Early Modern English features in Scripture Language

Here are some suggestions for items you can look for in your translation or mimesis assignments:

1. Preserving Hebraisms

• chiasmus
• narrative particles and expressions (“saith the Lord,” “behold,” etc.)
• parallelism
• merism pairs (“land of milk and honey”)
• polysyndeton (multiple conjunctions between items in a series)

2. Figures of Speech

• metaphor
• paradox
• personification
• pleonasm (semantic redundancy)
• periphrasis (circumlocutions)
• simile
• metonymy (substitution of part for whole)
• pairs (antithetical, synonymous, complementary, etc.)
• rhetorical questions
• word repetition and variation
• sound repetition and variation
• style (sermo humilis, etc.)
• proverbs, pithy sayings

3. Syntax, Grammar, Lexis, Semantics, Orthography

• shift in pronoun (1st person to 3rd person etc.)
• “you, ye, thou, thee,” etc. (2nd person familiar and formal)
• digressions (parenthetical phrases and clauses)
• unusual vocabulary
• ellipsis
• word order variations (normal poetic inversions or unusual hyperbatons)
• long and complex sentences (periodic, episodic, parisonic)
• syntactic redundancy (double negatives)
• participles (past and present)
• uses of “do”
• pronoun references (antecedents, etc.)
• preposition (“of” for “by,” etc.)
• passive verb constructions
• lexical ambiguity (puns; polysemy, more than one meaning is possible for a word)
• syntactic ambiguity (more than one meaning is possible for a structure)
• first edition spelling variations
• soriasmus: Germanic (Anglo-Saxon) and Romance (Latinate) vocabulary
• strong and weak verb forms
• be + participle = perfect aspect
• do + infinitive = present tense
• agreement (subject and verb number, person, tense, etc.)