William Tyndale and the English Language

David Crystal celebrates the 500th anniversary of the publication of William Tyndale's translation of the New Testament of the Bible in 1526. His book is a pioneering exploration of the impact Tyndale's writing had on the development of the English language, as well as a stylistic analysis of his prose style, demonstratying its character as a novel genre of 'written speech'. Using the files of the Oxford English Dictionary, in the first half of the book he brings to light the remarkable number of cases where Tyndae is the first recorded user of a word or phrase in English, and provides a thematic classification of their range. He draws attention to the hitherto unrecognised role of Tyndale as an early lexicographer. The second half of the book is a linguistic detective story, devising an innovative lexical and grammatical metric to investigate the often-stated claim that 80 percent of later biblical translations display Tyndale's influence. The book is written for the general reader, with selective examples of usage presented in a friendly narrative style, and supplemented by a series of detailed appendices providing the Tyndale specialist with a comprehensive lexical description.