Oh I see! I did wonder whether it was something to do with putting the name
at the head of the sentence, but don't know enough about the Welsh language
(should maybe do something about that some time) to work out exactly what
difference it made.
Thanks for that.
joanna
> 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
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