Now I Am Become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds — J. Robert Oppenheimer
Oppenheimer famously quoted this from The Bhagavad Geeta in the context of the nuclear bomb. The way this sentence is structured feels weird to me. “Now I am Death” or “Now I have become Death” sound much more natural in English to me.
Was he trying to simulate some formulation in Sanskrit that is not available in the English language?
There’s a discussion here:
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/3402/is-it-acceptable-to-use-is-become-instead-of-has-become
For the lazy:
See also the Christmas carol “Joy to the world, the Lord is come.”
Lord is come. Rock is push. Flag is win.
Lord is Baba.
And Baba, as always, is You.
French and other languages still have the distinction, while English has switched to using “has” everywhere.
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Not really. The reasons for the popularity of a language are rarely intrinsic; most of the time, the language is simply piggybacking on the power relations involving its speakers. Such as wooden walls on the sea (i.e. the British navy).
It’s also worth noting that, most of the time, languages don’t really “simplify”, they simply shift the complexity back and forth between internal systems. I don’t have a good example of that involving the perfect tense, but consider noun cases - sure, English got rid of them… but as a consequence word order became syntactically rigid, and its old role marking topic/comment was taken over by articles. The morphology got simpler, but the syntax became more complex as a result.
Is “ik heb … geworden” even correct Dutch? It feels so awkward for me to read
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It’s not awkward? Because that’s subjective, for me it’s awkward to read.
Or is it not correct? Because yay then, I guess.
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Okay great haha