The shapes of letters has changed over the last 500 years. We no longer use elongated "s"s which are easy to confuse with "f"s. Also, "u"s were shaped like "v"s, so the word fun would look like fvn.
The spelling of words became more standard as printed material became more popular. "The Great Bible," which was handwritten, has the full title "The Byble in Englishe that is the Olde and New Testament, after the translacion appointed to bee read in the churches." The Geneva Bible published in 1594 contains the message "translated according to the Ebrew and Greeke and conferred with the best translations in diuers languages." By the time the King James Bible was first printed, most of the spellings of words was more like what we see today. The full title of the King James Bible is the King James Bible (The Holy Bible containing the Old and New Testaments.
Interesting fact: Robert Barker, who had a monopoly on the printing of the King James Bible, continued to print the Geneva Bible while printing the King James Bible because the Geneva Bible still brought in a lot of revenue.
Does anyone know how many different versions of the Bible have been printed? There's the Geneva, Gideon, King James, what else?! Maybe I'll find that out when I go see the exhibit as well! It's so interesting to see how the evolution of language and written forms has influenced the evolution of the Bible. I wonder if the change of wording/ writing caused changes to the meaning and hence the doctrine. We certainly found out from the artifact assignment that translating languages can easily change the meaning of a sentence!
ReplyDeleteI like the comment of legibility over the ages. It seems to me that as years pass, the most important things will come out when allowed to do so. In your example, style lost to readability and content. It happens everywhere, in restaurants where fast food restaurants become dominant franchises in a world when time means money, or when libraries move to new e-books and internet magazines over print ones. There's still a place for style and quality however and those who enjoy it will keep it going. For me, muscle cars like the Pontiac GTO and Dodge Challenger of the 60's will always belong on the roads even if it's a hundred years from now!
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