I was led down a rabbit hole today by ktschwarz, who linked to this 2011 Log post, whose long comment thread I read with fascination. I was particularly struck by a comment by Suzanne Kemmer which I must have read at the time, since I commented later on, but which I’d completely forgotten in the ensuing decade and a half; since it’s so interesting, I’m reposting it here in the hope of both enlightening the multitudes and remembering it myself:
On till death do us part:
I’ve researched the various analytic causative constructions in the history of English. The “make” causative as in it made me laugh only started to emerge in Middle English. An older analytic causative, occurring in Old English and persisting through the Middle English period, was [don (the ancestor of Modern English do) + (direct object) + INF]. So “it did us laugh” was the normal way of saying “it made us laugh”.
Till death do us part means ‘until death causes us to part’. The main verb do is in the subjunctive, to indicate irrealis. That’s why it does not have a 3rd person sg. marker in this preserved formula.
In Old English the don analytic causative construction also did not take the to that precedes infinitivals in most of the modern infinitival complement constructions. to only became grammaticalized later, and never made it to constructions with make, let, and the later have causative.
The Old English construction had a ‘sister construction’ based on the verb latan ‘let’, which functioned as a causative with human direct objects (as in the Old English analogue of ‘they let him come’ which could mean ‘they let him come’ but also ‘they had him come’.
Both the don and latan causatives in Old English have “cognate constructions” which have persisted all through the history of Dutch, namely [doen/laten + (D.O.) + INF]). As in Old English, if you leave out the direct object of these verbs (an argument that also functions as the subject of the infinitive), it is interpreted as an unspecified, usually generic causee, something like “they let proclaim the law” meaning ‘they caused (GENERIC CAUSEE) to proclaim the law’. Sorry I can’t generate Old English and Dutch examples from where I currently am, far from home. Arie Verhagen and his students have written about the history of the Dutch constructions.
All these constructions have changed through time: English lost the ‘do’ causative, except in the expression ’til death do us part’; the make causative largely replaced it but is more semantically specialized (I wrote a paper about what it means in Mod. English–it is not a “general” causative construction). The borrowed verb cause, with to before the complement, covers some of the semantic territory of the old construction, but in the last couple centuries the have causative has appeared, with a semantic specialization for certain types of human-on-human causation.
It was suggested by some grammarians, I don’t remember if it was Visser or someone else, that the English make causative was a Middle English calque on the French faire causative. Analytic causatives are kind of rare and most of them seem to be based on verbs other than those meaning ‘make’.
I presume the paper she mentions is “Causative Constructions and Cognitive Models: The English Make Causative” (The First Seoul International Conference on Discourse and Cognitive Linguistics: Perspectives for the 21st Century [Seoul: Discourse and Cognitive Linguistics Society of Korea, 2001], 803-846). It is striking to me that almost no modern speakers of English know what the extremely common phrase “till death do us part” originally meant.
As lagniappe, I noticed an intriguing item in the Demographics section of the Wikipedia article on Torrance, California (I’ve bolded it):
The top five reported languages (people were allowed to report up to two languages, thus the figures will generally add to more than 100%) were English (_%), Spanish (_%), Indo-European (_%), Asian and Pacific Islander (_%), and Other (_%).
Finally Indo-Europeanists have a place to do field research!
The English-lexifier Atlantic creoles use mék to mark the subjunctive.
Thus (from Kofi Yakpo’s greatly-to-be-praised Pichi grammar):
Una mék chénch!
“Swap (pl)!”
Mék yu nó pút di watá mék e fɔdɔ́n fuera fɔ di glas.
“Don’t put the water so that it falls outside the glass.”
A go firma, wét fɔ mék a chɔ́p, a bɛ́g.
“I’ll sign, wait for me to have eaten, please.”
Wiki peer review fail
“Let”: unchanged in German. Ich lasse ihn kommen 1) “I let him come”, 2) “I’ll have him come”, “I’m going to summon him”.
“Do”: lost in German, except, it just dawned on me, in the archaism kund und zu wissen tun, which means… “they let proclaim”. Same image of heralds swarming out to every market square and shouting “hear ye”.
Oh… dear.
Yeah, this is another one where I think ESL competence is a benefit. I always knew how to parse this. I was once perusing the local linguistics library and found a book on the English subjunctive, which was interesting. But I also found nearby a book on child language acquisition, adapted to Danish by my paternal grandmother. Of course, we had a copy in my childhood home, so that’s how I recognized it.
Speaking of don, that’s also the origin of the modern verbs don and doff (do on and do off).
“Let”: unchanged in German. Ich lasse ihn kommen 1) “I let him come”, 2) “I’ll have him come”, “I’m going to summon him”
In English, “let” as an auxiliary still seems always to imply “permit” rather than “compel”, except in the imperative: “Let him explain himself!” Come to think of it, that has a somewhat archaic feel; not sure if “let” might not have had a broader range in earlier modern English.
I was disappointed to discover that English “let” in the sense “hinder, prevent” is actually of a quite different origin to “let” meaning “allow.”
Kusaal has grammaticalised a verb which basically means “leave alone, leave off, allow” as a straightforwardly causative auxiliary:
O kɛ vu’ud.
he let noise
“He’s stopped being noisy.”
but
O kɛ ka m lu teŋin.
he let and I fall down
“He’s made me fall down.” (Not “He’s let me fall down.”)
Yes, that’s what I mean by “1)” – the sentence is ambiguous between the two senses (probably not in most contexts, though).
