Pronunciation¶

When the faithful lift their voices in traditional prayer in the English tongue, they speak in a manner long consecrated to the worship of God. This is the liturgical English of prayer books and sacred rites, in which the words are formed with reverence and a deliberate clarity that befits the mysteries they proclaim. Prayers such as the Rosary stand as a radiant example within this living tradition.

The ancient second-person forms are uttered with the soft, voiced "th" as heard in "this." In "blessed" and "hallowed" the final syllable is sounded fully, so that each becomes a distinct and measured utterance. The "Amen" that seals every prayer is pronounced according to the custom of the faithful, whether as "ah-men" or "ay-men." The stress of the phrase falls upon those words that bear the weight of the mystery, allowing the soul to linger upon the Name of the Lord and the events of our salvation.

Those who pray thus often raise their voices in a clear and measured tone, offering not only the mind but the very instrument of speech to the service of God.

Old English Pronouns¶

The pronouns thou, thee, ye, thy, and thine descend from the ancient speech of the English people and have been cherished in the prayers of the Church as a sacred inheritance. In prayer they permit the soul to address the Most High with a singular form once reserved for those joined by bonds of intimate love.

In the older tongue the subject and the object stand clearly distinguished: "thou" serves as the subject of the verb, as when we declare "Blessed art thou amongst women," while "thee" stands as the object, as in "the Lord is with thee." And those are just the singular, for plural it is "ye" for the subject, and of course today's familiar "you" is for plural objects, "I see you (all)".

Possession is expressed by "thy" before most words and by "thine" before vowels or in absolute constructions. The accompanying verbs retain their ancient inflections, so that we say "art" where modern usage has flattened the form to "are."

Modern English, by contrast, collapses these distinctions into the single word "you," which must serve alike as subject and object, singular and plural. This introduces ambiguity and imprecision that can lead to poor understanding of Holy Scripture. The older forms, preserved in prayer, restore a more exact and reverent mode of address. When we pray "hallowed be thy name" or "blessed art thou" the tongue speaks with a clarity that mirrors the ordered love of the heart for God.

This ambiguity can and does lead to poor understanding of the very Word of God.

In modern translations the distinction disappears as everything becomes "you", obscuring that Satan targets the group while Jesus prays for Peter individually. To be clear, "Satan hath desired to have you" in old English does not leave one wondering, who me? Yes, you! Satan wants all disciples. And "thou art converted" means Peter will personally fall and later be restored, and the command to "strengthen thy brethren" is a personal command from Jesus to Peter concerning his (Peter's) role in the Church, and "thy brethren" includes you, yes you! The Old English "thou" makes the meaning sharp and personal: Peter will be the one restored to strengthen the others.

These forms endured in the sacred prayers long after they had faded from common conversation. Through the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer they entered the English tradition of prayer, there to remain as a sign of intimate yet reverent address. To utter "thy kingdom come" is to join our voice with the generations of the faithful who have spoken the same words before the throne of grace.

In this way prayer serves as a school of the tongue and the heart. The precision of these ancient pronouns teaches us that we stand before the Father as adopted children, not as distant servants. The very sounds we form become a means of sanctification, drawing the soul into humility, loving familiarity, and holy awe before the mysteries of Christ.

Examples from the Prayers¶

These graces of speech appear throughout the traditional prayers of the Church.

In the Our Father the soul prays, "who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name." The name of God is not merely mentioned; it is hallowed by lips that have learned to speak with reverence, and the archaic forms lift the petition above the noise of the world.

The Hail Mary leads us to say, "the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus." Here the tongue salutes the Mother of God in the very language in which generations of English Christians have honored her, and the singular address keeps the salutation tender and exalted at once.

The Glory Be concludes with the words "world without end. Amen." The phrase preserves an older sense of the eternal ages, and the final "Amen" seals the doxology with a word that has resounded in the Church since her beginning.

Thus prayer in English is not a mere repetition of phrases but a participation in the unbroken prayer of the saints who have gone before us in the sign of faith.

English in a Latin Alphabet¶

The letters used for the traditional prayers in English arrived with the first Christian mission to the Anglo-Saxons. In 597 the monk Augustine, sent by Pope Gregory the Great, landed in Kent carrying the Latin alphabet of the Church, the Vulgate Bible, and the liturgy. That script soon became the vehicle for writing English as the people received the faith.

Before then, when the English wrote their own speech at all, they used the futhorc. This runic alphabet, expanded from the older Germanic futhark with extra signs for Old English sounds, appears on objects from the fifth century onward. On the towering Ruthwell Cross, carved in the eighth century, the Cross itself speaks in runes the story of the Crucifixion from its own point of view -- one of the oldest surviving pieces of English literature. A whalebone casket from the same era, the Franks Casket, mixes the Adoration of the Magi with Romulus and Remus and the Germanic hero Weyland the Smith, while its inscriptions deliberately switch between Old English runes and Latin letters for sheer virtuosity.

The change was gradual and inventive. Irish missionaries such as Aidan, who founded the monastery on Lindisfarne in 635, brought the distinctive Insular script developed in Ireland. Scribes working in this hand took the twenty-three letters of the Latin alphabet and added what they needed: thorn and eth for the two "th" sounds, wynn for "w," and ash (æ) for the front vowel. These appear throughout the earliest English writings, including the word-for-word Old English gloss later added between the lines of the great illuminated Lindisfarne Gospels around 715, and the translations King Alfred the Great encouraged in the ninth century.

Further layers followed. Norse contact, the Norman Conquest of 1066, and the constant flow of learned words from Latin and Greek all left their marks on vocabulary and spelling habits. Then came the Great Vowel Shift, a long series of changes that moved the pronunciation of long vowels between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. At the same time printing arrived. William Caxton set up England's first press in Westminster in 1476. He chose spellings based largely on London speech and once told the story of a northern merchant who asked a Kentish woman for "egges." She did not understand until someone explained he meant "eyren." Caxton's choices helped fix spellings while many of those vowels were still sliding into their modern sounds.

The Romance languages, descending more directly from Latin and standardized under different pressures, generally keep a closer match between letter and sound. English spelling carries the legible history of the island's successive encounters with Rome, Ireland, Scandinavia, and Normandy.

It is this layered instrument that has been taken up for the mysteries of the faith. The Latin letters, received as the proper vessel for Scripture and the prayers of the Church, were turned to English as soon as English began to carry the Gospel. The same alphabet that once held a runic "Dream of the Rood" now holds the Our Father, the Hail Mary, the Glory Be, and the full Rosary in the language of the faithful. When we pray these words we speak with letters that have themselves been drawn into the service of Christ.

Even in our own day, when we form with care the words of prayer, we take part in that consecration of speech.