MAKERS OF CONCORDANCES

Evening Post, Volume CV, Issue 17, 21 January 1928, Page 20

MAKERS OF CONCORDANCES

WORK AND WAGES

(By"Ajax.")

'A correspondent whose very kind letter modesty forbids me to print in full raises a point which unfortunately came too late for treatment in my second instalment of "'Dispensable' Words," and must therefore stand over for the present. But, incidentally, he provides other openings by mentioning two very old friends of mine and a strange oversight on the part of one of them. Tour correspondent's too limited acquaintance with Holy Writ falls, he writes, to tad It there even with the aid of Cruden's or Young*! Concordances, the latter's title page telling me that It contains every word In alphabetical order, exhibiting about 311,000 references, t yet omitting the word "Its," mentioned once I am told. For this laborious work the compiler Young was offered tho sum of £2001 My correspondent is certainly right in his first two points. The word "its" occurs only once in the Authorised Version as it is printed to-day, yet it is not included in the 311,000 references —118,000 more than Cruden's total — which Dr. Eobert Young claims to have given in his "Analytical Concordance." It grieves me to find that a scholar for whose work I have entertained a profound admiration and gratitude ever since I made its acquaintance more than thirty years ago was guilty even of this small error, and that the defence which I had proposed to make >, will not stand. • ♦ * • "As a matter of fact, the word "its" floes not occur at all in the Authorised Version as it appeared in 1611. The original text of Leviticus xxv., 5, in which the word is now found, was as follows: That which groweth of It owne accord of thy harvest thou shalt not reapo, neither gather the grapes of thy vine undressed: for tt Is a yeare of rest unto the land. Nor, oddly enough, is the word "its" to be found in this passage in the Revißed Version. In that text the verse reads: That which groweth of Itself of thy harvest, etc The revisers have used "its," mostly as & substitute for "his" or "her," about four dozen times, but here they have properly preferred "of itself" to "of its own accord" in order to match the A.V. rendering of the same Hebrew phrase in verse 11 of the same chapter. The alteration of "it" to "its" in this passage in the ordinary Bibles of to-day is but one of hundreds of unauthorised changes that have been made from time to time in the Authorised Version, often by unknown hands. The earliest text since 1611 that I have been able to consult shows that the substitution of "its" for "it" in Lev. xxv., 5 had been adopted by the King's Printer in 1717, but the Oxford Dictionary says that the change had been made as far back as 1660. The only modern Bible known to me, apart from the facsimiles, that has restored tho original text is that model of punctiliously faithful scholarship, Dr. Scrivener's "Cambridge Paragraph Bible" of 1873. ♦ * * .» Regarding Shakespeare's use of "its" the Oxford Dictionary supplies some interesting information: — The original genitive or possessive neuter was "his," as In the masc, which continued in literary use till the 17th c. . . Finally, "it's" arose, apparently in tho south of England (London, Oxford), and appears in books Just before 1600. . . "Its" does not appear In any of the works of Shakespeare published during his life-time (in which and the first folio tho possessive "it" occurs 15 times), but there are nine examples of "It's" and one of "its" in the.plays first printed in the folio of 1623. Mr. A. W. Verity in his notes to "King Lear" points out that five of these nine examples occur in a, single play, "The Winter's Tale," and suggests that the editors or ■■ printers were responsible. The same commentator's further observation that the "possessive use of 'it' without 'own' to strengthen it seems to have been somewhat familiar in Elizabethan English, applied especially to children," gives me special satisfaction. One of my earliest Shakespearian associations is with "King John," 11.1, 180:— Do, child, go to it grandam, child; Give grandam kingdom, and it grandam will Giro It a plum, a cherry, and a fig: My schoolboy interpretation of tliose first two "its" —whether original or not, I cannot say—was that they were baby talk, and Mr. Verity's remark suggests that there may have been something in it. * « « • The defence which I had proposed to make for Dr. Robert Young's omission of "its" from his concordance was that there was no such word in the Bible that he was using, and that he did not pretend to record every "it." It is certainly odd that so accurate a scholar should not havo told us what his text was, but his silence on this point would have been much more surprising if he had gone back to the authentic text of IGll—which was easily available in tho "immaculate" Oxford Teprint of 1833—than if he had used some ordinary modern edition. But speculation is cut short and the plea overruled by the fact that under "groweth" Lev. xxv. 5 is quoted by Young as "That which groweth of its own accord, etc." Indeed, my attempted defence had really made the matter worse for, though under "own" there is a cross-reference to "accord," the passage is not noted under that word. This omission of a unique word has a parallel in tho case of Dr. Young's famous predecessor. Cats are only mentioned once in the Bible, and that is in the satirical description of theidols in Baruch vi. 22: Upon their bodies and heads sit liattes, swallowcs, and birds, and the cats also. There must have been something important about those cats, or thT;y would not have been.put in a clause by themselves and honoured with tho definite article. Yet Cruden in his Concordance" to the Apocrypha noted all tho inferior animals in the verso, but missed the eats. »■**<:• And just as Cruden's omission of "cats" survived the two revisions of his book which, he made himself and is perpetuated by Youngman, who is still, I believe, the best of his editors so Dr. Bobert Young's omission of "its" has survived at least seven editions, some of which were "revised and corrected" by other hands. Yet even had he detected it that missing "its" could not have cost him as sharp a pang as what he actually suffered from the discovery that not one of about a hundred passages ir« which "Holy Ghost" is mentioned had been given a place under the word "holy" in his first edition! With its 311,000 references, alphabetically arranged and subdivided alphabetically according to the Hebrew or Greek words represented, his "Analytical Concordance" is a wonderful monument of human industry. It is also an inestimable boon for the ordinary reader, since it brings him face to face with the original in Si manner that he could not have otherwise secured without a high degree of proficiency in both Greek and Hebrew. « * ' # * According to the writer of the artiMe tm "Concordance" in the Schaff-

Hertzog Cyclopaedia, Young's great book was the outcome of 40 years of labour, and took him "nearly three years (from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m.) merely to carry it through the press." I can well believe it, which is more than I can say of the statement which tho Rev. W. D. Macray makes about Cruden in the "Dictionary of National Biography":— In 1736 he began his "Concordance" and must have laboured at It with great assiduity, as the next year saw Its publication with a dedication to the Queen, to whom it was presented on 3rd November. Even if Cruden took only three months for passing his book through the press instead of the three years that Young needed and worked 24 hours .a day instead of Young's 16, tho time left for the writing of it would surely have been insufficient. The £200 which my correspondent mentions as offered to Young for his work amounted to £5 a year! Or, if we allow him two hours a day off for his meals, the three years spent on his proofs would represent about 15,000 hours, and, writing off all the work of the previous 37 years,' the £200 would amount to about 3jd an hour for these 3 years alone! The patron who made this munificent offer well deserved his place in Johnson's couplet— There mark what Ills the scholar's lifo assail, — Toil, envy, want, the patron, and tho jail.