I just ran across a sentence in a year-old NYRB review by Robert O. Paxton of Pierre Birnbaum’s Léon Blum: Prime Minister, Socialist, Zionist
For: For or Against?
August 18, 2016 by 105 Comments
I just ran across a sentence in a year-old NYRB review by Robert O. Paxton of Pierre Birnbaum’s Léon Blum: Prime Minister, Socialist, Zionist
In junior high in the early fifties, we memorized the five conjunctions: and, or, but, nor, and for. While we knew that the first three were the ones most commonly used, there was no caution about the others.
Oh, I know there’s no official caution against it; in fact, it’s probably propagated by just such junior-high classes. I’m wondering about people’s personal Sprachgefühl: does it sound normal, or does it sound highfalutin’/literary/poetic?
It sounds old-fashioned to me, but I don’t find it irksome (and use it sparingly in my own writing).
I think it’s normally pretentious & wouldn’t use it myself. I don’t think I would even use it in fiction to color dialog spoken by an archaic person.
However you’ve triggered a memory about the word “for”. Not too long ago when I was teaching in Watsonville, California, I noticed that the English-speaking children there used “for” in a different way than I’m used to. They would say things like “My mom gave me money for I could buy lunch” (not an actual sentence I heard, I can’t remember an exact one)–using “for” like you would use “so” or”so that.” These were kids from a rural, blue-collar background. I thought maybe it was from Southern dialect speech but I had never heard it anywhere else before. Does that use ring a bell? These kids grew up with a lot of Spanish speaking kids and a smattering of kids from other language backgrounds but “por” is not used that way in Spanish and I think “para” isn’t similar enough to have affected this usage.
I doubt I would use it myself. I suspect I dislike it for practicality rather than stylistics: there is potential for a miscue, given that “for” can indicate purpose as well as cause.
My personal quaint-peeve is “all the while”, for some reason.
I consider it pretty normal in writing, though I probably would say since instead. Here’s an example from Henry Petroski’s 2003 article “The Evolution of the Grocery Bag” (found via COCA):
Petroski was born in 1942, so while he’s no spring chicken, he doesn’t go back to the turn of the last century, either.
To my ear, “for” as a coordinating conjunction de-emphasizes causality and therefore has a hint of correlation or synchronicity, even though the underlying relationship is a causal one. A hint of correlation may be technically inaccurate, as in the example that got LH’s goat, but using “for” is more about flavor than the literalism of a subordinating “because”.
That said, “for” would be pretty fustian in most contexts. In contemporary literary English it can still be acceptable, just, in large-scale history writing. But “Léon Blum arrived late at the Chambre des Députés, for he had spilt scalding tea over his trousers at breakfast” would sound silly.
I associate “for” with Old High Translationese, to render Greek γάρ. Anywhere else it sounds overwrought.
I associate it with Kennedy’s inaugural speech, which I heard when I was four, so I think it sounds great. As always, context is everything.
“We observe today not a victory of party but a celebration of freedom–symbolizing an end as well as a beginning–signifying renewal as well as change. For I have sworn before you and Almighty God the same solemn oath our forbears prescribed nearly a century and three-quarters ago. … The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe–the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God.”
Ian: “Léon Blum arrived late at the Chambre des Députés, for he had spilt scalding tea over his trousers at breakfast” would sound silly.
Silly in more than one way. It is very unlikely that a Frenchman would spill tea on himself at breakfast or at any other meal. Although customs are changing somewhat, café au lait in a bowl is the traditional French breakfast drink, and few adults would be clumsy enough to spill it on themselves.
For in the above sentence does sound weird – using because would be straightforward when introducing the actual, rather trivial, concrete cause, but somehow for seems to imply some larger, perhaps more historically or even metaphysically significant cause.
My feeling may be similar to Ian’s. There’s no denying that the usage has passed out of the colloquial register in my dialect (NAE), but just barely it does hang on in writing, though it has to be used judiciously. And sometimes I’m grateful it does, since conjunction-for is *not*, I would argue, equivalent to “because,” “as,” or “since.” Nor do I mean this in the trivial sense that, yes, all words have unique properties. I actually feel there’s a substantial difference, which it seems to me we can readily admit, without at all denying that language change has in most contexts left us unable to take advantage of it.
I almost want to go a step further and suggest that living fossils like these *can*, as our host suggests, be just literary affectations, but can also–and I think this is the case here–represent niche survivals in the evolutionary sense, where the particular properties of a word or usage are appreciated enough to keep it from extinction–at least in the more kindly linguistic environment of writing.
