Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant documents that answer the question.
Query: What was the first language spoken in the Bible?
The Bible was translated into various languages in late antiquity; the most important of these translations are those in the Syriac dialect of Aramaic (including the Peshitta and the Diatessaron gospel harmony), the Ge'ez language of Ethiopia, and, in Western Europe, Latin. The earliest Latin translations are collectively known as the Vetus Latina, but in the late fourth century, Jerome re-translated the Hebrew and Greek texts into the normal vernacular Latin of his day, in a version known as the Vulgate ("Biblia vulgata") (meaning "common version", in the sense of "popular"). Jerome's translation gradually replaced most of the older Latin texts, and also gradually ceased to be a vernacular version as the Latin language developed and divided. The earliest surviving complete manuscript of the entire Latin Bible is the Codex Amiatinus, produced in eighth century England at the double monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow. By the end of late antiquity the Bible was therefore available and used in all the major written languages then spoken by Christians.
Eliot made his first text for the "Corporation for the propagation of the Gospel in New England" into the Massachusett language as a one volume textbook primer catechism in 1653 printed by Samuel Green. He then translated and had printed in 1655-56 the Gospel of Matthew, book of Genesis, and Psalms into the Algonquian Indian language. It was printed as a sample run for the London Corporation to show what a complete finished Algonquian Bible might look like. The Corporation approved the sample and sent a professional printer, Marmaduke Johnson, to America in 1660 with 100 reams of paper and eighty pounds of new type for the printer involved to print the Bible. To accommodate the transcription of the Algonquian Indian language phonemes extra "O's" and "K's" had to be ordered for the printing press.
The first translation of parts of the Bible into Swahili was accomplished by 1868, with a complete New Testament translation following in 1879 and a translation of the whole Bible in 1890. Since that time, there have been several translations into different dialects of Swahili as spoken in different regions of East Africa; these include the "Union Translation" published by the Bible Society of Tanzania in 1950 and the "Swahili Common Language" version.
Henry Hare Dugmore, a Methodist, translated into Xhosa language. Tiyo Soga (1829–1871) was ordained the first African Presbyterian minister in 1856 and also translated.
"Ndandililo ni Kutyoka" is a translation of the books of Genesis and Exodus from the Old Testament into the Yao language published by The Bible Society of Malawi, Blantyre, Malawi 2004.
In 1611 the King James or Authorized version of the English Bible, begun in 1604, was published. It was essentially an official Anglican work, but there were many Puritans who contributed to the translation. It was first printed by Robert Barker, the King's Printer, and was the third translation into English approved by the English Church authorities: The first had been the Great Bible, commissioned in the reign of King Henry VIII (1535), and the second had been the Bishops' Bible, commissioned in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1568). In January 1604, King James I convened the Hampton Court Conference, where a new English version was conceived in response to the problems of the earlier translations perceived by the Puritans, who preferred the Geneva Bible. The King James version slowly took over the place of the Geneva Bible had among the Puritans. The KJV of the Bible translation is noted for its "majesty of style", and has been described as one of the most important books in English culture and a driving force in the shaping of the English-speaking world.
The translators of the King James Bible were instructed to take the 1602 edition of the Bishops' Bible as their basis, although several other existing translations were taken into account. After it was published in 1611, the King James Bible soon took the Bishops' Bible's place as the "de facto" standard of the Church of England. Later judgments of the Bishops' Bible have not been favorable; David Daniell, in his important edition of William Tyndale's New Testament, states that the Bishops' Bible "was, and is, not loved. Where it reprints Geneva it is acceptable, but most of the original work is incompetent, both in its scholarship and its verbosity". Jack P. Lewis, in his book "The Day after Domesday: The Making of the Bishops' Bible", notes that unsympathetic reviews of this Bible have been done. However, "Granting all the shortcomings eighteenth to twenty-first-century scholarship can find in the Bishops' Bible, it was an important stage in moving English people from prohibited Bible reading to being a Bible-reading people. The revisers labored to give God's book to God's people in a language they could understand. The King James translators did not think they were making a bad translation into a good one, but were making a good one better."
The first translation of the Bible ("Alkitab") in Indonesian language was Albert Corneliszoon Ruyl's translation of the book of Matthew (1629). Between then and now at least 22 other translations exist, excluding the translations to local languages of Indonesia (out of more than 700 local languages of Indonesia, more than 100 languages have portions or whole Bible translated, while some, like Javanese and Batak, have more than one version). In 1820, Gottlob Brückner (1783–1857) translated the Bible into Javanese, the most widely spoken language of Indonesia.
His motivation to produce an accessible, more easily understood translation of the Bible began when he tried to read the King James Version to his children and they asked, "Daddy, why don't you make a Bible that we can understand?" His first effort was "The Children's King James Version, New Testament" (1960). He went on to produce a large number of translations of the Bible into English, some revised multiple times, including "The Interlinear Hebrew-Greek-English Bible, in One-Volume". He once described himself as "the most experienced Bible translator now alive" (Paul 2003:99).