Isn’t “do” in the phrase “do [pronoun] wrong” also causative?
@Adam: I knew about don from early on, but it was many years before I realized that doff was a thing too. And I hadn’t made the etymological connection, obviously.
Speaking of don, that’s also the origin of the modern verbs don and doff (do on and do off).
Well, sort of, but modern don is from dōn + on, not straight from dōn.
Yeah, that’s why I included the on. I was taking the coincidental similarity of forms as a segue.
> not sure if “let” might not have had a broader range in earlier modern English.
Let there be light.
Never thought about it but it doesn’t make much sense as permissive.
Yes, but that’s an imperative.
I’m trying to think of KJV examples of indicative auxiliary “let” in the sense “make”, but haven’t come up with any yet.
My Sprachgefühl (an unsafe guide) suggests that even imperative “let” in the “make” sense is not a feature of ordinary contemporary English, though.
When the Beatles sang “Let it be” they did not mean “may it exist.”
Just noticed that the Kusaal version goes
Kɛl ka li an nyain.
let.IMPERATIVE and it be bright
which is not in fact “let light exist.” Li “it” is a dummy subject pronoun, and an is the copula verb, not “exist.”
“Let light exist” would be
Kɛl ka nɛɛsim bɛ.
let.IMPERATIVE and light exist
which actually is the template for God’s other creation commands in the Genesis version.
I wonder why they translated it that way? It’s not that the language itself can’t express it as “let there be light.”
The Mooré version goes Bɩ vẽenem zĩndi, which pretty much is “let light exist.” Zĩndi is “sit down, take one’s place, happen”, which is close enough, I suppose, though it doesn’t quite capture the ex nihilo vibe of the original. Dunno why they didn’t use be “exist.” Maybe the optative particle bɩ is only compatible with dynamic verbs.
In the programming language BASIC, LET is an optional keyword to assign a value to a variable. You don’t have to do it, but the usage seems to stem from mathematical proofs.
A bunch of newer translations of Psalm 78:28 put made where KJV had let. But I am not certain whether it had a causative, versus permissive, sense in mind; or this is a theological difference around divine reliance on gravity.
> this is another one where I think ESL competence is a benefit.
Somehow it didn’t benefit this ESLer, I’ve always parsed it as “Until death parts us”, with a transitive ‘part’. I’m surprised the possibility of that hasn’t even been mentioned. Is there something else blocking that as a possible parse? Like the object coming before the verb German-style?
I don’t know if it’s that I lack ESL competence, or am just being dumb.
Neither did I know ought of Old or Middle English when I came across the phrase. (First probably with Alf Garnett. Is there something of momentous significance from reversing ‘do’ – ‘us’?)
I’ve always understood the phrase to mean: ’til death makes us part — that is, the death of either one of us. Or as @dainichi puts it. Either way, ‘part’ is the main verb, ‘do’ is acting as an auxiliary, so I don’t expect it to have -s 3PS. Given that it’s an archaic fixed phrase.(Compare ‘can’ as an auxiliary as opposed to ‘can’ as in canning beetroot. Some dialects of BrE (West Country?) also don’t have -s on 3PS ‘do’ as auxiliary.)
irrealis? We’re both going to die eventually,
almost no modern speakers of English know what the extremely common phrase “till death do us part” originally meant.
So in what way do I not know what the phrase means? I suppose I didn’t check closely at the time, but I don’t think my understanding was at variance with my contemporaries.
The Alf Garnett premiss was that we’re stuck with each other ball-and-chain, though we can’t stand even being in the same room. Redolent of many of my contemporaries’ home dynamics, after two World Wars had screwed with everybody’s lives.
The original Book of Common Prayer from 1549 actually has:
tyll death us departe
It is the 1662 version that changes this to:
till death us do part
See here:
https://archive.org/details/bim_early-english-books-1475-1640_the-booke-of-the-common-_liturgies-church-of-engl_1549/page/n319/mode/2up
https://archive.org/details/bim_early-english-books-1641-1700_the-book-of-common-praye_1662/page/n353/mode/2up
Note also the occurrence of the collocation of death and departe ‘separate, force apart, sunder’ in the description of the relation between brothers-in-arms (Palamon and Arcite) in the Knight’s Tale (line 1134 here), and also at the end of the Man of Law’s Tale (line 1158 here).
There must surely exist a thorough scholarly study of the history of this formula out there somewhere, but I have other things I must attend to now, so I leave it to others to pursue.
Same here. After all, do in Shakespeare seems pretty random…
I think dainichi’s interpretation is the most common one among native English speakers as well. Since, as FJ reminds us, the wording with “do” originated as an eggcorn, it’s not straightforward to say what it is “really” supposed to mean.
Do certainly has a storied recent linguistic past. Every student of linguistics must remember ‘do support’, where do is inserted to make questions and provide emphasis. I’ve been thinking of it lately as there are local newscasters who insert do virtually everywhere it can fit, e.g., the politician has a brother > the politician does have a brother; even in those places where emphasis is neither needed nor wanted. It does drive me crazy.
The Alf Garnett series was actually called Till Death us do Part, not “death do us part”, and I had no idea that the word order was different in the original expression. In “till death us do part”, I think “do” has to be taken in its usual do-support sense. It’s subjunctive either way, so that is irrelevant.
This order appears in the Book of Common Prayer:
https://www.churchofengland.org/prayer-and-worship/worship-texts-and-resources/book-common-prayer/form-solemnization-matrimony
At the least, this suggests to me that this do-causative was already dead by the seventeenth century. Is there any evidence that it ever appeared in the English version of the marriage ceremony?