For instance, in the Christian Scriptures there are a number of episodes concerning Jesus where “it is written” that such and such an event had to happen in order to fulfill a given prophecy. “This happened because the prophet X predicted it” would sound ordinary and does not have the added resonance of “…. for the prophet X predicted it”. At least that is what it seems to me.
I rather like the separate archaic/poetic-license usage of “for” found in Ye Olde Ballad Style, as, e.g., “I’m going to Louisiana, my true love for to see” or “There were three men came out of the west, their fortunes for to try.” But I’m not sure I’ve seen anyone use it recently in academic/scholarly prose, even of a high-falutin’ register.
I noticed that the English-speaking children there used “for” in a different way than I’m used to. They would say things like “My mom gave me money for I could buy lunch” (not an actual sentence I heard, I can’t remember an exact one)–using “for” like you would use “so” or”so that.”
Now that’s interesting, and I too would like to know more about it.
To my ear, “for” as a coordinating conjunction de-emphasizes causality and therefore has a hint of correlation or synchronicity, even though the underlying relationship is a causal one.
My feeling may be similar to Ian’s. […] conjunction-for is *not*, I would argue, equivalent to “because,” “as,” or “since.” Nor do I mean this in the trivial sense that, yes, all words have unique properties. I actually feel there’s a substantial difference
Huh. Well, of course those who feel that way are entitled to use it to express that difference, though I confess I don’t know what it is.
Further to marie-lucie’s point, the first appearance of “for” in the KJV NT seems to be Matthew 1:20: “But while he thought on these things, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a dream, saying, Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost.”
Some recent translations render the last bit as, e.g. (NIV) “do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit”; others as e.g. (NRSV) “do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.” That’s pretty much consistent with the overall vibe that the NRSV is often in a more formal register than NIV, even though it purports to eschew actual archaism.
For to is low-register now rather than high-register: “Oh, Susanna, oh don’t you cry for me / I come from Louisiana [luziˈænə], my true love for to see.” One of the few grammatical differences between Boontling and Standard English is the use of for … -ing instead of to + infinitive.
As it happens, I just read a paper on convergent grammaticalization, a process whereby several different free morphemes all move down the grammaticalization cline and in the process converge, or nearly converge, in meaning. An English example is shall, will, be going to, each with a separate origin but now all expressing the future. The paper addresses the French synthetic future (historically the infinitive plus aver) vs. the aller-future, the Italian passives with essere, venire, andare, and (in most detail) the four current forms of the Romanian future. The conjunctions as, since, because arise from old grammaticalizations; for is short for forthy, the non-question form of for why.
I’m not a native speaker, but to my ears it hits all those adjectives people mentioned so far: “pretentious”, “overwrought”, “old-fashioned’, “translationese-y”, “highfaluting”… However, the sort of thing associated with such descriptors is very often just the sort of thing that I like; and, predictably, I find “for” = “because” to be totally delightful. I use it sparingly (for the same reasons that I love suspenders, but wear them sparingly—it’s for special occasions; use it all the time and it’d lose the charm).
And yes, I love translationese and the way it weirds language (for a full discussion, cf. Venuti, Scandals of Translation). I hate the adjective “pretentious”; to me it always feels like a contentless criticism of the kind of thing I enjoy the most (“I love the way this videogame combines hand-made artwork, soundtrack, and the gameplay itself so as to convey the author’s depression” “meh. I hate that game, it’s so pretentious” “you mean it’s bad? why, exactly?” “because it’s………pretentious”). I love “overwrought” because it is itself overwrought. I didn’t know “twee”, which to me also sounds self-descriptive, being one of those cute, barbaric sound-symbolic words you Germani use so often; I like it, though I still prefer the sound of “quaint” (such a shame that the superlative is “most twee” and not “tweest”).
While using “for” as a conjunction is certainly elevated style, I find it otherwise unremarkable. I certainly use it in writing, even occasionally in speech. Naturally, I use it less than “because,” “since,” or “as,” but it does show up. It does have a different character from the more common conjunctions of causation, although the differences are certainly subtle.
Since I happened to have a novel manuscript open on my machine as I started typing this, I decided to look through it to see how I actually use the conjunction “for.” Overall, the word “for” makes up about 0.6% of the text, but in the first 200 or so occurrences of the word, only one was a conjunction:
They spoke loudly, to show they had no secrets; for secrets and whispers were the prerogative only of the master and his inner confidants.
