Hacker News Reader

I personally like the term "biblical English" as a description of the KJV's dialect. It's not really representative of early modern English, as it often uses non-standard grammar to preserve the word order and cadence of the source texts.

View on HN

I would be less confident about that, there are false friends in EME and most modern readers would benefit from not having the added complication.

(I don't have a theology degree, but I do have an English degree. I have read parts of KJV, and it has literary significance, but it is not attempting to be a bare literal translation)

It's usually pretty obvious when a word means something different than what you think it means, because the verse won't make any sense. And stopping for a moment to resolve that confusion is always a good learning experience. You either learn something about English, about Hebrew/Greek, or about the text's cultural context or how it's been historically understood.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com