In the last post we noted that modern translations like the NIV have maintained a strong reliance on the word "Lord", including those that claim that they have a fundamental commitment to dynamic translation and avoiding word-for-word translation traps. So, how does that double commitment work out? One way to check is to attempt to measure the dynamics of 'Lord' usage today, given my analysis that it should now be considered antiquated and 'old hat' in a way that its underlying Greek term was not.
Let us then look at some data. First, we can track is the trajectory of a word’s usage in English books[1], tracking ‘Lord’ usage from 1500 to 2008 alongside a selection of authority titles: ‘God’, ‘King’, ‘President’, ‘Chief’, ‘Leader’ and ‘Duke’:
Here we have the same terms again but focussed on the most recent 60 years:
Compared to its lofty heights in the 1600s where ‘Lord’ averaged around 0.08% of published words, it seems to have slumped to around 0.01% of words by the early 2000s. Indeed, the first graph also clearly shows some other relevant trends: all of the popular seventeenth-century keywords followed a similar pattern – ‘God’, ‘Lord’ and ‘King’ (and maybe ‘Duke’). However, it is interesting to note that the arrival of some other terms like ‘Leader’ and ‘Boss’ (not included above) have not outpaced these historic titles. You might think this implies that rather than painting a picture of a language that moves (like a painter painting over his old paint), evolving languages are simply diversifying and expanding (the painter is painting around his old paintings on an infinite canvas). Should we perhaps not question the validity of ‘Lord’ after all then? This first data pool, however, is derived primarily from published books and stops in 2008 and we have a couple more checks to do yet.
A second more up-to-date source provides a list of the top 5000 words from a large and balanced corpus of American English pool of 450 million words. The definite article, “the” occupies the top rank. “God” is 3,302nd, “King” is 2,359th, “Chief” is 1,781st, “Leader” is remarkably high at 464th and “Boss” is 2,344th (source: wordfrequency.info). “Duke” and “Lord” do not make the cut.
This is interesting – why the discrepancy between these two measures? Clearly language usage is not an easy thing to gauge. We need a third metric. Let us return to the most successful online search engine, Google, to focus on their News section, surely an accurate reflection on contemporary usage. Here are the number of hits per title as I write this in November 2018:
God
|
617,000,000
|
King
|
664,000,000
|
Boss
|
613,000,000
|
President
|
462,000,000
|
Chief
|
379,000,000
|
Leader
|
317,000,000
|
Lord
|
92,500,000
|
Duke
|
47,600,000
|
Two out of three of our metrics above seem to show a strong tension between:
- CBT’s intended stance on Bible translation (dynamic),
- CBT’s reinforcement of ‘Lord’ language (nearly 8000 instances, a few of which as insertions),
- The current linguistic situation of ‘Lord’ (low usage in mainstream discourse).
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