I don’t think I would be as happy with any of the alternatives in that sentence.
I admit to using ‘being’ in place of ‘because.’ I’ve even written ‘forasmuch as.’ I doubt I’ve ever used ‘for.’
Lawyers keep some words alive but not others.
LH: I didn’t explain my perception of the difference well, partly because of the problem that “for” is formally a coordinating conjunction but with the implied force of a subordinating conjunction – which seems to be why some writers use it simply as a pseudo-elegant variation on “because”. In the Léon Blum example the distinction (i.e. between greater or lesser emphasis on causality) is arguably so fine as to be meaningless. I’d struggle to find a case where it added a genuinely significant, not merely stylistic, nuance. But I still feel, agreeing with Elessorn, that conjunction “for” is a niche survival worth preserving in literary English.
marie-lucie: Yes, unquestionably café au lait would have been more likely! But the French family with whom I spent a month of schoolboy French immersion almost 40 years ago drank bowls of tisane for breakfast. I don’t recall if it was explained to me that tisane instead of café au lait was a minority practice, but this has forever biased my view of French breakfasts.
I’m not a native speaker, and perhaps I have been too exposed to archaic prose, but to my ears for still has its uses. In Paxton’s passage about Blum I find it stilted and I agree since would be more natural. But in Petroski’s passage about bags and mousetraps cited by John Cowan I find it perfectly natural, and I find that substituting because, as, or since would detract from the sentence.
> does “for” = “because” annoy you
As a native speaker of a language (Danish) which has both a subordinating (fordi) and a coordinating (for) conjunction, I kinda want there to be both in English as well, although I realize that distinction is harder to make syntactically in English.
I think in speech, I more or less use “because” with some level of stress on “cause” as the subordinating one, and “cuz” without stress as the coordinating one. But it does kind of annoy me that there’s no good option for the coordinating one in writing.
“For” is my go-to translation for γάρ. Maybe it is “Old High Translationese” but I don’t really notice it. Maybe dainichi’s suggested “cuz” would be more idiomatic. I’m still getting used to the singular “they” in modern Bible translations.
“For to” is found in America’s “A Horse with No Name” in the line: “‘Cause there ain’t no one for to give you no pain.” Not being familiar with the idiom, I once thought the seemingly extraneous “for” was metrical gibberish, like tra-la-la.
(30-something Brit.) I don’t think I use it myself, but it doesn’t feel markedly formal or archaic to me, at least in any even slightly literary context. If you’d asked me to pick out hints of archaism in the original example sentence, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have noticed for as a candidate.
Ian: the French family with whom I spent a month of schoolboy French immersion almost 40 years ago drank bowls of tisane for breakfast
Indeed a minority practice!
LH: But do you still find it irksome or annoying when people sing to you, “For he’s a jolly good fellow which nobody can deny?” … Seriously though, I’m not a native speaker, but I’ve only come across “for” in this sense in the written word. And I don’t think I’ve ever heard people use it in everyday talk either.
The word tisane is an interesting one. The dictionaries agree that it has final stress and is a BATH word: that is, the stressed vowel is [ɑː] in BrE and [æ] in AmE. (There is a minority AmE pronunciation with initial stress.) But this is a very unusual stress pattern for such an old borrowing, first recorded in the OED about 1400. Indeed, until I looked, I assumed it was fairly modern and would have the opposite alternation, like pasta, which is TRAP in BrE, PALM in AmE. There is also an alternative spelling ptisan(e) directly < Latin < Greek πτισάνη 'pearl barley': the word originally meant 'barley-water' before being extended to herbal infusions other than tea proper.
For to as the infinitive marker is actually quite natural in English. When an infinitive has a subject, like I had hoped for George to drive me to the airport, it can be marked with the preposition for, though other verbs don’t require it, as in I wanted (for) George to drive me to the airport. On e of Puddleston’s insights is that English prepositions can be used in three ways: as heads of clauses (so-called subordinating conjunctions), as heads of noun phrases, and objectless, with lexically-specific restrictions on which ones can be used how. For whatever reason, though, the standard language rejected objectless for in for to in favor of simple to.
They spoke loudly, to show they had no secrets; for secrets and whispers were the prerogative only of the master and his inner confidants.