I’ve always parsed it as “Until death parts us”, with a transitive ‘part’. I’m surprised the possibility of that hasn’t even been mentioned.
That’s because it’s the obvious parsing that everyone automatically accepts; that’s the way I always understood it.
I’ve always understood the phrase to mean: ’til death makes us part — that is, the death of either one of us. Or as @dainichi puts it.
That’s a very odd formulation: “The sun goes around the earth. Or vice versa.” The whole point is that if you accept the analytic causative reading (which may not be accurate, given the “tyll death us departe” original formula — thanks, FJ!) death does not part us (which is dainichi’s understanding, and the usual one) but causes us to part (intransitive). If you’re going to say “So what, it all comes to the same thing in the end,” that just means you don’t care about grammatical analysis.
As David E. no doubt knows, the normative wording for the phrase that comes out oddly in English as “till death us do part” is “hyd pan y’n gwahano angau.” Perfectly straightforward in the original.
Within English, you can find as far back as 1882 a discussion in _Notes and Queries_ calling the BCP phrasing “us do part” a “solecism” and “not good English,” having as noted above arisen from the reanalysis of “us depart” (originally, “vs departe”) as what N&Q calls a printer’s error but we might call an eggcorn. That N&Q piece notes another eggcornish reanalysis that came out as “Till death us two part.”
You can find the emendation to “death do us part” in, e.g., the 1962 revision of the BCP promulgated by the Anglican Church of Canada, which was pretty much the world’s last mainstream moderate/traditional updating of the BCP texts before more radical Vatican-2-style reworkings came into vogue. But most other 20th-century BCP versions I have checked stick with “us do part.” There’s a 1950’s translation into Twi that I have not investigated.
ETA: the more radical modern rewrite promulgated in New Zealand in 1989 offers the easy-to-parse “until we are parted by death.”
How old is “part”, in the intransitive verb sense “get separated”? (It has to be intransitive for the causative-do analysis to work.)
I suppose it might be construed as “depart” (in the modern English sense), in which case the supposed causative-do formula “till death do us part” would in fact just mean “until we die.” That seems implausible in the context, though, which is all about uniting.
One way or another, Suzanne Kemmer seems to have been misled by her Old and Middle English expertise into a misanalysis of the Early Modern English formula.
hyd pan y’n gwahano angau
A subjunctive and an infixed object pronoun! Welsh does archaic so much more thoroughly than English.
??? The exact bit of context is NOT really about uniting. The context is a legalistic asterisk to the uniting, embodying the Western canonical view that there’s nothing at all untoward about the remarriage of the widowed. It’s an explicit expiration date on not-actually-perpetual vows.
Surely the point is rather that marriage is only during this life (Matthew 22:30)?
No reason why it couldn’t be both, I suppose. But the remarriage of widows is specifically sanctioned in the New Testament (1 Corinthians 7:39), so it seems a bit of a stretch to characterise it as “Western”, as opposed to calling its deprecation “Eastern.”
The Eastern tradition in theory grudgingly and within certain limits tolerates the remarriage of the widowed on exactly the same terms as the remarriage of the divorced. People more culturally accustomed to the old-fashioned Western approach (which until the decadent 20th century treated those situations quite differently) often find this peculiar.
But backing up, the language in question doesn’t really mean “until we die” so much as “until one of us dies.” If the spouses die essentially simultaneously*, the point doesn’t matter.
*See also the strikingly-named https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Simultaneous_Death_Act.
The 1559 Latin version of the Anglican Prayer Book (which is translated from the English, and is not the original) has
which at least tells what people thought the English version meant in the sixteenth century.
I haven’t been able to track down the Sarum Latin version(s) that presumably underlay Cranmer’s English version. By all accounts Cranmer felt free to adapt them anyway, rather than simply translating them, so the “until death us do part” thing may have been his invention. I dare say it would have pleased his old boss, though at the relevant time the king was Edward, not Henry.
the language in question doesn’t really mean “until we die” so much as “until one of us dies.”
Sure. Another reason for rejecting parsing the chimerical “until death do us part” with “part” meaning “depart”, and a better reason than mine. Though I must say that “separation” actually logically implies a previous union to be separated out of, so I am (of course) absolutely right in any case.
Uniform Simultaneous Death Act
https://youtube.com/watch?v=frAEmhqdLFs
Some discussions of alternate conventions in cases of simultaneous deaths begin here.
Re pre-Cranmer language, the pre-Reformation marriage services in England were bilingual, with the priest’s parts in Latin but the happy couple’s lines spoken in English. There may have been substantive as well as orthographic variation in the manuscripts but “til dethe us departe” and “tyl deth us departe” are both attested.
It occurs to me that, even making allowances for the fact that languages can tolerate a lot of ambiguity, causative “do” would pretty much have to be dead for the development of do-support to be possible in Early Modern English.
In modern Welsh, gwneud “do” can in fact be used causatively, e.g.
Mae hwn yn gwneud iddyn nhw deimlo’ n well.
“This makes them feel better.”
McWhorter might have been on better ground claiming that English causative “do” was due to a Brythonic substratum than his fanciful chronologically-impossible claim that do-support is. (Brythonic “do” verbs are used as auxiliaries, but in a way which is really completely different from do-support. The supposed similarity is an illusion caused by not actually knowing any Brythonic language.)
