Languages That Carried Scripture and Worship

Ancient Egyptian is one of the earliest known written languages, first recorded in hieroglyphic script in the late fourth millennium BC. Its descendant Bohairic Coptic is still the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox and Coptic Catholic churches, so one language line runs from early hieroglyphs to present-day worship.

Greek has at least 3,400 years of written records, and the New Testament was originally written in Greek. This stop marks the language in which Christian scripture first took written form.

Mishnaic Hebrew is the language of the Sages used in the Talmudic texts. It was spoken in roughly the first two centuries CE, and its later Amoraic form, about 200 to 500 CE, survived only as a literary language, a case of a tongue kept alive by its texts.

Gothic survives principally because Bishop Wulfila translated the Bible into it in the fourth century CE, devising a new alphabet for the work. The rest of East Germanic is lost, so one translated Bible carries the whole language.

Sogdian was the working lingua franca of the eastern Silk Road, and its merchant networks carried Manichaean, Buddhist and Church of the East communities and texts. A substantial corpus in all three traditions survives, recovered chiefly from Turfan.

The Tibetan script was reputedly devised in the seventh century by Thonmi Sambhota on the Devanagari model, after King Songtsen Gampo sent him to India to gather information on Buddhism. It was first used to write Tibetan translations of Buddhist texts, and the formal register called Chos-skad serves religious literature.

Old Japanese is the oldest attested stage of Japanese, recorded from the eighth century. Its corpus includes 27 Norito, liturgies recorded in the Engishiki compiled in 927, which ties the earliest written Japanese to Shinto ritual speech.

Church Slavonic descends from Old Church Slavonic, the ninth and tenth century language of the first Slavic translations of scripture and liturgy from Koine Greek. It is kept for worship rather than spoken at home and is still used in Eastern Orthodox services in Russia, Serbia, Bulgaria and other countries.

Medieval Hebrew is a literary and liturgical form of Hebrew that has existed since the fourth century. It is written mainly by rabbis, scholars and poets rather than spoken, and it borrows vocabulary from Aramaic, Koine Greek and Latin.

Middle English was spoken in England from the Norman Conquest of 1066 until the late fifteenth century. A new literary style emerged in the fourteenth century with writers such as John Wycliffe and Geoffrey Chaucer, and vocabulary was widely borrowed from Anglo-Norman in religion among other fields.

Quechua is the language of the Huarochiri Manuscript, compiled around 1608, the one substantial surviving work of Andean religious narrative composed in Quechua rather than Spanish. It ends the path with a living language that carries an oral religious tradition into writing.