of antisemitism aimed at people alive today, by pretending that a throw-away (and I agree, foolish and inaccurate) characterisation of people living more than 2,000 years ago has any relation to that problem.
Richard Eis,
It depends which direction you are looking and which particular pair of specs you have on. For instance, do we count those French loan-words if they exist at all or do they deserve more attention if they have completely replaced the previous term?
I live only half-way up the main island of the archipelago and I hear and use words every day which have a Norse or Germanic root. The place names and the names of topological features also include an earlier, presumably Celtic, element.
What I find fascinating about English is not how many loan-words it has – from French, from Latin, from Hindi – but that almost every word has one or more synonyms from earlier sources and still in use today.
(Just look up the etymology of the last word I wrote!)
@maureen.brian #69:
Ditto. If I walk to the edge of town I can see a geographical feature the etymology of whose name illustrates the development of English very clearly: Bredon Hill.
maureen.brian #69
Bill Bryson, in his excellent book The Mother Tongue, points out that English is not the only language with loan-words:
Richard Eis:
Ah, but how many of those are from the Norman Conquest, and how many were introduced later by people like Chaucer (who, IIRC, was criticised in some quarters for doing just that)?
And even if the majority of all English words have a Latin (not necessarily via French) or Greek etymology, the most commonly used words are still largely Anglo-Saxon in derivation.
True indeed, ‘Tis.
It would be great, though, if someone with more brain cells left than I would make up a fancy interactive map showing how the proportion of the different contributing languages changes from place to place – at the village to village level.
An example – proper Cockney in East and Inner London draws on Yiddish for both vocabulary and sentence construction but the much derided Estuary English, a collection of dialects, does not.
There’s an interesting short story by Poul Anderson called “Uncleftish Beholding”. It shows what English might look like if non-Germanic root words were removed.
We will never know! I doubt Chaucer would have bothered if the Norman Conquest had never happened…but who knows.
What i do know is that the bible is pants, and Gove is an idiot in any language or derivation. Though it probably sounds best in french.
@’Tis Himself
And it’s interesting how much sense it still makes. Almost all the ‘glue’ words — the words we rely on most to spin coherent sentences — are still the same; most of the new (or oddly used) words are a consequence of the technical nature of the story.
‘Un-Germanifying’ your example paragraph, we get:
That’s eight words out of fifty or so: not bad for a basic primer on atomic physics.
#76 Ok Now do it in latin!!!
AJ @ 22 Really? Who owns the copyright?
@Richard Eis:
Je sais bien que la Bible est une ineptie, et Gove est crétin en tous langues et dérivations.
SherriffFatman
Soothly we live in mighty years!
@Richard Eis:
Per vitae maximam partem, homines naturam rerum ignorabant, sed solum divinare poterant. Scientiae incremento, discere incepimus, et hodie materiae impigritatisque intellegentiam habemus quam observatio adfirmat, et in officina et in vita cottidiana.
@’Tis:
That’s going to be my new sig.
Odd. There are already bibles everywhere around here. Most of them rather old. There doesn’t seem much use in making more after a certain count. Do you brits eat your old books or something?
@katjo
Absolutely, especially when he’s just told teachers that there’s no money:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-politics-15662445
“Per vitae maximam partem, homines naturam rerum ignorabant, sed solum divinare poterant. Scientiae incremento, discere incepimus, et hodie materiae impigritatisque intellegentiam habemus quam observatio adfirmat, et in officina et in vita cottidiana.”
Pretty fun that this still makes sense with only roots and novice grammar.
@Svlad Cjelli
“Do you brits eat your old books or something?”
Depends on the pupil. :P
James VI and I’s first language was English. The last Scots king who spoke Gaelic at all was James’ great-grandfather, James IV. While he almost certainly spoke French, the language of his courts, both in Scotland and in England, was English.
Carbon Based Life Form,
I was working from the premise that Scots (Lowland Scots, if you wish) is a language and not just a defective form of English.
Certainly, there are tales of his arrival in London to be greeted with a chorus of “can’t understand a word he says” – a phrase still in use in that city, especially among those who have ventured no further than the ends of their own noses!
So, Scots from his wet-nurse and the servants but used also by members of the court, then more than a passing acquaintance with both French and Latin and finally, as an adult, James I&VI learns what is foolishly called (between London and Oxford) Proper English.
For those over here who don’t have contact details for their local MP:
http://www.theyworkforyou.com/
Letter-write this moronity out of existence.
