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Re: USAGE: 2nd pers. pron. for God

From:Thomas R. Wier <trwier@...>
Date:Wednesday, September 11, 2002, 15:20
Quoting Eamon Graham <robertg@...>:

> The _one_ exception to "Thou" that I can think of is this: in the > Lutheran Book of Worship there are two options given for the Lord's > Prayer, and one of them is the King James Version - I think it's > simply the version that American Christians grew up on and heard > more as part of American Christian culture, even if their particular > denomination doesn't use the KJV Bible.
That's my experience. My church at home always used either the Revised Standard Version or the New International Version when actually quoting or reading scripture, but during the service, the Lord's Prayer, the Doxology, and the Apostle's Creed were always in archaic (not archaized) English versions: "Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name..." and "He ascended into Heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty, from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead." ObConlang: in Phaleran, the archaic dative ending -û /u:/ serves similar functions in religious services and in political traditions that haven't changed in centuries. (It also marks the opening word of most fairy-tale type stories: "Melasû," ["At that [time]"...].) Dialectal features are, such as vowel harmony, are more likely to surface in these kinds of circumstances as well. ========================================================================= Thomas Wier "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally, Dept. of Linguistics because our secret police don't get it right University of Chicago half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of 1010 E. 59th Street Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter. Chicago, IL 60637