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Originally posted by Lyda*Rose:
I was thinking about liturgy in the vernacular. The RCs hung in there with Latin only for most of its history, only making the switch to modern, local languages for the Mass in the 1960s. But as I understand it, the Orthodox have always used the language of the people in liturgy. True?

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No.

I hear this a lot too but history doesn't really bear it out. It might be considered the ideal in Orthodox countries but in non-Orthodox lands with a breadth of ethnicities forming the Orthodox populus, I think that there is some discussion to be had.

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The thing is that living languages change. What kind of mechanisms have the Orthodox churches used to update the liturgical forms from, say, ancient Greek to modern Greek? Or have they? Would the Greek used in a Greek Orthodox church be something like using the Old English of Beowulf in the BCP?

Thanks. (Sometimes I wish I were a linguist. )

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Originally posted by Lyda*Rose:
The choice of Latin as the language of the Roman Catholic Church appeared to be one that would provide a common tongue among the literate of the church.

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Originally posted by mousethief:
There is a huge resistance in Greece and Russia to updating the language of the liturgy.

Even in North America there is a noisy crowd that wants to keep doing services in Slavonic, and even ones that allow for English want it to be a horrifically mangled pseudo-Elizabethan English.

Augh.

But I refer you to the old joke about the Orthodox:

Q: How many Orthodox Christians does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Change? What is this "change"?

Interestingly, in the early 20th century the Russian Synod (college of Bishops) began to discuss updating the liturgy, but then they had that little Revolution thing and had to put all their plans on hold. In the intervening years the Babushki went into lock-down mode, and changing anything at this point would be even harder than it would have been in the 19th century.

And then there's the monks on Athos who have the Greek church by the short hairs and consider change to be the equivalent of burning Jesus in effigy, or something.

And like virtually every other glacier in the world, the Orthodox Church rolls along at a snail's pace while melting rapidly.

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The adoption of Latin in the liturgy of the Roman Rite occurred at a time when Latin, in a fairly deponent form, was the language of the poor, common folks in Rome and across large parts of the Latin West.

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An interesting bit of information. Thank you.

ETA: Welcome, gog!

[ 30. December 2012, 04:13: Message edited by: Lyda*Rose ]

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"Dear God, whose name I do not know - thank you for my life. I forgot how BIG... thank you. Thank you for my life." ~from Joe Vs the Volcano

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[amended title to make subject of thread more clear]

[ 30. December 2012, 08:01: Message edited by: seasick ]

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Originally posted by venbede:
When you think about, there's lots of examples of non-demotic language used in religious traditions, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Classical Arabic.

The most surprising example to me is C19 working class revivalist evangelicals, without a formal liturgy, still using as a staple the Authorized Version in a style of English notably different from their demotic usage.

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Originally posted by gog:
Interesting as the local Orthodox to me does services in the vernacular of the local area. It had parts in Greek, and parts in the local languages. And also has authorised books with the service in Greek and English in them.

They are Greek Orthodox and part of the Archdiocese of Thyateira and Great Britain. But not sure how common this is in a wider setting.

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Originally posted by mousethief:
...ones that allow for English want it to be a horrifically mangled pseudo-Elizabethan English.

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Originally posted by The Scrumpmeister:
As Jon in the Nati rightly says, the subject of the language is such that this will never be the case. However, placing unnecessary hurdles in the way seems unhelpful.

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Venbede and Jon in the Nati, please forgive this misattribution. It was of course, you, venbede, who said this.

Here are some more thoughts on the matter.

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If Christ is not fully human, humankind is not fully saved. - St John of Saint-Denis

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Originally posted by Bostonman:
It makes you wonder why we don't all still use a mix of Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek, and the vernacular...

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Venbede and Jon in the Nati, please forgive this misattribution.

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Originally posted by The Scrumpmeister:
Likewise the Romanian parishes, which I don't see changing any time soon, particularly given recent edicts from that patriarchate about a "Romanian church for Romanian people", which has been a source of significant consternation in the Orthodox world Ordinary Romanians have no time for that nonsense, and my experience is that they will freely tell you what they think of it.

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All of that said, there are legitimate concerns, I think about the inability of modern English to distinguish between singular and plural in the second person pronouns, when such distinctions in the source languages sometimes carry doctrinal weight.