I’m always perfectly open to having my views on the Tories changed; it’s not really a shame that they keep confirming my desperately low opinion of them every fucking day.
That man Gove is very silly. Everybody knows that the best book written in English is the translation of “The ingenious gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha.” by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. OK, there was that English guy William something or other, that was pretty good.
Seriously though, I can understand why it might be a good idea to know something about the bible to understand some references in literature but there must be hundrerds of authors who write in English as well as other translations that are more important than the KJV.
I think they made a mistake. The best book ever published in English is the Kama Sutra. Both start with a K though so he got at least one thing correct.
Fuck, that’s a tedious book. Tried twice, couldn’t get beyond the second chapter.
Really? The education Minister of the UK doesn’t know the difference between a book *written* in Enligsh, like for instance “A Tale of Two Cities”, and a book *translated* into English from books written in Latin, Hebrew and Aramaic, and then translated into Greek.
@66
Whoa, what? What does living in a desert and having sexual intercourse with animals, have to do with being semitic? We know the people of the bible lived in the desert, and we know they had sex with animals, (because it is explicitly forbidden under threat of capital punishment by the Law of Moses – in Exodus 22:19 and again in Leviticus 20:15).
Teshi@31
I know it’s an example of 1, but the one time they tried christmas carols followed by prayers at my school we stood around and chatted and ignored whatever the hell the weird headteacher was going on about (hated that guy, came in full of buzzwords, took money from the govt. not to expell anyone then spent so much money he left the school in £60k of debt after he got moved on to a ‘failing’ school after doing so ‘well’ with ours). They’d got the entire school, ~800 pupils at that time, into the largest available space and didn’t have room or enough people to police us properly. There’s a reason normal non-religious assemblies were held one year-group at a time…
Weirdly, my Church-of-England primary school didn’t have any nativity plays while I was there. Did Joseph and His Technicolour Dreamcoat, but that’s more likely due to being free for schools to perform than for any religious reasons.
I’ve had sex with animals too. Admittedly, they were all Homo sapiens.
Not that’s there’s anything wrong with that.
Or so I’ve heard.
The Bible is at least an interesting book and if read critically from cover to cover, will turn any believer in to an atheist. Within the C of E there are so many wishy washy christians that you know it is working!
As for Gove, he is a world class fool. It is interesting talking to my local MP (Conservative) to hear quite how minimally that he commands any respect, and as an architect, I would happily see him undertake a mission to Mars, with minimal hope of success, bearing in mind how he effectively put me out of a job as well as destroying a goodly number of practices in the UK.
Not that I hold a grudge you understand!
@68
I would suggest the Jews have had to deal with a very long history of antisemitism; implying that their ancestors were goat fuckers, is a little offside to say the least. I think it’s in the same antisemitic vein as the characterizations of Jews throughout the writings of antiquity, through the middle ages, into the present. Antisemitism didn’t just arise out of a vacuum, and denigrating them, be they past or present is something I find pretty repulsive.
@93
I would question the logic of suggesting that an group of people can be rightly referred to corporately as goat fuckers, because there were laws against animal fucking on the books, so to speak. Would you characterize some other group as “child rapists” because they have anti-child rape laws on the books, or even if they had a few people within their community convicted of child rape?
Gove is a pompous prick. Writing a forward for any book that gets distributed is bad, this is… well, assuming that he’s some sort of Anglican then this is really bad form.
Anyway, I can see this going down really well with the various stripes of faith school that our last 2 governments seem to like encouraging.
This country really irritatews me sometimes.
Than we could have debates about the literary value of the Bible.
Name ONE other book, entirely in Hebrew, we could compare it to judge its literary value.
waste of time, and you know it.
Some thoughts:
1. wow, why is there still copyright on the KJB?
2. Cameron is an atheist? Really?
3. the bible is indeed part of Western culture. And comics and Hollywood movies. If people from outside of the West want to understand Western culture better, they need to study those things. But probably the Cliff notes version should suffice here.
4. And regarding the linguistic question about English being more influenced by Norse or Norman:
A. let’s not forget that originally the Britanni were a Celtic people. The Roman occupation did not leave many traces. The Anglo-Saxon (AS) immigration then led to a language switch. But Anglo-Saxon was a West-Germanic language (WG).
B. Which is different from Norse, which was a North-Germanic language (NG). You’ll get a wrong impression from looking at the Scandinavian languages today, which were heavily influenced by Low and High German themselves (and acc to some scholars, around the 15th c., the Scandinavian languages only very narrowly escaped extinction, at the price of heavy Germanisation).
