JOINCULTURE
WE, READERS
21st century readership
ENGLISH SPELLING AND SENTENCE STRUCTURE
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It is true that a text may have a high degree of readability, but it cannot be totally understood because the majority of its content is archaic. That is, common 21st century people may find difficult its reading. Mostly because they have limited knowledge of 17th century English spellings and sentence structure. Although King James Version (KJV) may seem easy to read at first sight, readers do not feel comfortable after a fifteen minute reading session. I tried to figure out that this could be due to an awareness gap that readers have with Early Modern English texts and I was partially true.
Mark Ward is a member of Logos Bible Software Pro worker, an on-line platform to study the Bible with tools for Mac, PC, mobile devices and web. Through his research he has studied the different electronic tools that devoted admirers of KJV use to prove that KJV is easier to read than modern English Bible translations.
He is totally concerned about the fact that Present Day English has a lot of expressions and words that have their origin in KJV. In order to verify that assertion I took some expressions from the KJV that English speakers do use nowadays without any religious connotation. KJV translation brought these expressions to the English language at the turn of the 17th century. Although sometimes we may adapt some words to standard spelling, they still show the same ideas.
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CHECKING WITH SOFTWARE TOOLS
What makes a great difference in KJV writing may be the different usage of words that have identical meaning but are hard to be recognised by the user’s mind. These features and many more are part of the book that Ward will publish in 2018, Authorized: The Use and Misuse of the King James Bible. I read some reviews of the future publication and he tries to debunk the usage of software tools to test the readability or the quality of a book, especially King James Sacred Bible.
Software tools like F-K test use a mathematical formula that has into account three elements: words, sentences and syllables. The next figure shows the applied formula:
What is actually true is the fact that F-Kl is not able to judge the degree of rareness of words, phrases or even notice their spellings. That is, users may recognise the words besom or to wit as two syllable words, but they will not know what they actually mean if they are not KJV specialists or linguists.
TYPOGRAPHY
Furthermore, such tools do not even consider syntax of the text as a whole. This is an example taken from the KJV that Ward uses in his on-line review to illustrate the contradiction:
Which things have indeed a shew of wisdom in will worship, and humility, and neglecting of the body; not in any honour to the satisfying of the flesh
We may understand the words individually, but we do not actually see the clear meaning when we look at the phrase not in any honour to the satisfying of the flesh maybe because, we do not exactly know what not in any honour to refers to. Instead, Ward presents a better version taken from modern editions, the English Standard Version (ESV):
These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh (Col. 2:23)
Typography is not taken into account as a way of expression or meaning difference. Although the book has not already been published, in one of his reviews he presents this controversy and its humorous tone makes easier to understand the debate.