Free The Book of Books by Melvyn Bragg Page B

‘bullfrog’, ‘potato-bug’, ‘groundhog’, ‘reed bed’. Even when describing Native American life, they preferred their own words as in ‘warpath’, ‘paleface’, ‘medicine man’, ‘peace pipe’, ‘big chief’. Their attitude to language reinforced their religious conviction. They had the Words of God through His prophets and His Son: what more could they possibly need save a few phrases which speeded up commonplace understanding?
    English had taken on thousands of words from several other languages since about AD 500. It had been promiscuous. But in its beginnings in America it was very prudent. Perhaps Squanto spoiled them. Perhaps the Indian languages were just too difficult. ‘Squash’ for instance was ‘asquat-asquash’, ‘raccoon’, like many other animals, had several names. In this case they included ‘rahaugcum’ ‘raugroughcum’, ‘arocoune’ and ‘aroughcum’.
    This was a group of people obsessed by the power of the word. Improper speech, blasphemy, slander, cursing, lying, railing, reviling, scolding, threatening and swearing were crimes. Curse God and you were in the stocks. Deny the Scriptures and you would be whipped and possibly hanged. These colonists set out to honour the language and it started in the schoolrooms. This began with the New England Primer , which sold over 3 million copies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Every English-speaking family in America must have worked their way through this clear and well-constructed teaching aid. It was stocked from the Bible.

    A.In Adam’s Fall we all sinned
    B.Heaven to find, the Bible mind
    C.Christ crucify’d for sinners died
    D.The Deluge drowned the earth around
    E.Elijah hid by ravens fed
    F.The judgement made Felix afraid
    G.As runs the grass our life doth pass
    H.My book and Heart must never part
    J.Job feels the rod, yet blesses God
    Some commentators would call this propaganda. Some have said its effect on the minds of the young could be called ‘child abuse’. It set out to promote literacy and you were being made literate in order to study the Bible. But the law of unexpected consequences was to take that literacy far away from study of the King James Version.
    The King James Version became an Anglo-American literary story and, more widely, an English-speaking story – Australia, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, parts of India and Africa. There would be developments which took America further away from the English of the Pilgrim Fathers and other early settlers. There would be great seams of new words from other European and then Eastern immigrants who poured into the United States.
    American English, extended and embellished by all these new Americanised tongues, would go on and soon deliver its own greatness in books and speeches and songs. But the genesis of the country’s language lay in the King James Version. The vital early achievement of letting no other language speak for this New World was down to the early Puritan settlers. And it could be credited, through the centuries, with making that enormous, patchwork, multiracial continent into a single and often a cohesive force.

    John Adams, who would become the second President of the United States, prophesied in a letter in 1780: ‘English is destined to be in the next and succeeding centuries more generally the language of the world than Latin was in the last or French in the present age. The reason for this is obvious, because of the increasing population in America, and their universal connection with all nations, will, aided by the influence of England in the world, whether great or small, force their language into general use.’
    While the early colonists were digging English into New England, back in the mother country the King James Version became a crucial factor in civil war and revolution.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    THE