14. Sample texts, read word by word

Five short passages, each with what an EModE reader must notice and what Mova does with it. They are worked examples for the chapters before; the trees are quoted from the db (parsedb/current.conllu) and from the small model (en-agreed.bin, «SLM now»), both 2026-10-17.

14.1 Genesis 1:1–5, KJV (1769) and JPS 1917 side by side

v.	KJV (1769 text)	JPS 1917 (`jps:GEN:0`–`jps:GEN:5`; v. 5 is two sentences in `torah.tsv`)
1	In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.	IN THE beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
2	And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness [was] upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.	Now the earth was unformed and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters.
3	And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.	And God said: 'Let there be light.' And there was light.
4	And God saw the light, that [it was] good: and God divided the light from the darkness.	And God saw the light, that it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness.
5	And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.	And God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day.

What to notice:

Supplied words. The KJV brackets ([was], [it was]) mark words with no Hebrew counterpart; JPS prints them as normal text. A parser must not see the brackets (chapter 2.3).
Background Now. JPS opens v. 2 with Now, marking a circumstantial clause; KJV keeps the and-chain (chapter 11.1).
Quotation. KJV has no quote marks; JPS has a colon and single quotes (chapter 2.3).
Prolepsis. «saw the light, that it was good» = saw that the light was good (chapter 8.7).
Object fronting with inversion of nothing: «the darkness He called Night» — object first, then subject and verb; JPS capitalises He for God (chapter 2.2).
Semantics. «one day» (JPS, after the Hebrew yom eḥad) vs «the first day» (KJV).
Modernisation. JPS: «unformed and void» for «without form, and void», «hovered» for «moved».

14.2 Genesis 3:9–13 (JPS 1917) — the second person at work

9 «And the LORD God called unto the man, and said unto him: 'Where art thou?'» (jps:GEN:69) 10 «And he said: 'I heard Thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.'» (jps:GEN:70) 11 «And He said: 'Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?'» (jps:GEN:71, jps:GEN:72)

Word by word for jps:GEN:72, the db against the small model:

#	Form	db (lemma, UPOS, XPOS)	SLM now	Note
1	Hast	have AUX VBP	have PROPN NNP	capital at the start + unknown form = name
2	thou	thou PRON PRP	thou AUX VBD	the inverted subject is read as an auxiliary
3	eaten	eat VERB VBN	eat VERB VBN
4–6	of the tree	ADP DET NOUN	same	partitive `of` (chapter 8.3)
8	whereof	whereof ADV WRB	whereof ADJ JJ	pro-adverb opening a relative clause (chapter 10.1)
10	commanded	command VERB VBD	same
11	thee	thou PRON PRP	thee NOUN NN	the object pronoun as a noun (chapter 3.9)
12	that	that SCONJ IN	that PRON WDT
14	shouldest	shall AUX MD	should ADJ JJS	db lemma should be should; the SLM reads a superlative (chapter 4.6)
15–16	not eat	PART, VERB VB	same

db tree: eaten root; Hast aux; thou nsubj; tree obl; commanded acl:relcl of tree; whereof obl of commanded; thee iobj; eat ccomp of commanded; shouldest aux and not advmod of eat. This is right (with should as the lemma of shouldest). In the SLM's draft five of eighteen tokens have the wrong part of speech, all of them archaic.

14.3 Genesis 2:17 — a law and a penalty

«but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it; for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.» (jps:GEN:51)

Form	db	SLM now	Point
shalt (×2)	shall AUX MD	shall NOUN NN	deontic `shall`: prohibition, then sentence (chapter 5.2)
eatest	eat VERB VBP	eat ADJ JJS	2nd person `-est` (chapter 4)
thereof	thereof ADV RB	thereof ADJ JJ	«of it» (chapter 10.1)
surely	surely ADV	surely ADV	renders the Hebrew infinitive absolute: certainty, not manner (chapter 11.4)
die	die VERB VB	die VERB VBP
that (in the day that)	that PRON, `obl:unmarked` of `eatest`		a relative `that` standing for on which

The db tree: eat root, die conj of eat, eatest acl:relcl of day. For the frame reader: a prohibition (shalt not eat), a condition in time (in the day that thou eatest), a consequence with modal certainty (shalt surely die).