The similarity of the Hebrew, Arabic and Aramaic languages was accepted by Jewish and Islamic scholars since medieval times. The languages were familiar to Western European scholars due to historical contact with neighbouring Near Eastern countries and through Biblical studies, and a comparative analysis of Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic was published in Latin in 1538 by Guillaume Postel. Almost two centuries later, Hiob Ludolf described the similarities between these three languages and the Ethiopian Semitic languages. However, neither scholar named this grouping as "Semitic".
, 400 million people spoke English as their first language, and 1.1 billion spoke it as a secondary language. English is probably the third largest language by number of native speakers, after Mandarin and Spanish. However, when combining native and non-native speakers it may, depending on the estimate used, be the most commonly spoken language in the world. English is spoken by communities on every continent and on oceanic islands in all the major oceans.
The dominance of Latin and Greek among the literate elite may obscure the continuity of spoken languages, since all cultures within the Roman Empire were predominantly oral. In areas where Syriac, Coptic, Hebrew and Aramaic were spoken, they coexisted with Greek.
King James's Bible is used as the name for the 1611 translation (on a par with the "Genevan Bible" or the "Rhemish Testament") in Charles Butler's "Horae Biblicae" (first published 1797). Other works from the early 19th century confirm the widespread use of this name on both sides of the Atlantic: it is found both in a "Historical sketch of the English translations of the Bible" published in Massachusetts in 1815, and in an English publication from 1818, which explicitly states that the 1611 version is "generally known by the name of King James's Bible". This name was also found as King James' Bible (without the final "s"): for example in a book review from 1811. The "phrase" "King James's Bible" is used as far back as 1715, although in this case it is not clear whether this is a name or merely a description.
The reign of King James I established a definite victory for Protestantism in England. The King James Bible introduced a new Protestant form of the Bible to church members throughout the country. This translation was in a language and dialect specific to the English people and to their Protestant religion. James I fulfilled the efforts of Protestant reformers who had been supporting the distribution of Bibles in common language for decades.
Worldwide, English is used widely as a lingua franca and can be seen to be the dominant language at this time. The world's largest language by native speakers is Mandarin Chinese which is a first language of around 960 million people, or 12.44% of the population, predominantly in Greater China. Spanish is spoken by around 330 to 400 million people, predominantly in the Americas and Spain. Arabic is spoken by around 280 million people. Bengali is spoken by around 250 to 300 million people worldwide, predominantly in Bangladesh and India. Hindi is spoken by about 200 million speakers, mostly in India. Portuguese is spoken by about 230 million speakers in Portugal, Brazil, East Timor, and Southern Africa.
The precise number of creole languages is not known, particularly as many are poorly attested or documented. About one hundred creole languages have arisen since 1500. These are predominantly based on European languages such as English and French due to the European Age of Discovery and the Atlantic slave trade that arose at that time. With the improvements in ship-building and navigation, traders had to learn to communicate with people around the world, and the quickest way to do this was to develop a pidgin, or simplified language suited to the purpose; in turn, full creole languages developed from these pidgins. In addition to creoles that have European languages as their base, there are, for example, creoles based on Arabic, Chinese, and Malay. The creole with the largest number of speakers is Haitian Creole, with almost ten million native speakers, followed by Tok Pisin with about 4 million, most of whom are second-language speakers.
However, Classical Arabic is not itself sacred, and holds no inherent spiritual significance. This is unlike, for example, the significance of Biblical Hebrew in Judaism, Sanskrit in Hinduism, or Avestan in Zoroastrianism. Though the Qur'an was revealed to Muhammad in Arabic, other prophets received revelation in their own languages - e.g., Moses was revealed the Torah in Hebrew, and Jesus was revealed the Injil in Aramaic. These revelations were no less divine than the Qur'an; their texts have only become less divine, as their original message was corrupted over generations. The Arabic used in Muslim worship was also the same language used in day-to-day life by Arabs at the time, and the fact that the Qur'an was revealed to humans in Arabic does not make the Arabic language itself more sacred than any other. Sermons are delivered in local vernacular.
The native language of the Romans was Latin, an Italic language the grammar of which relies little on word order, conveying meaning through a system of affixes attached to word stems. Its alphabet was based on the Etruscan alphabet, which was in turn based on the Greek alphabet. Although surviving Latin literature consists almost entirely of Classical Latin, an artificial and highly stylized and polished literary language from the 1st century BC, the spoken language of the Roman Empire was Vulgar Latin, which significantly differed from Classical Latin in grammar and vocabulary, and eventually in pronunciation. Speakers of Latin could understand both until the 7th century when spoken Latin began to diverge so much that 'Classical' or 'Good Latin' had to be learned as a second language
It was first printed by Robert Barker, the King's Printer, and was the third translation into English approved by the English Church authorities: The first had been the "Great Bible", commissioned in the reign of King Henry VIII (1535), and the second had been the "Bishops' Bible", commissioned in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1568). On the European continent, the first generation of Calvinists had produced the "Geneva Bible" of 1560 from the original
Hebrew and Greek Scriptures, which was influential in the writing of the Authorized King James Version. In January 1604, King James convened the Hampton Court Conference, where a new English version was conceived in response to the problems of the earlier translations perceived by the Puritans, a faction of the Church of England. The translation is noted for its "majesty of style", and has been described as one of the most important books in English culture and a driving force in the shaping of the English-speaking world.
