Religious hymns are verbomusical prayers, interwoven in the texture of the life of the people and the congregation. The performance practice is a speaking-and-singing mediation of praise of God. Church singing partakes of Peirce’s threefold categories: feeling, willing and knowing. The pure potentiality of feelings (firstness) would become a stream of events (secondness) to reach a continuous flow of messages (thirdness). The semiosis of hymns follows, upward and downward, the mobile categories in the unification of text and tunes in any language. In translated hymns the melody and the native tongue must retain a rudimentary, abstracted notion of this application. The old hymns are edited, translated and retranslated without real signs of a primary sign and of the work of reviser and translator. The new hymns are, in turn, transitory vocal songs and their text and tunes form the basis for further revisions, editions and translations.