Well, that’s the sort of high rhetorical context I mentioned in my post, so it fits in quite naturally. I don’t mean to say there’s no place for it in the language, just that it’s used more widely than feels right to me.
As an American, I don’t think I’ve heard tisane with [æ], and if I had I’d have assumed like John Cowan that it was a British pronunciation. But maybe I’ve only heard the word from the mouth of Hercule Poirot.
Puddleston = Pullum + Huddleston? I can’t tell if it’s a typo or their ‘ship name. On the merits, I have no problem with ‘for … to’, but it’s ‘for to’ that’s not part of my language.
As an American, I don’t think I’ve heard tisane with [æ], and if I had I’d have assumed like John Cowan that it was a British pronunciation.
Same here; I asked my wife, and she says it with [ɑː]. I confess I have rarely if ever heard the word used, which suggests to me that it is not an especially American word; in any case, I suspect the alleged US prevalence of [æ] is overstated.
LH: They spoke loudly, to show they had no secrets; for secrets and whispers were the prerogative only of the master and his inner confidants.
I agree with you here. It would be different in, for instance: They spoke loudly … because they wanted to be heard from the adjoining room.
Because seems to be more prevalent if the cause is limited to the situation described. Since would imply that the causal element was already known when the situation occurred: They spoke loudly … since they wanted to be heard … (they knew they wanted to be heard before they started to speak).
The temporal sense of since merges with its (historically later?) causal sense to explain its frequent use as the first word in a clause preceding the main one: Since they wanted to be heard …, they spoke loudly. Because can also be used this way, but less often (and not in casual speech). But for cannot.
Pullum and Huddleston, exactly; specifically the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language and the associated textbook.
The grammaticalizations I mentioned above are: as < also < all so; since < sithen ‘afterward’ < OE sið ðam ‘after that’ plus the adverbial genitive (as in towards, forwards, etc.); and because < by cause < L causa.
I’ve never heard the word tisane used in England or America, but if I did, I’d expect it to be pronounced the same way as artiSAN, which I believe is the English pronunciation (I can no longer speak for the Scots, Welsh & Irish because Brexit).
dainichi: Danish has both a subordinating (fordi) and a coordinating (for) conjunction – Thanks. I remember asking literally millions of Norwegians if there was any difference and they all said no. Bastards.
I don’t think I’ve ever noticed when I saw “for” used. So it certainly doesn’t grate.
But since shipping was mentioned, it seems apropos that those coordinating conjunctions from the first according to one of my colleagues can be mnemonicised as FANBOYS. (Even if shipping is more often considered in the remit of fangirls.)
Hat, I agree with your perception that it sounds a bit “high-falutin'” to use “for”, but it’s never particularly annoyed me. If I found it used in combination with other types of puffery I would find it offputting, but I’ve found examples where I could only marvel at the author’s ability to use it naturally in prose. I would find that hard to pull off.
Do English as well and Spanish también share any historical connection, or are they unrelated parallel grammaticalizations?
Unrelated, I suspect. Here are the earliest OED cites for the English phrase:
Higgledy-piggledy
Pullum and Huddleston
DA-da-da DA-da-da
DA-da-da DA . . .
“This happened because the prophet X predicted it” would sound ordinary and does not have the added resonance of “…. for the prophet X predicted it”.
“This happened for the prophet predicted it” is ungrammatical, I’d say. For is a coordinator, not a subordinator, so a for-clause can’t be the focus of an utterance. (It’s like Greek γάρ in this way, which is often best translated “you see”.)
I have no trouble with “This will happen, for the prophet predicted it”, but the comma is essential (or the coordination intonation, in speech). It does not mean the same as “This will happen because the prophet predicted it”, which would make the prophecy the cause of the event rather than the reason I affirm it.
A more common KJV-register way to make the point would be e.g. to say such-and-such occurred “that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet.” (Mt. 21:4, Englishing “ἵνα πληρωθῇ τὸ ῥηθὲν διὰ τοῦ προφήτου”).
Only now I realized that this “for” is not only typical of purple prose, but also features proëminently in the immortal parenthetical of the Purple Prose, the one, the only, the
inimitable:@leoboiko: I assume from the diaeresis that that was supposed to be “preëminently”; however, my curiosity was piqued. Unfortunately, the words “proeminent” and “proeminently” are unknown to the OED, although French Wiktionary finds “proéminent,” with an unsurprising definition of simply “prominent.”
