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Comment by haskal | Hacker News Reader

The bible is by far the most translated text (and a reasonably sized one). I just wish it wasn't written in a weird way.

I learned a little bit of Korean by reading the bible as the primary source and when I tried to speak, I only got weird looks. I get why. It is like someone asking you "How art thou?"

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I find it a bit weird that people stick with such antiquated translations of the bible in English. The German translations are pretty much standard German. Even the Luther Bible is quite readable to this day.

There's always some friction when it comes to updating translations (source: I used to have to go to church, there was much debate whether or not to replace the archaic translation with a modern version). A lot of debate is about whether the translation is correct (compared to the old version), and people read the bible so often they are used to the old translation - if the new one changes some words, or even changes the meaning (to be a more accurate translation), people get a bit antsy.

But yeah, the old translation is becoming nearly incomprehensible now; compare the King James version of the ten commandments with the new translations: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus+20&versi... vs https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus+20&versi...

The KJV version of the Ten Commandments is still easily comprehensible. You only need to know a few archaic constructions ("spake" instead of "spoke," "thou" instead of "you"), which most native speakers of English are probably reasonably familiar with.

Looking at the Luther Bible, it has a similar number of archaic constructs as the KJV. For example, it uses archaic forms of the genitive case extensively (compare Luther's "der Väter Missetat" with the modern German equivalent, "die Missetat der Väter").

The reason people like these old translations, in my view, is that the slightly archaic language separates them from the common language we use in our everyday lives. That separates the book from the "profane" or mundane everyday world, and makes it something special. Even as a cynical atheist, I appreciate the feeling that this sort of slightly archaic language creates.

1. The Ten Commandments in the Luther Bible: https://www.bibel-online.net/buch/luther_1912/2_mose/20/#1

Didn't Orwell have a point when he contrasted a verse from the KJ version (antiquated!) bible with his own modern (' a parody but not a very gross one') version.

"I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all."

"Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account."

Doubtless someone can provide a much better modern version but why bother?

Amazing that the original was the product of fifty people.

I'm not a native English speaker. To me, your first excerpt is much more understandable: I can automatically form the abstraction given these examples, whereas the second excerpt, although more general, is honestly harder to "hammer" into the brain. But I think that is because the second version is not just modern language, but also more abstract.

That was the point being made by both Orwell and parent commenter. The KJV is, for all it's archaisms, incredibly 'punchy' in a way that really can't be improved on. You could try, but you're only going to ever get a fraction of the way there, and in the end would only amount to a revision that nobody would accept.

Try your hand at easier fare, like say Shakespeare.

I see, thanks for the clarification.

I agree that this is what's being expressed, but I think I'd have an easier time revising KJV than Shakespeare. The pieces of translated bible that I have read didn't come anywhere near the complexities of Shakespeare. I don't think anyone would read/accept my revision, but I think it would be more beautiful in the eyes of most English professors.

"I returned. Under the sun I saw that the race was not for the swift, nor the battle for the strong, nor the riches for the wise men; time and chance affected all."

Not a major departure, and it could certainly be improved upon, but it's more to the point while still showing the reader rather than just stating the point, and the repetitious bit in the middle has been paired down to three parts with a slight variation on the last repetion upending expectations while not going so off the rails that there is no particular expectation.

There is a lot of crufty old stuff in Shakespeare, the stories are re-written pretty much yearly pretty much all omitting this stuff. I'm not a part of that world, but I'd be pretty surprised if theater companies that regularly run Shakespeare plays weren't revising the plays in that regard.

I believe that Shakespeare had more rhyme and meter than the bible. I also believe that text with more rhyme and meter is more difficult to edit without damaging these qualities, while text with less rhyme and meter has less to damage by these metrics and is therefore easier to edit. Do you agree with both of these statements? If so, do you think the bible has other complexities Shakespeare lacks which outweigh the complexity added by Shakespeare's rhyme and meter? If so, what are those qualities?

Oh dear I'm certainly not prepared to dive that deep into the topic. I was more referring to the content rather than the specific qualities of the verse. The Bible is surprisingly hard to compress. Shakespeare, well you can make two hour long movies that hit all the story beats.

As a counterpoint, I'm a native English speaker, and I found the second much easier to understand, whereas the first seemed like a maze.

As a former hard-core Bible reader, but never a fan of the KJV, I found the first easier. But I think that could be because it follows closely to the patterns of the Zen Buddhist literature I'm reading lately. 'cuz it does read kind of like a Zen koan.

I don't think it's weird, in fact I think it's very interesting and telling of the world we live in. After all you could make the same argument for the Bible in Latin, why did the catholic church stick with it up until less than a century ago? And let's not even mention the Quran or Vedic Sanskrit.

The USA is now the world's superpower, English is its language and it's become the de-facto lingua franca of the world, a new Latin. But all that is fresh and new, in the grand scheme of things. Religions and cultures call for relics, for heritage, for proofs that there's something greater than a sum of people living in the same place at the same time.

The King James Bible is one of these artifacts. It's the one true bible for our Anglocentric world and like the Latin of the catholic church it's probably going to outlive the language it's been written in by a long margin (unless of course the USA manage to collapse before that and some other civilization takes over).

Besides that, there's clearly a certain fascination for overly formal and/or outdated English in the American psyche. Look at how Received Pronunciation is so popular in American media (especially in fantasy, but not only) even though it's effectively only used by a small minority of mostly British and Indian speakers.

I tried something similar to learn Samoan, but didn't get far. I would compare some phrases in English and Samoan, then ask native speakers what a confusing word meant. I stopped pretty quickly because I found that a phrase made of three words might mean "tree", but if you just take the first word alone it means something extremely vulgar (I couldn't get anyone to tell me what).

Think in syllables and that's not terribly unlike English.

Country Farmer

"So, I know what tree and farmer mean ..."

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