I don’t know how old this causative construction with “do” is in Welsh, though. The marking of the subject of all subordinate infinitival clauses with the preposition i “to” is a Modern Welsh innovation, but it actually seems to be generalised from Middle Welsh cases with control verbs, like
A chyt archo yti rodi yr eil
“Though he may ask you to give him the second”
(Nicked from p331 of The Syntax of Welsh, Borsley, Tallerman and Willis.)
But I’m not sure that gwneuthur “do” itself was used in causative constructions in premodern Welsh. I suspect not, as (in the inverse of my point about English, above) that would have clashed with its use as an auxiliary verb, where it has no causative implications.
BTW, the “us depart[e]” language in the first post-Reformation version of 1549 was carried forward in the 1552 and 1559 revisions, but changed to “us do part” at the Restoration. There’s an 1870 facsimile reprint (scanned copy floating around the internet) of what became the authoritative 1662 text, viz. a copy from a 1636 printing of the 1559 revision with the final and definitive set of handwritten editorial changes made in 1661, in which you can see that specific change indicated.* That “convocation copy” was then used to prepare the fair copy that was annexed to the 1662 Act of Uniformity.
So that’s a bit contrary to the “printer’s error” story. What I don’t know is whether some of the numerous different printed editions of the 1559 text already had the change due to error or liberties taken by the typesetters.
*Many of those changes apparently came from ideas previously developed by the Rt. Rev’d Matthew Wren, Bishop of Ely (and uncle of Christopher W.), who had occupied himself during a lengthy imprisonment in the Tower of London by the Puritans in reflecting on potential BCP improvement. Somewhere out there in the literature should be an indication of whether he had the specific “us do part” emendation in his notes.
made in 1661
It would make sense for “depart” to have been “emended” to “do part” relatively later, once semantically neutral do-support had become a regular feature of English.
But evidently there never was any “death do us part”, Comrade.
One way or another, Suzanne Kemmer seems to have been misled by her Old and Middle English expertise into a misanalysis of the Early Modern English formula.
It would seem so, and once again I have been swept up by enthusiasm and propagated a misconception. Fortunately, I will have forgotten the whole unhappy episode by tomorrow.
German: bis dass der Tod euch scheidet “until death separates/divorces you”. Blatant archaism in including a redundant dass, but no subjunctive. (Scheiden as “separate” as opposed to specifically “divorce” would also be an archaism, but, not coincidentally, this is a Tolkien-style situation where they both work.) Second person, because it’s the last part of what the priest asks; the bridespeople are expected to say nothing other than “yes” in the entire ceremony.
The whole issue is that the word order in “us do part” has long been (often unconsciously) thought violative of the rules of English syntax governing do-support and for that reason further emended (often unconsciously) to the grammatically-acceptable “do us part” by many writers/speakers who were (often unconsciously) resistant to precisely repeating the ungrammatical BCP phrasing.
There’s a specific usage of optional (i.e. not grammatically necessary) do-support that you can see when for example instead of saying “we announce that X” the announcers say “we do hereby announce that X.” It seems more formal (unless jocular), and often feels a bit gratuitous. I might call this usage “ostentatious do,” although perhaps that’s too pejorative. But I think many attempts to make actual sense of either “us do part” or “do us part” are assuming that usage in accounting for what work the “do” seems to be performing.
@J.W. Brewer: I wonder if those for which til death us do part feels ungrammatical would have the same problem without the subjunctive: til death us does part. For me, that feels slightly less archaic, but both are grammatical. In fact, a lot of forms, with or without do-support, subjunctive or indicative, work fine:
As further evidence that this construction should be interpreted as ordinary do-support, rather than a causative, note the problems that arise with other auxiliary verbs:
@Brett: I guess it depends on what you mean by “auxiliary verbs.” The one that would be parallel in syntactic terms would be have+participle.
The order “has parted us” is unmarked and normal. The question is whether if for some reason you want to move the object away from the end your ear finds “has us parted” and “us has parted” equally acceptable or whether one seems vaguely “poetic” but the other merely “weird.” Maybe intuitions will vary, of course.
Note FWIW that if you try to find instances of “us has parted” in the google books corpus the first page, at least, is entirely full of false positives where the “us” is not actually the direct object of the verb but is in some other bit of the sentence.
Taking “do” as do-support (and thus not actually parallel to “make” or “cause”) and glossing over the subjunctive issue, I find “till death us do part” distinctly more acceptable than “till death do us part.”
(in fact I actually read “till death do us part” as “till death us do part” initially – mentally correcting it without noticing that I had done so. That may have been a question of familiarity, though.)
And speaking of seemingly extraneous appearances of do forms, there is the difference between different dialects of English when there is an auxiliary verb and an omitted understood infinitive. In the first episode of Chef!, after Gareth* complains that he has never had to fire someone before, his wife Janice says, “Surely you must have done,” which is the normal form in British (Commonwealth?) English but is questionable or ungrammatical in American (North American?) English, where it should be just, “Surely you must have.” “Surely you must have done so,” is fine everywhere, but it has slightly different pragmatic implications.
I think things get murkier with other auxiliaries, particularly the full strength modals. “I can,” and, “I will,” are probably fine in all varieties, but British English also allows, “I can do,” and, “I will do.” And yet again, “Can do!” and, “Will do!” are, while a bit more informal, acceptable everywhere.
* That name is another transatlantic difference. In Britain, it is given a spelling pronunciation** with a fricative. In America, the common name is Garrett, which ends with a stop.
