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?

  • twistedtxb@lemmy.ca
    47·
    1 year ago

    For the lazy:

    The use of “is become” here relates to verbs of motion/transition; verbs of motion would take be while other verbs would take have. There is no such grammatical distinction in English perfect forms anymore.

    English began with this distinction, as did sibling languages like German.

      • Lvxferre
        1·
        1 year ago

        I think grammatical simplifications like this are part of the reason why English is so popular as a second language around the world.

        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.