Professor David Crystal: The Influence of the King James Bible on the English Language

Seth Lerer maintained that "the AV bequeathed to modern colloquial English no more than--in David Crystal's calculation--257 expressions" (Burke, The King James Version at 400, p. 45).

Seth Lerer added: "All but eighteen of Crystal's list appear in at least one earlier version of the English Bible" (p. 45).

Seth Lerer asserted: "Where the AV has had its impact, and where I think it participates most fully in the linguistic changes of its own time, is therefore not in the rise of vocabulary but in the codification of idiom. The AV's impact, in part, lay in its translators' attempts to render the idiomatic expressions in the Hebrew" (p. 45).

 

David J. A. Clines observed: "Elizabethan punctuation marks were speed regulators, and represented the pauses a reader might make in the reading rather than reflecting our modern ideas of grammatical logic" (Burke, KJV at 400, p. 238).