That said, it is remarkable that English borrowed some basic terms, including pronouns. “they – them” is a Norse import, as are the verb forms “are” and “art”. Originally, English had words very similar to what other WG languages have even today, i.e. German and Dutch.
Some linguists, e.g. John McWhorter, have argued that the extensive language contact between Norse and AS speakers can explain why English is morphologically so much simpler than its WG sisters (but all Germanic languages, except Icelandic and Faroese, have significantly simplified their morphology).
C. After the Norman conquest, French became the language of the realm, but the Normans weren’t strong enough in numbers to effect a language shift, unlike the AS. (compare to Romans in Gaul, and then later with the Franconian conquest of what is today known as France). BUT: French did not leave a big mark in the grammatical system of English, unlike Norse (after some time, the Normans also shifted their language, like the Franconians, and changed to English). It did however open the floodgates to the borrowing of a lot of French words and also jumpstarted the use of Latin as the languages of science.
D. And this is the important bit:
When the language of science and technology was switching from Latin to the vernaculars, all these languages needed to develop the means for expressing themselves. In the case of English, Latin words were directly taken into the language (usually in a slightly “Normanised” form) or new words were coined using Latin roots (and by extension Greek ones), while Dutch and German used a technique known as calquing, using German roots to create new terms modeled after Latin terminology.
Example: conscientia “conscience” can be broken down into con- “with” and scientia “knowledge”. English just went with “conscience”, while Dutch and German created calques: ge-weten and Ge-wissen.
As a final note:
there are different degrees of borrowing. Borrowing involving only technical vocabulary is the lowest, and borrowing of basic vocabulary and grammatical words is the highest. There is the Thomason-Kaufman borrowing scale, that goes from 1 (lowest) to 5 (highest).
Applying it (following Grant 2009) we get the following picture:
Pre-Celtic:1
British Celtic:1?
Latin:3
French:3-4
Norse:4-5
Dutch-Low German: 1-2
all other languages:1
i. grammatical system: judging from this, English is pretty much WG. Sure, it has shed some typically Germanic features such as V2 for SVO, and also getting rid of nominal gender and adjective inflection. But in many areas you can still see its WG-ness.
ii. basic vocabulary: among the WG languages, English has indeed been impacted more by French and Latin than others. Based on an investigation of 1300+ basic vocab items, the numbers are as follows for English:
French 25.2%
Latin 8%
Old Norse 3.5%
Non-loanwords: 59.0%
(Grant 2009)
Compare this to Dutch, another WG language:
French: 6.8%
Latin: 6.1%
German: 2.7%
Non-loanwords: 80.9%
(van der Sijs 2009)
iii. technical vocabulary: this is where English diverged from its WG sisters as well. As I’ve mentioned above, it preferred to use Latinate lexical material for technical terms, while its WG sisters (and the German-influenced NG languages) used Germanic lexical material. For an educated speaker, this will be one of the most noticeable characteristics.
This is really a political question, but the choice is not between a. language and b. defective form, but rather b’. dialect, I’d say.
I’m not an expert of Scots, but what I’ve read about it reminds me of Low German v. High German. In the past, both Low German and Scots had achieved a status similar to that of a “sister language” to English or High German respectively, though in those days language standardisation wasn’t really in place like it is today.
Nowadays both LG and Scots seem to have been exposed to heavy influence from the standard languages, narrowing the gaps more and more. (also language shift of the population in favour of the standard language. In case of LG, the pronunciation of former LG speakers is now seen as standard, though I see this as a small consolation for losing your mother tongue)
Thanks, pelanum. That was useful.
On just one tiny point and accepting that I am not a specialist may I raise this point of narrowing the gaps between dialects? Remember that I’m almost 70 and thus remember (some of) WWII plus much since then.
When I was at school it sometimes seemed that the entire purpose of the 11+ and of secondary education was to end up with the entire population able to speak nothing but “BBC” English. It didn’t happen!
All sorts of reasons, I suppose but they must have included the speed at which a dialect can change and still remain distinct – not predicted before it happened – the arrival of new accents and their recombination – Jamaican patois + diluted Cockney = estuary English – and the increasing proportion of people who began to say, “Yes, thank you. I will take your university education and your professional career. I will even adopt your dress code for most of the time but I’m hanging onto my linguistic identity.” As, indeed, the Scots of whatever language heritage always have.
maureen.brian,
there is the distinction between low and high register in a language.
