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“Myn Seele gebenedyt den Heere die u croont in bermhertigheyt ende ontferminghen - Psal. 102” I’m not sure how to translate this (German? Dutch? Low German?) and I can’t find the verse offhand in either Psalm 102 or 103, but it seems to be something beginning “My soul [blesses?] the Lord...

From April 2, 2007

That looks an awful lot like Plattdeutsch - Low German. I have a suspicion that it may be rather old-fashioned Dutch(the borders between Plattdeutsch, Flemish, and Nederlandisch get fuzzy, especially over time!). What's funny is that the spelling is the main problem, if you read it out loud it's pretty close to High German.

Looks like a conflation of three verses of Psalm 103 (I know that the numbering of Psalms varies - even in the Episcopal Church the King James version and Cranmer's Psalter were numbered differently) -

In the Luther Bible, it's vs. 4 "der dich krönt mit Gnade und Barmherzigkeit" with the refrain from vs. 1-2 and the last 2 verses, "Loben den Herrn meine Seele" -- Bless the Lord my soul, that crowns you in mercy and grace.

In the King James it's "Bless the Lord, O my soul . . . . who crowneth thee with lovingkindness and tender mercies."

"ontferminghen" is less plain to me, but it sounds sort of like a form of the verb "entfernen" - which means "to put far away". Which sounds like vs. 12 - so far as the east is from the west, he has put away our sins. A more modern version of the German bible uses the verb "entfernen" in vs. 12 - so I bet that's it. The only use of the word I could find is in a Dutch church charter, and I can't really read Dutch - just enough to follow it vaguely. But it does look like it's being used in the sense of "set apart".

Any Dutch speakers out there?