On Mar 14, 2006, at 15:29, Joanna Boulter wrote:
> What a fascinating piece of knowledge! But I don't quite understand
> why this tense should be necessary. Why should it be syntactically
> incorrect to start a sentence with the word 'Christ' without using
> this special tense? Is the corresponding English incorrect? Can you
> give a couple of explanatory examples?
OK, to be Biblically correct I should have said "Jesus" rather than
"Christ." With all possible caveats as to the accuracy of this
information, considering it's been some years since I studied this:
Welsh (and in general, Celtic) word order varies from English, in that
sentences generally go verb-subject-object. In spoken Welsh most
sentences end up being auxiliary verb-subject-participle-object, where
the auxiliary verb is an expanded form of "to be", but formal, literary
Welsh varies quite a lot from this. Eg.:
Mae e'n prynu
Mae e wedi prynu
Brynodd e
Literally "Is he buying," "Is he has bought," "Bought he," meaning of
course "He is buying," "He has bought," "He bought."
Anyhow, this was a problem for the translation of the Bible, as it
dictated that Jesus' name did not come first in most sentences, but
rather what he was about to do. Hence a bit of grammatical juggling
which allowed a different word order, and which is generally not seen
outside of this context.
All this courtesy of my lecturer, I don't have any references at hand.
I'd give examples, but my Welsh Grammar is of the modern language and
doesn't cover this area!
--Knut
|