Even the same speaker can switch between different “modes”, called register in linguistics (I’m not even mentioning the cases of multilingual/multidialectal speakers here). The easiest example is a formal situation, say a parliamentary debate, or tea with the Queen, compared with an informal situation, talking sports with your friends, or enjoying dinner with your family. Your speech will be markedly different. What sounds pretentious in one situation will just be fine in another.
The informal register is called Low, and the formal one High. The Low register type of speech is acquired when you’re small, the High one is acquired in school and university, it doesn’t come naturally. Here, more educated speakers are at an advantage. This is also where standardisation can be useful. For trade and commerce, science and technology, this is an important factor.
Now, again, let’s look at various linguistic levels:
1. pronunciation: this is probably the most ingrained level, because you acquire it as a child. I’m not familiar with the history of UK language policy, but I can imagine that in earlier times, RP was the only acceptable model for societal success. I mean, you’ve had two Scottish prime ministers recently and while especially the second one might have had tiny hints of a Scottish accent (found an amusing article here), they did aspire to project an RP accent (but that might also be politics, as the England is the most populous constituent country).
But luckily, English seems to be becoming more accepting of regional accent as of late.
2. lexicon: words can also be markers of identity. I think Irish English is a good example, and probably Scottish English too. However, here we have to differentiate between Low and High register. Formal speech often frowns upon the use of local terms that are not understood elsewhere. Another aspect would be accommodation effects: if speakers from different regions interact on an ongoing basis, they will subconsciously avoid terms that wouldn’t be understood.
3. grammatical differences: this depends on how far away the dialects are. In a language shift or dialect shift situation, when speakers of a less dominant dialect learn a dominant one, they usually internalise the grammatical system of the dominant dialect, but will often have some interference effects such as pronunciation. And that’s probably what Scottish English is about (if you want to consider it distinct from Scots).
As a “standard English” speaker, I benefit on a regular basis from Aberdonians doing this at work, where standard English speakers are the majority among research and admin staff, but a minority among catering, cleaning and security staff (the Aberdonian “Doric” dialect has a lot of words unique even in Scotland, as well as unusual vowel shifts). During a recent brief hospitalisation, I found it very hard to understand a large proportion of the patients, and of the nursing staff until they realised I’m a Sassenach, but understood all of the doctors without difficulty.
Anecdote about accents:
When I was in the US Navy ever so many years ago, my ship made a portcall in Faslane, Scotland. The Ship’s Office needed a typewriter repaired so a tech came out from Glasgow to fix it. One of the Yeomen*, a Black from Mississippi, was the escort for the tech. Each man found the other’s spoken English so incomprehensible they were reduced to writing notes to each other. Yet if you had asked them what language they were speaking, they would have said they were using their mother tongue, English.
*A US Navy Yeoman is not the same as an RN Yeoman, but I won’t go into the difference or how it came about.
probably it wasn’t just the accent that made communication difficult.
I remember an anecdote concerning AAVE: in the South, there was an African American cleaning lady, who one day complimented the (white) English Department coordinator that she was “phat”. That caused a lot of trouble.
I believe it was primarily the accent. The Yeoman spoke standard American English but with a very strong Black Mississippi accent. The rest of the crew had no trouble understanding the man because we were used to the accent.
Incidentally, the Black Mississippi accent is somewhat different from the White Mississippi accent.
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Cameron’s not an atheist, he’s CofE:
Daily Mail source, I know, but it’s an interview.
My wife works at the local community college library. The only book donated more to the school than the KJV is the book of mormon. They have boxes and boxes of them in the backroom.
There’s a reason I said “basically atheist”. CofE is a pretty wishy-washy brand, and he’s a wishy-washy exponent. ;)
Also, Daily Mail. I suspect he’s pandering to the base somewhat …
The estimated cost for the Bible sending scheme Gove is proposing is £375,000, which will be sought from philanthropic sponsors, according to the Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/nov/25/michael-gove-king-james-bible?CMP=twt_fd)
Secularists have expressed their intention to send out a copy of the Origin of Species to every UK school on Darwin Day.
http://www.secularism.org.uk/133155.html
My guess is that Gove won’t find the money for this. The UK education system is screwed and in a recession no one will give out the money for his nonsense. (I hope.) He really is an idiot. He should be concentrating on finding money for rebuilding crumbling schools, whose refurbishment his departmnet withdrew funding for as one of their first moves in 2010 when the Tories got into power. For £375,000 I’m sure a couple of nice school buildings could be financed. Why not ask the philanthropic donors for the money to go towards that? Oh yeah, ‘cos it’s Gove.
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