Proper proclaiming and pronouncing Holy Writ

I can never understand why any sane and self-respecting person should step on to a public platform and direct a reading of the sacred writings to a serious congregation without a rehearsal or preparation of any kind. Yet this appears to be the root cause of those travesties that mar not only carol services but also other, even more common, occasions of worship where the sacred word is supposed to be proclaimed. PHOTO | FILE

What you need to know:

  • Our focus, however, is on the readings, the formal proclamation of the scripture from the lecterns. My beef is mainly with those readers who ruin the whole show with inarticulate mumblings and even the “cold-blooded murder” of the biblical language.
  • I can never understand why any sane and self-respecting person should step on to a public platform and direct a reading of the sacred writings to a serious congregation without a rehearsal or preparation of any kind.
  • When it comes to biblical readings, the English-speaking tradition is deeply embedded in the history of the language, most clearly manifested in the “Authorised Version” of the text, also called the King James Bible.

In Islam, all the subscribers to the monotheistic faith, believers in one God, are called ahl al kitab (community of the revealed word). These are the practitioners of Islam, Judaism and Christianity.

The word is the kitab, a term familiar to most of us Kiswahili speakers as kitabu, the book. Indeed, it is the written word, kitab being derived from the Arabic root (ktb), which suggests writing. It is from the same root that we derive other words, like katibu, mkataba and katiba.

So, it is appropriate to refer to the monotheistic community not only as people of the Word but also as people of the Book. This is in the sense that their faith is derived from revealed words recorded in the sacred scriptures, like the Qur’an, the Tora and the Bible. This is what in classical English would be called Holy Writ, sacred writings.

Now, Holy Writ is strongly on the minds of many mainstream Christians in this season. They not only recall the coming of their founder and Lord, “the Word made flesh”, but also reflect on the final revelations of the end of times.

So, while the joyous merrymaking and carol singing roll along, those who understand the spiritual dimension of the festival strive to relate it to its scriptural and biblical significance. Thus, many Christian carol performances are interspersed with relevant readings from both the New and the Old Testaments of the Bible.

One of the best-known carol services in the English-speaking world is probably the Cambridge University King’s College Choir’s Service of 9 Carols and 9 Readings. The choir, founded in 1453, is mainly a boys’ affair, and their carol service is internationally broadcast on Christmas Eve. It invariably opens with the carol Once in David’s Royal City intoned by a single boy’s voice.

ORAL SKILLS

Our focus, however, is on the readings, the formal proclamation of the scripture from the lecterns. My beef is mainly with those readers who ruin the whole show with inarticulate mumblings and even the “cold-blooded murder” of the biblical language.

I can never understand why any sane and self-respecting person should step on to a public platform and direct a reading of the sacred writings to a serious congregation without a rehearsal or preparation of any kind. Yet this appears to be the root cause of those travesties that mar not only carol services but also other, even more common, occasions of worship where the sacred word is supposed to be proclaimed.

The concept of “proclaiming” was suggested to me by my dear friend and spiritual guide, Dr David Kyeyune, a learned, inspired and inspiring prelate, now sadly departed. For Dr Kyeyune, the divine word was not just to be read or spoken routinely and indistinctly as frequently happens in our places of worship. It is to be “called out” from the heart of the reader and into the heart of the listener. “Proclamation” comes from two words which mean “cry forth”.

Now, a great deal of preparation, meditation and internalisation is required in order to achieve that level of expressiveness and communicativeness. No level of devotion, charisma or “savedness” can compensate for that. Moreover, competent proclamation also demands specific speech skills essential to all oral communication.

The disaster is that many would-be lectors, pulpit-preachers or street-corner declaimers are not even aware that there is an expected and accepted way of uttering the word. They try to improvise through pathetic aping of fantastic-plastic pseudo-accents, or simply yelling their heads off with ear-splitting shouting.

Yet the simple trick lies in precise pronunciation, expressive intonation, adequate pitch and projection and a relaxed pace. These are both technical language skills that need learning and practising, and also good life habits that educated people should apply to all their communication contexts.

This is what my friends, Professor Martin Njoroge of the Panafrican Christian University and the teacher and novelist Pasomi Mucha, and I try to share with our readers in the book Spot On Oral Skills. On pronunciation, for example, we warn that you cannot just pick up an English text and read it accurately, since “English is almost never pronounced as it is spelt.”

AUTHORISED VERSION

Do you realise, for instance, that there is no “o” sound in “woman” or in “womb”? The sound there is rather like the “u” sound in “put”. But that is even before we get to the “i” sound in “women”!

When it comes to biblical readings, the English-speaking tradition is deeply embedded in the history of the language, most clearly manifested in the “Authorised Version” of the text, also called the King James Bible. The profusion of different translations, adaptations and simplifications of the text may be an inevitable and possibly desirable development. But these variations should not obscure that old and valuable point of reference.

At Makerere we used to study the Authorized Version (AV) as part of our English Literature course. I realised that the successive editors of this work have offered readers an exceptionally useful service by suggesting the standard pronunciation of all the proper names, the places and personalities, in the Bible.

I must confess that any wilful departure from the utterances suggested in the AV sadly distracts me from the significance of the whole text. After all, Jacob is “jay-kab”, not “jah-koh-boo”! But these might be the eccentricities of an aging and unnecessarily conservative dodderer.

Incidentally, “are we weary and heavy-laden”? I trust and pray that the season’s cheer will lift us up. But whatever you do, please, make sure you utter that last word of the line as “lay-dn”. Otherwise, if you yell it out as “lah-den”, as 95 percent of our choirs seem to do when they sing What a Friend, the listeners might begin to suspect that you are praising Bin-You-Know-Who.

Thank you for reading me, for loving me and allowing me to love you. I wish you a gloriously joyous and blessed (both blest and blesséd) season and a healthy and fruitful new year.