About
What Biblang is, and why it exists
A regularized, word-for-word representation of the Greek Bible — built so you can be reading the real syntax and vocabulary of the original, years before the Greek paradigms would let you in.
Free, in your browser, no account. The Greek behind any word is one tap away.
| Greek | Biblang | carrying |
|---|---|---|
| Ἐν En | En | preposition |
| ἀρχῇ archē | archa | noun · dative sg. |
| ἦν ēn | ate | verb · imperfect 3sg. |
| ὁ ho | tos | article · nom. sg. |
| λόγος logos | logos | noun · nom. sg. |
One word for every word, in the Greek’s own order. Only the spelling of the grammar is new.
Why it exists
Koine grammar is not the hard part. The many different spellings Greek uses for the same small set of facts is the hard part, and it is what costs people years.
A handful of cases, tenses, voices, and moods, most of which English marks in some way too — that is the whole of it conceptually. What costs years is the irregularity: three declensions with a dozen sub-patterns, contract verbs, liquid aorists, principal parts to be memorized for every irregular stem. Most people who set out to read the New Testament in Greek stop there, long before the text opens up — not because the ideas are hard, but because the forms are.
One verb, six tenses
“Loose”, first person singular — I loose, I was loosing, I will loose…
| tense | Greek | Biblang |
|---|---|---|
| present | λύω luō | luamō |
| imperfect | ἔλυον eluon | luame |
| future | λύσω lusō | luami |
| aorist | ἔλυσα elusa | luama |
| perfect | λέλυκα leluka | luamē |
| pluperfect | ἐλελύκειν elelukein | luamelē |
Greek changes the front of the word, the middle, and the end, and each verb does it a little differently — which is what principal parts are for. Biblang changes the last vowel and nothing else, on every verb in the language.
Six nouns, one genitive
Six ordinary words, six different Greek endings, all of them saying the same thing.
| meaning | Greek | Biblang |
|---|---|---|
| of a word | λόγου logou | logou |
| of love | ἀγάπης agapēs | agapau |
| of flesh | σαρκός sarkos | sarkau |
| of spirit | πνεύματος pneumatos | pneumeu |
| of a king | βασιλέως basileōs | basilevou |
| of a city | πόλεως poleōs | polau |
Six endings in Greek, spread across three declensions.
One -u in Biblang, and the same -u on
every noun, adjective, and participle there is.
Nothing has been simplified away in either case. The six tenses are still six tenses; the six nouns are still genitive, still singular. What is gone is the need to learn a separate spelling of those facts for every word in the language. The Learn page sets out the whole system, lesson by lesson — forty-seven short ones, one idea each — and the reader’s Grammar button shows the same tables while you read.
What you are reading
One Biblang word for every Greek word, in the Greek’s own order, each built on the stem of the word it stands for. Nothing added, dropped, rearranged, or turned into English.
Biblang
En archa ate tos logos, kai tos logos ate pros ton theon, kai theos ate tos logos.
Greek
Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος.
En archē ēn ho logos, kai ho logos ēn pros ton theon, kai theos ēn ho logos. — the Greek line above, letter for letter
John 1:1
The third line is the Greek spelled in our letters, and it is worth
holding it against the first: archē against
archa, ēn against ate,
ho against tos. Same words, same order —
what Biblang changes is the ending that marks the grammar. Every word
on the first line stands in the place of the word below it, and
carries the grammar it carried there.
The sense of the sentence is still yours to work out from that grammar, which is the whole point: Biblang moves the difficulty off the forms and onto the language, and the language is the part worth having.
Three ways to use it
They are not three stages you have to work through. Any one of them is a whole use of the thing, and you do not have to decide which one you are doing before you start.
Simplest
As a reference
Learn a few dozen words and use it the way you would a lexicon. Open a verse, tap anything, and see the Greek word behind it, what it means, and what it is doing in the sentence. There is no commitment in this and no alphabet to learn first — you get the answer to “what does the Greek actually say here?” in one tap.
Open the dictionary ›The whole thing
As a language, and stop there
Commit to it the way you would to any language, and then stay. No new alphabet, no principal parts, no third declension — forty-seven short lessons, and then vocabulary, which is the only long part left. You end up reading almost everything the Greek carries, in the author’s words and the author’s order. That is a destination, not a stop on the way to somewhere better.
