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?
It’s from English, not Sanskrit. More specifically, an archaic English feature, where you’d use “be” instead of “have” for the present tense, if the main verb denotes a change of state (such as “become”). Note how “I have become Death” sounds perfectly fine for modern readers.
Odds are that Oppenheimer was quoting either an archaic translation Bhagavad Gita, or one using archaic language (this is typical for religious texts).
Also give this a check. English used to follow similar rules for be/have as German does for sein/haben.
[Shameless community promotion: check !linguistics@lemmy.ml ! This sort of question would fit like a glove there.]
I think he translated it himself. It’s an archaic text though, so translating it in modern english would also be weird probably.
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Ah maybe I can learn german understand half the memes on lenny
But in that example isn’t the “am” replacing the “have”?
Historically the language replaced “be” with “have”. Then Oppenheimer (or whoever translated his Gita) re-replaced it back with “be”, to sound ancient.
Yes. The conjugates for “to be” are: I am, You are, He/she is, etc.
Can you make “All Your Base Are Belong to Us” correct with some linguistics magic?
Linguistics is mostly descriptive, mind you; it doesn’t “make” things correct, it explains what happens.
That said, “are belong” wouldn’t work. “Belong” indicates possession, not a change of state, so even under older grammatical rules you’d still need to use “have” with it. And you’d need to use it in the past participle (belonged), not the base form (belong). Note that Oppenheimer’s quote doesn’t have this problem because the past participle of “become” is still “become”.
And the present perfect wouldn’t even make sense here. CATS is not saying “those bases used to belong to us, and they still do”; it’s more like “those bases used to be yours, but now they’re ours”. You’d need to use the simple present here, “belong” - “now all your bases belong to us”, without an auxiliary, with the “now” highlighting that this wasn’t true in the past but it is in the current time.