** Okay, it’s probably a spelling pronunciation. There are West Germanic (Gerhard) and Insular Celtic (Geraint) that both should give modern Garrett. However, I think the “Gareth” spelling is first recorded in Mallory, for a character he probably invented, and he may have intended the fricative after all.
“Gareth” is quite popular as a Welsh name, but it may well have been imported from English. Whether it’s really anything to do with the echt Welsh name “Geraint” seems dubious to me. I don’t think there’s any way to get the English name “Garrett” from “Geraint” unless there’s an Irish cognate (which would have /d/ for Brythonic /nt/.)
Irish “Gearóid” looks as if it could be, but in fact it seems to be from French, whereas “Geraint” is from Latin “Gerontius”:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gear%C3%B3id
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Geraint
In the Mabinogion, Geraint’s bird is Enid rather than Eluned. Hard to see why she puts up with him, TBH.
The original (saint) Eluned seems to be a scribal error (like so many of us):
https://cy.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santes_Eiluned
@J.W. Brewer: There are a lot of possible constructions with have forms, and there we have the further distinction of mandative versus perfect. Here are my perceptions of acceptability.
Note that none of the examples with subjunctive have work for me.
Do tell!
@Brett: I think the “til” is causing problems here – substituting “have” for “do” means the temporal POV has changed. And let’s not try to muddle a subjective in with the perfect construction.
Please judge only as among
After death has parted us.
After death has us parted.
After death us has parted.
And/or the same trio with “had” instead of “has.”
Isn’t the English surname “Garrett” (firstnamified by Americans) in fact from the Irish Gearóid?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_FitzGerald,_8th_Earl_of_Kildare
Actually maybe this is a good place to ask about a different marked use of do-support which has vaguely bugged me for years, namely the “do thou VERB” construction found in a certain archaicizing register and used for quasi-imperative statements to divine, or at least exalted, addressees. Here are three examples from 19th-century translations of Mystical Oriental Wisdom texts:
“Do thou resolutely take upon thyself this eighth perfection.”
“Do thou save me by this thy power.”
“Do thou attend me, thou rich in all sorts of desirable things and strong!”
Also explicitly Christian uses from the same approximate time frame, like “Do thou convert us, O Lord” and “Do Thou grant that righteousness may prevail in this land.”
These all seem like someone’s idea of a KJV-ish-sounding register, but I can only find one instance in the KJV itself: “neither do thou remember that which thy servant did perversely the day that my lord the king went out of Jerusalem.” 2 Sam. 19:19 – this is Shimei addressing King David.
Was this in fact an established construction in Tudor/Stuart days? Does it have a name? Or am I correct in my suspicion that it became a late-arising feature of a self-consciously archaizing style in the hands of those who could not actually make it seem idiomatic so it often seems kind of clumsy and unnecessary to the desired goal of a KJV-ish-sounding register?
@J.W. Brewer: I don’t think the til is affecting my judgements. Whether with til or after, I find all the non-subjunctive examples with the participle parted that have been put forward so far to be grammatical. Of the three you listed with after, they are (from top to bottom) increasing marked as archaic, but any of them could be fine in an appropriate context.
@David Eddyshaw: Insofar as Gerald (“spear” + “rule”) and Gerard (“spear” + “hard”) have been getting confused for centuries, it’s hard to say that Garrett comes from either one or the other. My lunch arrived as I was finishing that comment, and it was therefore not as well edited as I might have liked. So I didn’t mean to imply that the names I showed there were the only possible sources, merely that Garrett could have multiple origins. There is also Gwriad (e. g. ab Elidyr), which, however, may just be another variant of Geraint (from Latin Gerontius*) and in any case was likely no longer in use by the time Garrett and variations were emerging.
* Westron name apparently unknown.
Further to my own earlier question about the “do thou VERB” construction, I can now report two possibly relevant bits of earlier evidence.
First, Shakespeare used it occasionally, and in his hands it doesn’t sound clumsy. E.g. Falstaff says “Do thou amend thy face, and I’ll amend my life,” while Iago says “Do thou meet me presently at the harbour.”
Second, the incompetent Calvinist hacks who produced the so-called Scottish Metrical Psalter of 1650 (alias “The Psalms of David in Meeter”) used it quite a lot, and in their hands it does sound consistently clumsy. E.g., “My sing and faults of youth / do thou, O Lord, forget” or “And do thou lead me in thy truth, therein my teacher be.”
The general problem with virtually all metrical psalters (a genre that was weirdly popular in Anglophone Protestant culture for the first two centuries or so after the Reformation) is that inevitably the actual verses are terrible doggerel much more often than not. The “do thou” construction is obviously useful to hacks churning out doggerel because when you need more syllables to fit the meter it supplies you with essentially contentless ones. “Do thou lead me in thy truth” need not mean anything even subtly different from “Lead me in thy truth”; it just fills up two more beats of your stanza without conveying any additional semantic information. And of course the Shakespeare examples I gave were in blank verse, where he likewise needed enough syllables to fill out a line even if he was more aesthetically adroit at what may have been padding.
This leaves open the question of when and how the construction became more common in prose contexts where there was no obvious need to pad by adding contentless syllables. But it seems like someone ought to have investigated this before.
incompetent Calvinist hacks
You rang?
(The attraction of the Metrical Puh-Sallums is often in the melodies, some of which are very beautiful.)
I think it’s just do-support spreading to the imperative.
Do thou
In Kusaal, the imperative kɛl ka … “let …” is ungrammatical with a following second-person subject: you can’t make you do things.