The phonology of Samaritan Hebrew is very similar to that of Samaritan Arabic, and is used by the Samaritans in prayer. Today, the spoken vernacular among Samaritans is evenly split between Modern Israeli Hebrew and Palestinian Arabic, depending on whether they reside in Holon (Israel) or in Shechem (i.e. Nablus, in Palestine’s Area A).
In 1604 he was recruited for one of the Cambridge committees set up to translate the Bible into English. He also served in the "Second Cambridge Company" charged by James I of England with translating the Apocrypha for the King James Version of the Bible. As well as his own work, he assisted in the work of the "First Cambridge Company" translating from Chronicles to Canticles. Six years later, when the work was done, the different translations were reviewed by six scholars for the final publication. Bois was one of their number. The Bible was then published in 1611.
Arabic came to Egypt in the 7th century, and Egyptian Arabic has become the modern spoken language of the Egyptians, is understood by almost all Egyptians and is based on Egyptian Coptic grammar. In southern Egypt, Saidi Arabic is the main spoken language for most non-urbanized people. Of the many varieties of Arabic, Egyptian Arabic is the most widely understood first dialect in the Middle East-North Africa, probably due to the influence of Egyptian cinema throughout the Arabic-speaking world.
Old English was divided into four dialects: the Anglian dialects, Mercian and Northumbrian, and the Saxon dialects, Kentish and West Saxon. Through the educational reforms of King Alfred in the ninth century and the influence of the kingdom of Wessex, the West Saxon dialect became the standard written variety. The epic poem "Beowulf" is written in West Saxon, and the earliest English poem, "Cædmon's Hymn", is written in Northumbrian. Modern English developed mainly from Mercian, but the Scots language developed from Northumbrian. A few short inscriptions from the early period of Old English were written using a runic script. By the sixth century, a Latin alphabet was adopted, written with half-uncial letterforms. It included the runic letters "wynn" and "thorn" , and the modified Latin letters "eth" , and "ash" .
The earliest uses of the word God in Germanic writing is often cited to be in the Gothic Bible or Wulfila Bible, which is the Christian Bible as translated by Ulfilas into the Gothic language spoken by the Eastern Germanic, or Gothic, tribes. The oldest parts of the Gothic Bible, contained in the Codex Argenteus, is estimated to be from the fourth century. During the fourth century, the Goths were converted to Christianity, largely through the efforts of Bishop Ulfilas, who translated the Bible into the Gothic language in Nicopolis ad Istrum in today's northern Bulgaria. The words "guda" and "guþ" were used for God in the Gothic Bible.
The first portion of the Bible in Haida language (Language isolate) of Alaska, 500 copies of Matthew, became available in 1891. It was translated by Charles Harrison (missionary), a Church Missionary Society missionary at Masset. Harrison was sent out in 1882, and returned to England in 1891, being succeeded by the Rev. John Henry Keen. Harrison also published a book entitled "Old Testament Stories in the Haida language", this was published after he had already returned to England, in 1893. In 1897 Keen's version of the Acts was published: till then Matthew was the only printed book in the language. Keen also prepared Luke, John, 1 Corinthians, Psalms, and parts of Genesis. (see account of his method of translation, Report of the British and Foreign Bible Society, 1898, p. 317); Luke and John were published in 1899. It is unclear what happened to Keen's manuscripts for Genesis, Psalms, and 1 Corinthians, as they were never published.
The written form of Bora was developed by Wycliffe Bible Translators Wesley and Eva Thiesen with the help of the natives of the village of Brillo Nuevo on the Yaguasyacu river. Wesley and Eva Thiesen's daughter Ruth is also the first recorded non-native to learn the language. First, Bora to Spanish school books were developed. Then the New Testament Bible was translated. Finally, a comprehensive dictionary and grammar book was developed to document and preserve the language's grammar rules. This has since facilitated more text books so that speakers can be taught to read and write in their own language, rescuing it from extinction due to the prevalence of Spanish and Portuguese in the regions where it is spoken.
As Christianity spread through Europe, so did Latin. Native speakers of Celtic or Germanic languages were rapidly becoming exposed to Latin: the language of the Church and international communication. In West Europe, from 400 until the late middle ages, the Bible and its commentaries were only available in Latin. Although some regions in West Europe were introduced to Latin centuries earlier by the Romans, these spoken languages evolved differently from the Latin of the written Bible. To properly understand the Bible, and its commentaries, and the works of figures such as St. Augustine, knowledge of written Latin was a must. East of the Rhine, the people spoke an ancestor to today's German language because the Roman empire did not stretch that far. Learning Latin was challenging to peoples who were often not literate in their own native language. Another problem was posed by the inadequacy of the (outdated) teaching material that was available to instructors and missionaries. The materials were often designed for more advanced, native Latin speakers, or possibly Roman students. An example of this could be the Ars Maior by Donatus. Younger clergy in, for instance, Frankia or Germania, could see the study of Latin as a better way to understand the Bible, its commentaries, and prayers.