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The sixteenth-century Bible translations and the development of Welsh literary prose style

ABSTRACT The traditional view of the language of the sixteenth-century Welsh Bible translations as unnatural and conservative in having predominantly subject-verb, in contrast to the verb-initial word order of Modern Welsh, is essentially incorrect. This article shows that poetic books of the sixteenth-century Bible translations (e.g. Psalms, Song of Songs, Isaiah) were the first continuous Welsh prose texts to use frequent verb-initial order in affirmative main clauses and may have contributed to the development of a new literary prose style, characterized by frequent verb-initial word order. The translators may have adopted verb-initial word order from poetry, where it was common, to recreate a poetic quality in a prose translation of the original Hebrew poetry, reflecting a simultaneously domesticating and foreignizing strategy, in that it exploits a native linguistic feature in a novel way to reproduce exotic stylistic effects of the source text.