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In 1384, John Wycliffe made an important translation of the Bible into English

Latin words continued to be absorbed by such writers as John Wycliffe (also: Wyclif, Wiclif, et al.), an ardent reformer of the Church, who insisted that Holy Writ should be available in the vernacular, and produced his translation of the Bible.

Wycliffe and his associates are credited with more than a thousand Latin words not previously found in English. Since many of them occur in the so-called Wycliffe translation of the Bible and have been retained in subsequent translations, they have passed into common use.

Caxton helped to stabilize the language by standardizing spelling and using East Midland (London) dialect as the literary form which became the standard modern English of Britain.

Wycliffe's translation of the Bible has such words as "generation" and "persecution", which did not appear in the earlier Anglo-Saxon version. Anglo-Saxon compounds like "handbook" and "foreword" were dropped from the language in favor of the foreign "manual" and "preface" (many centuries later, they were reintroduced as neologisms, and objected to by purists unskilled in linguistic history).

Wycliffe is credited with making English a competitor with French and Latin; his sermons were written when London usage was coming together with the East Midlands dialect, to form a standard language accessible to everyone, and he included scientific references; such as, those referring to chemistry and optics.

Wycliffe was noted for criticizing the wealth and power of the Catholic Church and upheld the Bible as the sole guide for doctrine; his teachings were disseminated by itinerant preachers and are regarded as precursors of the Reformation.

William Tyndale, the man who first printed the New Testament in English

The Roman Catholic church in England had forbidden vernacular English Bibles in 1408, after handwritten copies of a translation by John Wycliffe (an earlier Oxford scholar) had circulated beyond the archbishop's control. Some of the manuscripts survived and continued to circulate, but they were officially off-limits. Translating the Bible into English without permission of the Catholic church was a serious crime, punishable by death.

William Tyndale was born into a well-connected family in Gloucestershire, England, around 1494. We don't know much about his early life, but we know that he received an excellent education, studying from a young age under Renaissance humanists at Oxford.

By the time he left Oxford, Tyndale had mastered Greek, Latin, and several other languages (contemporary accounts say he spoke eight). He also had become an ordained priest and a dedicated proponent of church reform; a "protestant", before that word existed. All he needed now was a vocation. He found one, thanks in part to Desiderius Erasmus.

William Tyndale was executed

Sources of the Word

Erasmus, one of Europe's leading intellectual lights, had caused a stir in 1516 by publishing a brand-new Latin translation of the New Testament--one that departed significantly from the Vulgate, the "common" Latin translation the Catholic church had used for a millennium. Knowing that many readers saw the Vulgate as the immutable Word of God, Erasmus decided to publish his source text (a New Testament in Greek, compiled from sources older than the Vulgate) in a column right next to his Latin translation.

It was a momentous decision. For the first time, European scholars trained in Greek gained easy access to biblical "originals." Now they could make their own translations straight from the original language of the New Testament. In 1522, Martin Luther did just that, translating from the Greek into German. In England, Tyndale decided to publish an English Bible--one so accessible that "a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the scripture" than a priest.

One problem: the Catholic church in England had forbidden vernacular English Bibles in 1408, after handwritten copies of a translation by John Wyclif (an earlier Oxford scholar) had circulated beyond the archbishop's control. Some of the manuscripts survived and continued to circulate, but they were officially off-limits. Translating the Bible into English without permission was a serious crime, punishable by death.

The Word of God made into English

Undeterred, Tyndale tried to win approval for his project from the bishop of London. When that didn't work, he found financial backers in London's merchant community and moved to Hamburg, Germany. In 1526, he finally completed the first-ever printed New Testament in English.

It was a small volume, an actual "pocket book," designed to fit into the clothes and life of that ploughboy. That made it fairly easy to smuggle. Soon Bible runners were carrying contraband scriptures into England inside bales of cloth. For the first time, English readers encountered "the powers that be," "the salt of the earth," and the need to "fight the good fight"--all phrases that Tyndale turned. For the first time, they read, in clear, printed English, "Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here, but is risen."

Infuriated, the bishop of London confiscated and destroyed as many copies of Tyndale's New Testament as he could. Meanwhile, English authorities called for Tyndale's arrest. He went into hiding, revised his New Testament, and (after learning Hebrew) began translating the Old Testament, too. Before long, copies of a small volume titled The First Book of Moses, called "Genesis" started showing up on English shelves.

Spreading the Word

Tyndale never finished his Old Testament. He was captured in Antwerp in 1535 and charged with heresy. The next year, he was executed by strangulation and burned at the stake. Yet others picked up his work, and Tyndale's version of the Word lived on. In fact, practically every English translation of the Bible that followed took its lead from Tyndale; including the 1611 King James Version. According to one study, 83 percent of that version's New Testament is unaltered Tyndale, even though a team of scholars had years to rework it.

The reason is simple. Tyndale's English translation was clear, concise, and remarkably powerful. Where the Vulgate had Fiat lux, et lux erat, Wyclif's old version slavishly read "Be made light, and made is light". Tyndale's translation of the same passage is still familiar to nearly every reader of English: "Then God said: 'Let there be light', and there was light." Subsequent English writers may have been more original, but none wrote words that reached more people than these.

In 1340-1400, Geoffrey Chaucer helped make English the dominant language of Britain

He is credited with combining the vocabularies of Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian, French, and Latin into an instrument of precise and poetic expression.

William Caxton, in 1476, was the first to use Gutenberg's invention in England

“Mehr als das Gold hat das Blei in der Welt verändert. Und mehr als das Blei in der Flinte das im Setzkasten.”

More than gold, it's lead that changed the world, and more than the lead in a gun, it was the lead in the typesetter’s (printer's) case.

Proceed to Part 22, Modern English Period.

INDEX or Table of Contents, English and its historical development.

References: sources of information.