Take the course ›Then further
As a stepping stone to Greek
Learning this cuts a groove in your mind — the reflex to see a case, a tense, a voice as a discrete, movable part — and that reflex is Greek’s, not ours. Many readers will find the two-step road shorter than the one: learn this, then learn Greek, and arrive sooner than by walking straight at the paradigms.
Why that works ›Why the stepping stone works
A century of language teaching keeps rediscovering the same result: a learner who first internalises a regular, transparent language goes on to acquire later, harder languages faster than one who starts cold. This is the propaedeutic effect — the reason a year of Esperanto has been reported to accelerate a student’s subsequent French, German, or Russian rather than delay it. What transfers is not vocabulary but grammatical sight: the trained reflex to see a case, a tense, a voice as a discrete, movable part.
Biblang aims that effect at Greek itself. Because every case, tense, and voice is marked one way and one way only, you build those reflexes quickly, and then you spend them on the real thing. What transfers is Greek’s own grammatical system: its cases, its aspect, its word order, its particles. That is Greek, and none of it has to be unlearned. What does not transfer is the shapes — λύω, ἔλυον, λέλυκα are still new work when you get there.
Two honest notes on that. The Esperanto studies measured transfer to unrelated languages; a regularized form of the very language you are heading for is a different case, and nobody has studied it. It is a reasonable expectation, not a documented result. And the shortest road to Greek is still not a short one: what this removes is the paradigm wall that stops most people in the first year, not the years of reading that come after it.
And if you never go on, nothing is wasted. Most people who want the Bible in its own words want exactly that, and not a second degree. You can learn Biblang, read the New Testament in it for as long as you like, and never open a Greek grammar: you will still be reading the words the authors chose, in the order they chose them, carrying the grammar they marked, rather than a rendering of all that into English.
Where the text comes from
It is not written by hand. It is rebuilt automatically, word by word, from scholarly Greek editions in which every word already carries a full grammatical description — and that description is what each Biblang spelling is built from.
Greek
New Testament
The SBL Greek New Testament with the MACULA Greek morphological analysis: every word already tagged with its part of speech, and with the case or tense it stands in.
Optional
English parallel
The Berean Standard Bible, shown beside the text when you switch it on.
Where a human hand comes in
The endings are produced by rule and never vary. The stem is the part that sometimes takes a decision: roughly one dictionary word in twenty has had its stem set by hand rather than by the automatic rule, for one of three reasons.
One
Greek’s own root changes
Where Greek itself swaps roots between forms —
γυνή / γυναικός
(gunē / gunaikos), πᾶς /
παντός (pas / pantos) — Biblang
picks one root and keeps it everywhere, so gunaik- and
pant- are what you learn and what you always see.
Two
Words that came out hard to say
A stem and its endings can meet in a pile of vowels, a stutter, or a jam of consonants that nobody would want to read aloud. The fix is always to respell the stem, never to add a special rule at the join: one exception at the seam would cost the reader more than the awkward word does.
Three
Collisions
Two different Greek words can come out as the same Biblang spelling. Where that would merge words a reader needs to keep apart, one of them is respelled; where Greek itself separates them by nothing but an accent, they are left to stand alike.
None of these are improvised. Every proposed stem is checked against the whole corpus before it is accepted, so a change made for one word cannot quietly break another, and it is recorded as a decision about that word rather than patched into the rules. Full source and licensing details are on the copyright page.
The whole text is here, free
Every book, with nothing held back behind a sign-in. The fastest way to find out whether this works for you is to open a chapter and try to read it.
Questions
The ones worth asking before you spend time on this — including the places where this text is weaker than the Greek, which are the ones to read first.
Is this the New Testament?
No. It is a representation of the New Testament, not the New Testament as the apostles wrote it. The letters are not theirs, the spellings are not theirs, and every form here rests on a modern editor’s analysis of what the Greek word is doing. It is made for reading and for learning, and it is honest about which of those two things it is: when a question turns on the wording itself, the authority is the Greek edition, and in the reader it is one tap away.
Is it a translation?