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Originally posted by Sergius-Melli:

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Originally posted by Bostonman:
It makes you wonder why we don't all still use a mix of Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek, and the vernacular...

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It's only one example, but the Kyries, in most Churches I have attended, are still done in the Greek despite the rest being in the Vernacular...

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Originally posted by Jon in the Nati:
I think we often overestimate the difficulty modern English speakers have with so-called traditional language.

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I used to think this way, as well, but was not as tempered as you have been and was very dismissive of people who said that these forms of English are incomprehensible to many.

I do not speak of you here (indeed, I don't know your background), but I think that it is very easy for people who have spent their entire lives in church circles not to realise the degree to which they have been formed by the language and culture of church (even if, for the time being, we leave matters of belief and faith aside), and just how much this sets them apart from people who have not had that experience.

For my own part, from the age of seven years, I heard bible readings almost every day in the King James version. This was the version used both at church and in our daily assemblies at school. Our prayer book was in modern English but our hymns were almost all in thee-thou-thy language. I don't much care for it and find some elements of it to form a barrier to entering into the prayer, but I have had a working understanding of it instilled in me from an early age. I'm sure that many Christians have had similar exposure, whether through use of the Prayer Book, old-language missals, hymnals, and such like.

Now, in 21st-century Britain, the reality is that most people under a certain age have had no such exposure. Even among many regular churchgoers, the King James Bible is a thing of history, if they know about it at all, and church singing isn't necessarily in the form of hymns with thee-thou-thy language. Outside of that subset, many people have no exposure to church at all, perhaps beyond the occasional baptism, wedding, and funeral. English Literature doesn't necessarily give much awareness of such language to schoolchildren. An Anglican clergy friend tells me of the non-church funerals that he conducts, and the fact that most people do not know the Our Father - something that would be a shock in the part of the world in which I grew up.

Church people can so easily take their experience for granted. This really hit home for me when I was doing a job for a while due to the necessity for work. It was honest work but put me in a situation where I had simply not been before, among people whom I usually wouldn't otherwise encounter on a regular basis due to different social circles.

They were good people who had fun together and looked out for each other, but some of whom thought nothing of telling me that they had never read a book, who had little experience even of their own region of the country outside of their hometowns, and many of whose understanding of humour was of the really obvious variety to the point where any comedy show or comment that employed more high-brow humour would be dismissed as boring or greeted with awkward silence, simply because it was not understood. On more than one occasion I was asked to clarify my language when I wasn't using anything other than what I considered to be regular, everyday English. On more than one occasion, a humourous attempt was made at speaking to each other in "ye olde worlde englyshe". Among the strange constructions was that the suffix "eth" was just haphazardly added to various words, seemingly with no understanding that this is a third person, singular, verb form. It came so naturally to me that to hear this done sounded incredibly bizarre until I realised that it stemmed from the fact that they genuinely didn't understand how these words worked or what some of the constructions meant.

Yet I was honest about who I was, what I believed, and what I did, and it led to some conversations about matters of faith and one of my work colleagues accompanying me to a service at Christmas. I suspect that there are significant swathes of native speakers of English - perhaps outside of the daily experience of those who sit on liturgical committees or who translate from ancient languages - who are among of the people to whom the saving faith needs to be brought but for whom this contrived use of language in church would be a barrier, and a quite unnecessary one at that.

Combined with the difficulties of non-native speakers in understanding, and the difficulties of some who understand in praying through such language, I really see no convincing argument for keeping it other than I am not in charge and I must be obedient. The fact that I cannot do so quietly or without first making my protest is perhaps among my greatest flaws.

[ 31. December 2012, 18:05: Message edited by: The Scrumpmeister ]

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If Christ is not fully human, humankind is not fully saved. - St John of Saint-Denis

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Originally posted by Percy B:
For tradition sake using the ancient languages is admirable, but for drawing people into worship I am not so sure.

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Originally posted by mousethief:
I went to a service in Greek once. I don't know if it was ancient Greek, modern Greek, or the Greek of the distant future. I spent most of the service going, "I wonder if we're doing XXX prayer. No wait, maybe this is the such-and-such. Well, everybody else is crossing themselves so I guess I should too."

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Originally posted by Jon in the Nati:
I very strongly believe that the liturgical texts we use should be elevated, elevating, and eloquent, and that all of these qualities can be achieved without resorting to thees and thous.

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