Published by the Bodleian Library to mark the 500th anniversary of Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, David Crystal’s William Tyndale and the English Language is both an exploration of Tyndale’s impact on subsequent English and a fresh intervention on the question of the extent of Tyndale’s influence on the King James Bible. The book’s design, clear style, and lack of encumbrance from scholarly apparatus are all aimed at the interested general reader, but it also packs a serious amount of genuine scholarly content – including original research – into its 170 pages plus appendices. Accessibility doesn’t imply any compromise in either seriousness or rigour, and although there are brief exposition-dumps for the lay reader on the Great Vowel Shift or deponent verbs, Crystal integrates these without ever losing the sense of the reader’s being granted privileged access to serious academic thought. If this (necessarily) isn’t quite as democratising as Tyndale’s own desire to make scripture accessible to a ploughboy, it’s nonetheless a compelling example of inviting in rather than dumbing down.

After some brief scene-setting, the first two-thirds of the book explore Tyndale’s linguistic influence from multiple angles: parts of speech; concrete vs abstract nouns; idioms; particular subject-groupings of words (farming, religion); et cetera. The majority of examples are where Tyndale is the earliest extant source for a particular word, coinage, idiom, or borrowing, although the examples where he altered pre-existing usage are just as fascinating. I kept thinking that WH Auden would have loved this book: the pleasure of encountering instance after instance of coinage and language-change is a close cousin of Auden’s insistence in The Dyer’s Hand on genuinely loving Homer’s Catalogue of Ships; an encounter with – and recognition of – the being of words.

Several of Crystal’s discoveries are genuinely surprising: most people would open this book expecting to discover Tyndale as the source of multiple biblical idioms, but even Crystal himself admits to not having expected to discover Tyndale as the origin of landlady, busybody, or full house. The range of Tyndale’s innovation is equally impressive, especially to anyone who thinks that conversion – in the linguistic sense of a word from one part of speech being used as another, e.g. forming a verb from a noun – is a modern transatlantic phenomenon.

Some of the examples of religious language are particularly arresting, not least the theological irony that Tyndale’s is the first recorded use of transubstantiation and consecrate in the Catholic sense. On a structural level, that irony extends beyond Tyndale’s influence on subsequent translations of the Bible and into the quotation of scripture in vernacular liturgy: on reading that it was Tyndale who first rendered a phrase from 1 Timothy 1:17 as ‘for ever and ever’, it’s hard to escape the realisation that in doing so he indirectly shaped the Anglican formulation of the final doxology of the Lord’s Prayer. Similarly, being confronted by so many examples of contemporary idioms having originated in the translation of scripture cannot help but remind us that it’s at the margins and faultlines of language, in the impossibility of translation or of apprehending truth in language, that innovation so often happens.

Tyndale himself was (unsurprisingly) acutely aware of the perils of translation, as exemplified by a quotation that Crystal gives from one of his expositions:

Readers of David Bentley Hart’s gloriously polemical gloss on the same problem in his 2017 translation of the New Testament might suppress a wry smile at the thought that Hart is participating in a tradition that began with Tyndale nearly five centuries earlier.

Crystal’s chapter on Tyndale’s discourse is a particular joy, deftly unpicking some of the less helpful errors of nineteenth-century grammar in order to explore how Tyndale’s language really works. The demonstration of how spoken language and storytelling are built from clauses rather than sentences is one of the finest examples in the book of rendering profoundly important concepts accessibly for a general reader, as well as adding layers of complex meaning to the familiar assertion that Tyndale’s work is ‘written speech’. Crystal’s shift over two pages from analysing a contemporary anecdote about a new car, to an equivalent analysis of the opening of Tyndale’s Obedience, lands like a brilliant after-dinner party-trick while making its point clearly and unforgettably. The subsequent analysis of not only how but why Tyndale’s prose is so effective and memorable – from the paratactic linking of clauses to the almost self-regulating variation in the number of content units per clause – is among other things a reminder that the rules of good writing we now learn in school are a historically contingent expression of a particular ideology, and sometimes a long way from the magic of memorable speech.

The final third of the book explores the extent of Tyndale’s influence on the King James Bible – a question that last made headlines on the 400th anniversary of the latter in 2011. Crystal explains the origin of the oft-quoted statistic that eighty per cent of the King James Bible comes from Tyndale, then sets about constructing a methodology to test it, glossing each logical step with an exploration of the ways in which different pieces of language can be considered similar or different depending on whether we are talking about precise words, or variants, or syntax, et cetera.

It isn’t any kind of spoiler to reveal that there are multiple potential answers depending on how you frame the question, and the point of this final section isn’t to arrive at a precise ‘correct’ figure to refute or validate the eighty per cent, but to explore what the different forms of similarity tell us about Tyndale’s influence on subsequent English. As Crystal says in his Epilogue, of David Daniell’s assertion that Tyndale’s ‘gift to the English language is unmeasurable’:

This is a clear, scholarly, rigorous, surprising, and genuinely enjoyable book, and a great example of how the genre that academic publishers call ‘trade-cross’ (i.e., books with real academic depth that are nonetheless written to appeal to a general reader) ought to be written.