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?
joanna
----- Original Message -----
From: "Knut Mork Skagen" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, March 14, 2006 2:15 PM
Subject: Re: help--translation query--Anglo-Cornish
> Thanks for such a comprehensive answer, Lawrence. It would be interesting
> to look at the mystery plays, were I scholar of that bent, which I'm not.
> No translated bible accounts for a lot. (Welsh has an entire tense which
> is dedicated to biblical use, contrived so that one could start
> syntactically correct sentences with the word "Christ".)
>
>> Anyway the sense of being a small country with its own traditions and
>> language really has gone from here or been turned into trinkets.
>>
>> I find it useful, increasingly so; to work with that worked at awareness
>> but it's a way of psyching myself and it's not a widespread enthusiasm.
>
> What I like about the Celtic nations is their pockets of bilingual
> resistence in the huge sea of monoglot English dominance; they belong to
> Britain, but those of them who chose to do so are capable of seeing
> English from the outside, as it were. Poetry Wales recently published
> English-language poetry from West Africa, and it was refreshing to see
> one's old established language appropriated for a very different literary
> tradition. In a sense it's all very "post-colonial," but not the same, in
> that geographically Britain is a whole. I presume you can have some of the
> same language relationship going on with indigenous peoples in the
> Americas.
>
> We ought to be able to build those kinds of relations between Norwegian
> and Sami here, but, well, Sami culture isn't exactly taken seriously by
> the average Norwegian.
>
> --Knut
>
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