But there’s an interesting exception-to-prove-the-rule in the Bible version at Titus 2:7:
Kɛl ka fʋ mɛŋ an zanbinnɛ tisi ba
let.IMPERATIVE and your self be tattoo*.LINKER give them
“You yourself must be a sign to them”
Evidently your “self” is not “you” within the meaning of the (syntactic) Act.
* I’m pretty sure that the adoption of “tattoo” to mean “symbol in general” antedates Christianity among the Kusaasi. Facial tribal marks were probably the most complex arbitrarily-symbolic visual thing around in the various Oti-Volta cultures before Islam brought literacy to the area. In the Waama dictionary, wari is glossed (1) faire des scarifications au visage (2) écrire.
Nice inks!
When the Beatles sang “Let it be” they did not mean “may it exist.”
There’s a bad Hebrew translation of the song which makes exactly that mistake, the chorus ending kol shenevakesh lu yehi “all that we ask for, let it be”.
Jerry Packard’s news-anchor do is the same phenomenon I think of as “airline do“, as it seems more or less obligatory these days in scripted in-flight announcements: We do ask that you remain in your seat with your seat belt fastened…. I suppose it must have started out as a politeness hedge: “We don’t ask much, but we do ask…”
@Jerry Packard: I’ve been thinking of it lately as there are local newscasters who insert do virtually everywhere it can fit, e.g., the politician has a brother > the politician does have a brother; even in those places where emphasis is neither needed nor wanted. It does drive me crazy.
I have heard that. I feel that that at least some of them are doing it deliberately, maybe because the wrongness gets people’s attention or because it sounds as if they are disagreeing with someone, which could be exciting.
“do thou VERB” is imitated by C.S. Lewis a few times in Narnia, but in each case it’s the speaker who’s exalted rather than the addressee:
I should have specified the incompetent hacks who produced *the words in* the metrical psalter, since those who produced the tunes were not obviously incompetent and were not relevant to my word-oriented investigation. I assume that some of the tunes are still in use in more recent hymnals, with different texts fitted to them.
@David M.: Do-support alone doesn’t explain the mandatory second-person pronoun in this usage. You can say “Oh, do come to lunch tomorrow” in lieu of “come to lunch tomorrow” and it adds a note of emphasis or urgency or hopeful expectation or something like that. But “Do thou come to lunch tomorrow” is something other than that.
@TR: If that’s the song I learned in Hebrew school with that refrain, the words and music are prettyy different from the Beatles song. I can’t comment on whether the Hebrew means what it’s supposed to mean. EDIT: I don’t think we were told how to parse that it, but I understood it as, maybe because the teacher said it meant “All that we ask is to let it be,” that is, leave it alone.
It didn’t seem to occur to anybody at the time that other people might want to be let be too.
@J.W.B.: That “thou” could occur without do-support. Hymnists may know “Be thou my vision,” and in Julius Caesar, Mark Antony says, “Mischief, thou art afoot. Take thou what course thou wilt.”
@JerryF.: Yea, and verily thou findest divers KJV instances of that optional/gratuitous pronoun insertion without do-support. E.g. “quicken thou me in the way” in Ps. 118/119, and “turn thou us unto thee” in Lamentations. It’s harder to find instances in the NT where such a “thou” could be deleted without loss of sense, but Jesus says “follow thou me” to Peter in the fourth-to-last verse of John’s Gospel. Note also “judge thou him according to his wickedness” in 1 Maccabees, which is obviously not NT but where Greek rather than Hebrew was being translated.
Maybe this is just an idiosyncratic aesthetic reaction, but it seems to me that Jesus would sound a right prat, if that was the correct idiom in the reign of James I, if he were quoted as saying “Do thou follow me” to Peter.
@J.W.B.: There appears to be a “you” in the original of John 21:22. The Greek Orthodox text of 1904 is
I think we might use a “you” or two there if we were saying something like that in modern English. “Don’t you worry about him. You follow me!” Unfortunately, in writing that can be either indicative or imperative, but I think you can hear it as imperative.
I can’t guess what Jesus would have sounded [*] if the 1611 translators had given him a “do thou” there.
[*] I don’t have any intuition for that “sound” (or “look”) without “like” in British English. [Edit: Question for speakers of British English:] Is what I wrote grammatical, or would it have to be “how Jesus sounded” or something? Because what I wrote, I wrote.
In German at least, it’s just another form of emphasis – mach du das “you do.IMP that, not me”.
That’s a good observation by Jerry F. about the presence of an explicit second-person pronoun in the underlying Greek of Jn. 21:22 and indeed that’s probably what motivates many modern English translations to have the “You follow me!” he suggests. In the other three “VERB thou” examples I gave from the KJV, it looks like there’s no comparable overt pronoun in the Hebrew-or-Greek original and thus none in most modern translations.
I have no understanding of the time periods involved here, so I’ll just run this up the flagpole. If there was indeed overlap between the periods of causative do and plain do-support, could that help to explain the large number of ambitransitive verbs in English? “Death do us part”, “you do the egg boil”, “you do the window break” etc.
> Let it be
Neither here nor there, so this is a random tangent. In Danish, while a plain negative imperative “spis ikke” (“eat not” = do not eat) is possible, it hardly ever appears in speech. One of the common choices is “lad være med at spise” (“let be with to eat”). Let be with the eating / Let the eating be, I guess.
