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Mercatus Center...Free Press...dropping Scott Alexander amid early modern English bible translations...I get the sense that some nostalgic conservative donors want to bankroll the second coming of William Safire, with just the smallest of updates to hat-tip the modern tech right. I did enjoy reading this, but "right branching" / "left branching" aside, this is still more soft cultural commentary than hard linguistics. Even on that level, what seemed glaringly missing was more prose/poetry distinction --- did writing change overall? is prose a new category? or did the boundary between prose and poetry shift? (e.g. maybe before rhyme distinguished poetry, and rhythm was every, and then later rhythm distinguished poetry and rhyme was optional. I'm just guessing.) "Speechified" is a funny term when poetry traditionally was meant to spoken. (Maybe a good left-coded cultural reference to balance all the right-coded ones would be the e're-helpful reminder that spoken, non-melodic poetry thus remains very much part of our vernacular culture.) Also, if you want to make a JKV vs Coverdale distinction, please don't also skip between psalms and regular story-telling passages. Those are in a very different style regardless of translator! Better to show different translations of the same passage to prove the point, but of course that would not work so well. For example, yes for most of the couple psalms I glanced at, Coverdale is definitely better poetry than King James, but for the most famous Psalm 23 https://biblehub.com/coverdale/psalms/23.htm https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm%2023&vers..., KJV blows Coverdale out of the water. My kingdom for a linguist credentialed enough to write in, say, Quanta Magazine, with an art/literature passion on the side, to write on this topic with more precision and proof. |