No. Nothing is rendered into English: there is one word here for every word of the Greek, in the Greek’s order, carrying the Greek’s grammar. The English gloss in the word panel is a study aid for the single word you tapped, not a rendering of the sentence — the sentence is still yours to read.
Can I preach from it, or settle a question of doctrine with it?
Study from it, yes. For word order, the article, the particles and the grammar it marks, it stands closer to the original than an English translation does — and it is silent about everything else. It has not chosen English words for you: the words are the author’s, in the author’s order, carrying the case, tense, voice, and mood the author used. Anyone telling you to prepare from a translation instead is pointing you further from the Greek, not nearer to it.
Two cautions, which are not the same as “don’t”. The first is that this is not a pulpit text: nobody in the room reads it, so what you read aloud is still a translation, and that is fine — preaching has always been done in the hearers’ language from a text studied in another. The second is the distance between what this text shows and what it knows. Three things in it are decisions rather than data:
- Resolved ambiguity. A Greek form can often be parsed more than one way, and the analysis behind this text picks one. Biblang then spells that pick as plainly as everything else, so the seam an interpreter would most want to see is the one thing made invisible. This is the real limit, and it is worth knowing where your favourite verse sits.
- Hand-set stems. Roughly one word in twenty has its stem chosen rather than derived, and a few Greek dictionary entries that are really one word — μέγας and μείζων, megas and meizōn — are deliberately spelled alike.
- One-word glosses. The word panel gives a single English word for a word that has a range. Building an argument on a lone gloss is the oldest mistake in the trade, and it is exactly as available here as in any interlinear.
So: read it, prepare from it, teach from it. But when the point turns on what the Greek does — this case, this tense, this word — tap through and make the claim on the Greek. That is what the interlinear is there for.
Is it a made-up language?
There are no new words, no new syntax, and no new grammatical categories. The vocabulary is Greek’s, the word order is Greek’s, and the grammar is Greek’s — what is new is the spelling of that grammar. It is much closer to a spelling reform than to an invented language.
What is lost?
Three things, and it is better to know them than to meet them later. The Greek alphabet, which you will want in the end. Accents and breathings, which Biblang does not mark, so the handful of Greek words told apart by those alone look alike here. And ambiguity: where a Greek form could be more than one thing, the source analysis commits to a reading, and Biblang spells that reading as though it were certain. The Greek interlinear exists so that none of this is hidden from you, and the last lesson of the course sets the whole of it out with examples.
Will this transfer to real Greek, or is it a detour?
It transfers, because there is very little here that is not Greek. The stems are the dictionary words you would look up; the word order is the author’s; every case, tense, voice, and mood you learn to spot is one Greek marks too. What you have to add later is the alphabet and Greek’s own spellings of endings you already understand — real work, but far less of it than the wall you walked around.
Does it replace learning Greek?
It does not replace it, and it is not a substitute for it. What it will do is sharpen how you see the Greek: the vocabulary is Greek vocabulary, the syntax is Greek syntax, and every case, tense, voice, and mood you learn to read here is one the Greek marks too.
You can also stop here, and many readers will. You do not have to go on to the Greek alphabet and Greek spellings to get real and lasting use out of this. What stopping here asks of you is that you know the limits of what you are reading. There are a limited number of places where Biblang comes out more specific than the Greek: where a form could be a statement or a command, or could mean his or its, the analysis behind the text picks one. Where an ambiguity could be kept, it has been — Greek neuters use one form for the subject and the object, and Biblang gives them one shared ending too; where a Greek verb could be middle or passive, Biblang’s can too. The last lesson of the course, What this doesn’t show you, sets out the rest with examples.
How long until I can read?
The grammar is the small part — the whole system is forty-seven short lessons, and you are reading real phrases before you finish the nouns. Vocabulary is the long part, as it is in Greek, and it is the same vocabulary, so no time you spend on it has to be spent twice.
What if I want to go on to Greek?
Open a Greek New Testament at a chapter you have already read here. You will know the words, the order, and every grammatical category on the page; what you will be learning is Greek’s spelling of things you already understand. Doing that beside the reader’s interlinear is the shortest bridge there is.
Corrections
Corrections are welcome, and they are the fastest way to improve the text.
Open any word in the reader and use its Report an issue link. Every report is read, and fixes land in the next update of the text — and in the printed editions, which are waiting on exactly this.