Jn. 21:22
The Kusaal version is a bit unexpected, in that it seems to repeat the “if” from the previous clause:
Li ya’a anɛ m bɔɔdim ye o kpɛm bɛ ka m ti lɛb na, fʋ ba’a bɔɔ bɛɛ li ni?
it if be.FOCUS my will that he still exist and I after return hither your concern what.FOCUS exist it at.CONTENT-QUESTION
Fʋn ya’a dɔl man.
you.CONTRASTIVE if accompany me.CONTRASTIVE
“If it is my will that he is still around after I return, what is your stake in it?
If you come with me.”
Same wording in the previous translations, except that the 1976 version goes
Fun ya’a dolli m.
with the ordinary non-contrastive 1st Sg pronoun.
This is actually very interesting. You can have a 2nd person pronoun in front of an imperative in Kusaal, but in all the cases I’ve seen this is after a conditional protasis, where there is a rule that there must be an explicit subject, and if it’s a personal pronoun, it has to take the free/contrastive form:
Ya ya’a kpɛn’ yin la, yanam pʋ’ʋsimi ba.
you if enter house.at the you.CONTRASTIVE greet.IMPERATIVE.you them.
“When you enter the house, greet them.”
I wonder if you have to use a construction like fʋn ya’a dɔl man to express a command with a contrastive second-person subject?
(Unfortunately, dɔl “accompany” belongs to a minor verb conjugation that doesn’t have a morphologically distinct imperative.)
I’m trying to think of other places in the Bible where this might turn up.
Humph. No examples in the 2016 Bible of fʋn ya’a or yanam ya’a at all construable as direct commands, other than John 21:22. So it most likely is meant to represent something in that context like “[The only concern for you is] if you follow me.”
Ah well.
I did find a couple of nice examples of protases used as verb subjects (which actually makes sense in Kusaal, where adverbs are syntactically a kind of noun, and even words like dinzug “therefore” sometimes turn up as verb subjects.)
Going back to J.W.’s point about the couple’s words being in English: the vows and prayers said by the couple differ (unhappily) between modern English-speaking Catholic countries and also every other language because there is no Latin vow and the prayer said when exchanging rings is variable.
There is a set of Latin formulae for baptism as noted above, however, so those get translated into the vernacular. I suppose that as serious as baptism is, the marriage covenant, fundamentally a contract, requires that consent be exchanged, and ratified by the priest, with at least a set number of witnesses, in a language that you can’t weasel your way out of claiming understanding.
When the Beatles sang “Let it be”
i’ve often thought of their use as basically identical to the neopagan “so mote it be”.
I’ve always understood it in the same sort of sense as “it’s all good.”*
Looking at the actual lyrics, that may be unfair (and indeed, factually wrong.) Some vague revelation along the “Imagine” line seems to be on offer from the Catholic-lite Mary, and we’re probably being invited to wish for it in some not-too-active way.
But I’ve never felt it worth the effort to attempt to ponder the Deeper Meaning of Beatles songs.
(I’ve never liked the Beatles. When I was a teenager, it was socially impossible to admit this. It was a great liberation coming out in my twenties as Beatles-indifferent.)
* I greatly prefer Bob Dylan’s take on this evident falsehood, in his song of that name.
@Matthew Roth: The priest in a Catholic marriage (and indeed, in virtually all Christian denominations) does not ratify anything. Only the statements by the principals (which may be made ahead of time, contingent on subsequently having sex) are required. The priest’s role is to bless the union and to witness that it happened, although those are only conveniences.
@David Eddyshaw: The Mary in the song was Paul McCartney’s deceased mother. He wrote it after he dreamed she came to him and told him, “Let it be,” which he for some reason considered quite profound.
did find a couple of nice examples of protases used as verb subjects (which actually makes sense in Kusaal, where adverbs are syntactically a kind of noun, and even words like dinzug “therefore” sometimes turn up as verb subjects.)
Colloquial English has limited examples along those lines. Just because it’s a European language doesn’t mean it can’t do such things. Before Thursday would be good for me. Under the couch is the first place I looked.
The Mary in the song was Paul McCartney’s deceased mother.
I Did Not Know That. I was even wronger than I supposed. It doesn’t change my opinion of the actual song, though. It also suggests that my original take on the meaning may have been right after all.
@JF:
Perfectly true. I’ve often been struck by unexpected resemblances between Kusaal and English syntax, in fact. Some of this is very likely to be spurious, merely a matter of projecting my own linguistic preconceptions and categories onto a very different language, but it probably does also reflect some real typological similarities between two languages which do, after all, share things like SVO clause constituent order, possessor-possessum order, and being relatively light on flexional morphology compared with many of their respective relatives. Some of it is also likely to reflect things which really are quasi-universals, or at least extremely common cross-linguistically, though not truly universal.
@Jerry Friedman: English does it with adjectivals as well as adverbials. The constructions seem to typically use true adjectives as heads (possibly with further modifiers) in combination with how.
@J.W.B.: In the other three “VERB thou” examples I gave from the KJV, it looks like there’s no comparable overt pronoun in the Hebrew-or-Greek original and thus none in most modern translations.
I’m somewhat surprised (though I realize belatedly that I knew the original of the one from Lamentations, since we used to sing that in every service). It wasn’t a good time for me to look things up, though, and I don’t even remember whether Biblical Hebrews has such a construction.
Also, looking at the KJV of Psalm 19, I’m surprised that “thou” after imperatives isn’t in italics.
