Dr Paul Allen

I have come to realize through years of obsessive-compulsive love of English that the distance between my English and that of the KJV is mostly due to something over which I and the KJV translators have no control: language change.  The reason I can write an entire book evaluating the English readability of the KJV and yet not say one negative word about the choices of the KJV translators is that I don’t blame them for failing to be prophets.  Language changes in far more interesting and complicated ways than I understood as an eighteen-year-old KJV reader. No one can fully predict the future of the English language, even those who—like the KJV translators—help shape that future. But the biggest problem with KJV vocabulary is not actually the dead, obsolete words. When you run across emerod, you know you don’t know what it means, so you know when to pull out your dictionary. The biggest problem in understanding the KJV comes from “false friends,” words that are still in common...