Time&Eternity

No Concept of Time without Narrated Time 23
the frequency in the SA, which is composed primarily of more modern
hymns, is higher, but it nevertheless lags significantly behind that of the
German and Swedish hymnals. Compound time terminology is rare in the
two English-language books. The AHB mentions seed-time once, and the
SA speaks once of dreamtime. Timeless occurs twice in each of these two
books. Moreover, in the AHB, ageless occurs twice, and age-long appears
once. In the 624 hymns of the AHB, time occurs thirty-eight times, seven of
which are in the plural. Age is mentioned a full forty-three times, and future
appears nine times. In the SA, time appears twelve times, three in the plural.
The terms age and future occur three times each. In all of the ninety-six or
twenty-one passages that contain time terminology in the AHB and the SA,
the use of future in the SA is, proportionally, at least four times as high as in
the AHB. The most striking observation, however, is the difference in the
use of the word age. While the usage ratio between age and time was still
1.1:1 in the AHB, it had changed to 1:4 in the SA. This represents a
significant reduction in the usage of age in favor of time.
For the EG, I also studied how the occurrences of time terminology
were distributed over the centuries. The passages containing time terminology
come from 182 hymns. Of these, fifty-seven—that is, almost onethird—have
texts from the twentieth century, which represents a comparably
high proportion. Random sampling in different subject areas of the EG
show a relatively small proportion of hymns from the twentieth century. 48
Thus, it is evident that the topic of time has become more prevalent in recent
times, at least in the EG. 49 This trend is supported by the fact that Ps90,
with its texts coming primarily from the second half of the twentieth century,
exhibits the highest frequency of time terminology in all the material I
have analyzed.
Eternity Terminology
Compared to time terminology, eternity terminology occurs much
more frequently in the two German hymnbooks. In EG, eternity is mentioned
1.6 times more often than time. In GL, there are even two passages
containing eternity terminology for every one passage containing time terminology.
In contrast to time terminology with its numerous compound expressions,
eternity terminology is limited to only a few concepts. The area is
covered well by the words Ewigkeit(en) (eternity, eternities) and ewig(lich)
(eternal). Apart from these words, only the terms der/das Ewge 50 (the eternal)
and allewig 51 (eternal) occur.
The adjectival, adverbial, and substantive uses of ewig (eternal) occur
much more frequently than the use of Ewigkeit (eternity). In the GL, ewig