14.4 A fairy tale in the old voice (Grimm's Fairy Stories, PG 11027)

«But what wilt thou give me if I succeed in fetching thy plaything up again?» (book:pg11027:1293)

«Dost thou know that when I first saw the portrait of thy beauteous face I fell down in a swoon before it?» (book:pg11027:927)

«They called to her and asked, "Who art thou?" But she gave no answer.» (book:pg11027:1167)

«"Falada, Falada, there thou art hanging!"» (book:pg11027:45)

What to notice:

wilt thou give — will as the future of a question, and the speech of a frog to a princess: the old pronoun is a voice marker, not a number marker (chapter 3.2).
Dost thou know — do-support in a question, in the archaic form; the 19th-century translator uses the modern question syntax with the old morphology.
there thou art hanging — the progressive with art: a modern construction in old forms.
The narrator («They called to her and asked») speaks modern English; only the characters' speech is archaic. A document-level register detector would mark the quotations, not the whole text.

From the Russian Fairy Tales (PG 22373): «She was terribly frightened, but answered, "I am." "Art thou sitting?" "I sit." "Dost thou spin?" "I spin."» (book:pg22373:5543) — the questions are archaic, the answers modern (I sit, not I do sit): exactly the EModE alternation of chapter 7.

From the Cossack Fairy Tales (PG 29672): «An thou knowest him again, he is thine; an thou knowest him not, he is mine.» (book:pg29672:104) — conditional an = if twice (chapter 9.3), postverbal not (chapter 7), predicative thine/mine (chapter 3.5).

14.5 Shakespeare, from the grammars

Short quotations, as given by Abbott (1884) and Hejná & Walkden (2022):

Line	Source	Point
«Looks it not like the king?»	Hamlet I.1, in Hejná & Walkden §4.4.1	question by inversion of the lexical verb; `not` after the subject
«I know not by what power I am made bold»	A Midsummer Night's Dream I.1, ibid.	postverbal `not`
«I not doubt»	Tempest II.1.121, Abbott §305	preverbal `not` without `do`
«It not belongs to you»	2 Henry IV IV.1.98, Abbott §305	same
«if thou thou'st him some thrice, it shall not be amiss»	Twelfth Night III.2, Hejná & Walkden §4.3.1	`thou` used as a verb: to insult with thou
«you are over boots in love» … «it boots thee not»	Two Gentlemen of Verona I.1.25, 28, Abbott §231	switch between `you` (jest) and `thee`
«The venom clamours of a jealous woman / Poisons more deadly than a mad dog's tooth»	Comedy of Errors V.1.69, Abbott §333	plural subject with a verb in `-s`
«Where men enforced doth speak anything»	Merchant of Venice III.2.33, Abbott §334	plural subject with `doth`
«Thou torments»	Richard II IV.1, Folio, Abbott §340	2nd person `-ts` for `-test`
«The innocent milk in it most innocent mouth»	Winter's Tale III.2, Abbott §228	`it` as a genitive (= its)

None of these is in Mova's corpora today. They are the hard end of EModE: agreement does not identify the subject (§333–334), not can precede the verb (§305), thou can be a verb. If Mova ever reads the plays, chapter 4.1's warning applies: agreement cannot be used as a parsing cue.

14.6 Sefer Yetzirah, Westcott's translation (1887)

«8. And as to this Decad of the Sephiroth, restrain thy lips from comment, and thy mind from thought of them, and if thy heart fail thee return to thy place; therefore is it written, "The living creatures ran and returned," and upon this was the Covenant made.» (docs/sefer-yetzirah/text/en_westcott1887_sacred-texts.txt, line 31)

restrain thy lips — imperative with the archaic possessive; no subject.
if thy heart fail thee — present subjunctive after if (fail, not fails/faileth; chapter 9).
return to thy place — imperative.
therefore is it written — inversion after therefore (chapter 8.1).

Westcott writes «He hath formed, weighed, transmuted, composed, and created» (line 57) and «the chest from the air lieth between them» (line 77), but also «our God … does not permit any second» (line 29). The Hebrew letter names in the same text — Beth, Heth, Teth, Daleth (lines 87, 99, 117, 133) — end in -eth and are proper nouns: the negative control for any -eth rule. In the db they are PROPN (Beth 32, Heth 16, Daleth 9, Teth 5).

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