@DE: You may not be interested, but considering that another song by Paul about his mother is “Lady Madonna”, you may have been wrong to think you were completely wrong,
I’ve always taken “Let it be” to mean “You don’t have to solve everything or worry about everything,” but a friend of mine was certain it was (also?) Paul’s plea to the other Beatles to keep the band together. Great song, anyway.
I don’t think I can concoct an English sentence in which “therefore” is an actual verb subject, though, which happens in Kusaal. This doesn’t involve cheating by using “therefore” as if it were in quotes, to mean “the word ‘therefore'”, as in “‘therefore’ is a conjunction.”
Both English and Kusaal show more fluidity than many languages in their part-of-speech categories, but in different ways from each other: Kusaal can’t verb nouns, for example, but it can noun adverbs better than English does, and “adverb” also includes a lot of things which count as conjunctions in English.
@Brett: Good point. An example of a type without “how” is an abbreviation of one of Lazarus Long’s aphorisms: Bored is better than miserable.
@Jerry Friedman: I don’t think “Lady Madonna” was as specifically about Mary McCartney as “Let it Be.” Howard Sounes claimed it was, but another rock journalist, Jim Beviglia, says otherwise:
This page also shows the photograph that inspired the song.
The field of Beatles-lyrics exegesis attracts strong and sometimes questionable opinions. (Consider, for example, the noted exegete Charles Manson.) I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if there’s a theory out there that the “Molly” from “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” is in fact the Bl. Virgin Mary.
Sad is just how I feel today.
I think this kind of construction is actually a kind of quasiquote, not all that far removed from “‘Therefore’ is a conjunction.”
Kusaal can do something like this too, but usually makes what is going on more obvious by preceding the quasiquoted item with ye “that”, the same particle that introduces direct or indirect speech. It often does this even in a construction like
Ba na pʋd o yʋ’ʋr ye Joon.
they UNREALISED dub his name that John
“They will call him John.”
Given that adverbs are a subtype of noun in Kusaal anyway, it can sometimes be difficult to tell whether this is what is actually going on. A real-life exchange I once had was
Me:
Li an sʋ’ʋŋa.
it be well
“It’s good.”
Him:
Sʋ’ʋŋa bɛ.
well exist
“‘Good’ it is, then.”
Back to the “do thou VERB” construction, I am interested to learn that it seems notably more common in the Douay-Rheims than in the KJV. Again, much rarer in the NT than OT but e.g. in Phil. 1:12 the D-R has “do thou receive him as my own bowels” where KJV has “thou therefore receive him, that is, mine own bowels.” (NB that this is a verse where there seems to be material variation in the wording of the Greek MSS.) For a semi-random OT instance, consider Judges 8:21, where D-R has “Do thou rise, and run upon us” where KJV has “Rise thou, and fall upon us.”
OTOH, the usual D-R text (and certainly that I probably found online in a searchable format) is as fairly heavily revised in the mid-18th-century by the Rt. Rev’d Richard Challoner. So it would be an interesting follow-up to trace the extent to which those instances were added by Challoner and his 18th-century sense of an appropriate style versus having already been in the earlier editions roughly contemporaneous with the KJV.
@Brett: Thanks, I didn’t know about that photograph. But in the second article you linked to, McCartney is quoted as coming at the lyrics of “Lady Madonna” from various angles, one of which is
The page also gives more of the quotation you gave, talking about how Liverpool Catholic parents (just mothers?) connect themselves with Mary the mother of Jesus.
So I wasn’t completely right, but I wasn’t completely wrong either.
Let me rephrase that a bit. You don’t have to believe everything people say about what they wrote (painted, etc.), especially if they said it many years later. One of these days I may get into an on-line argument by not believing something Tolkien said in letters about The Lord of the Rings. But I think that according to what I quoted, the idea that McC. was thinking about his mother in “Lady Madonna” is at least a speculation with some basis, though not the fact I supposed it was.
The Catholic priest’s role is to perform the sacrament of marriage. No priest, no marriage, as far as the Church is concerned.
Luther couldn’t find marriage or four others of the Seven Sacraments in the Bible, so he ditched them on the grounds of sola scriptura. Henry VIII wrote de […] sacramentorum septem esse in reply and got the title fidei defensor for it – before losing it by breaking the sacrament of marriage…
The Catholic priest’s role is to perform the sacrament of marriage. No priest, no marriage, as far as the Church is concerned.
Not so, if you trust the Catholic Echo:
The situation in Vatican canon law is of course more historically complicated than David M.’s confident tone would suggest. Indeed, that canon law gives us the wonderful word “clandestinity.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clandestinity_(Catholic_canon_law)
As to the sacramental angle, [DELETED BECAUSE HAT ALREADY POINTED OUT WHAT EVERY SCHOOLBOY USED TO KNOW].
Indeed, that canon law gives us the wonderful word “clandestinity.”
It is a wonderful word, and so is “diriment.”
“Diriment impediment” has potential as a term of vulgar abuse, I think.
…huh.
@Jerry Friedman: As I said, “Lady Madonna” wasn’t specifically about Mary McCartney. However, she was an exemplar of the kind of woman the song was about, a hardworking Liverpudlian nurse-midwife.
@David Marjanović: The Catholic canon law on marriage, as described above, goes back to the Venerable Bede, although was probably only codifying a thread of preexisting practice. Bede said that if two people who are legally permitted to marry state freely and publically that they are married, then they are. If they instead state their intention to marry, then subsequently have sex, then they are married.
@David Eddyshaw: I think “dirimemt fundament” would be better.
Oh, Bede brought the common law into it. Suddenly it all makes sense!