Why Differ? – Divergent Lexical Choices in Two Middle English Prose Psalter Translations and Their raison d’etre
Why Differ? – Divergent Lexical Choices in Two Middle English Prose Psalter Translations and Their raison d’etre

Author(s): Kinga Lis
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Studies of Literature, Lexis, Semantics, Comparative Study of Literature, Translation Studies
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego
Keywords: etymology; lexical divergences; nouns; Psalter; Wycliffite Bible
Summary/Abstract: The objective of the paper is to establish the motivation behind the lexical divergences between otherwise surprisingly uniform late-fourteenth-century Middle English Wycliffite Psalters and observe how it affects the etymological make-up of the texts. For this purpose the paper analyses the nominal layer of the first fifty Psalms and tries to assign each case of divergence between the texts to one of four groups of probable causes, both intra- and extratextual, prompting the variation, while juxtaposing these nominal lexical items with the corresponding data from two earlier 14th-century Psalters – Richard Rolle’s rendition and the “Middle English Glossed Prose Psalter”.

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