TR, JC: I quite agree that …, for the prophet predicted it needs a preceding comma which I would have added if I had repeated the whole sentence.
pr∂eminent: In my speech at least, French proéminent has the concrete meaning of “prominent” (like a feature of a landscape) not that of “preeminent” (like a deservedly famous person).
I just realized that the same novel I’m working on also includes a direct reference to Bulwer-Lytton:
It turned out to be an old-fashioned historical romance, set in a classical resort on the Mediterranean Sea. The plot was populated with standard character archetypes—a noble poet, a lazy gamester who made his living gambling off his friends, and a sinister Egyptian foreigner. Yarec read for a while and found he was getting bored. The story seemed to be missing something—as if it were supposed to have illustrations that were not there.
I may edit this out, since it’s a bit self indulgent, projecting my own dissatisfaction with editions of The Last Days of Pompeii onto my protagonist. The point is that there was a subtext to the novel that is generally lost on modern readers (and may have been lost on most readers, even when it was first published). Several of the main characters were created as occupants of specific houses that had been excavated at the site, and the way their homes were decorated provides significant insights into the characters. For example, the protagonist Glaucus lives in the House of the Tragic Poet.
@Brett: I’m a Romance speaker (Portuguese: proeminente), so I wanted to type “proeminent”. The spellchecker helpfully informed me that the proper English spelling is “prominent”. But I was feeling purple / metallic, and decided to leave the “e” and add some arbitrary diacritic to boot.
I think I’ve seen for used instead of because as a means to save space. It reminds me of Lucky Luke saying qui eût cru instead of the perfectly standard qui aurait cru to save space.
I’ve also seen it in scientific prose clearly written by nonnative speakers. I don’t use it myself, for I do not aspire to writing literature or bombastic speeches. (Bombast can be done right – I actually like explosions –, but that’s so hard to pull off that the very attempt has fallen out of fashion.)
I was just reading a paper that turned on the sentence Go not to the Elves for counsel, for they will answer both no and yes. Whatever the author’s credentials as a Tolkienist may be, he has none as a grammarian of Modern English, and indeed says that the grammarians (by which he means ‘prescriptivists’) will criticize his reasoning. But I got stuck when he said that for was a subordinating conjunction[*]. Then I remembered this page and got to wondering if I actually knew the difference.
As I noted above, Puddleston merges subordinating conjunctions into pronouns and adverbs, but they still talk of what they call conjunctions, or perhaps it’s coordinators. (While looking around to see what the Internet thinks these are, I came across the acronym FANBOYS ‘for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so.) P also thinks the list is closed if I remember correctly: my copy is
in a galaxyfar, far, away.But if we replace for in Frodo’s proverb with because, is it not still a coordinating conjunction? Formally, at least, it is conjoining two independent clauses. Now no doubt “A and B” is the same as “B and A”, where these are sentences, and you can’t do that with because, but neither can you do it with but, yet, so. What’s going on here? In addition, coordinating conjunctions between sentences (unless the coordinands are very short) get a comma before them: can you really leave the comma out of Go not to the Elves for counsel[,] because they will answer both no and yes? I can’t, I don’t think. And now I really do feel as mixy as Painted Jaguar after Stickly-Prickly and Slow-and-Solid have been at him.
[*] It turns out my author thinks and is coordinating because it’s just one step up from parataxis: John is here. Mary is here vs. John is here and Mary is here, whereas any conjunction with more semantic meat than that he calls subordinating. Terminological buccaneering with a vengeance.
I wonder if the distinction even makes sense in English. (You can tell I haven’t read the CGEL.) In German, it’s trivial – subordinating conjunctions like weil trigger verb-final order, coordinating ones like denn don’t, regardless of meaning (my examples are exact synonyms).
Go to Elvis for counsel, the Elves have just left the building.
There is a word order distinction between different types of conjunctions in English, although it is not as obvious as in standard German. The coordinating conjunctions have to be placed between the clauses they coordinate, and the subordinators do not. The subordinate conjunction and subordinate clause may, in contradistinction, be placed at the start of a sentence.
*And I ate dinner, went to bed.
*But he hit her anyway, I told him not to.
Because I say so, you will clean your room!
Since you are so late, you will need to reheat your supper.
As to for, I think it is coordinating, but this sentence does not sounds as bad as the ones with and and but from above:
?For they will answer both no and yes, go not to the Elves for counsel.
However, if the main clause is not an imperative, sentence-initial for sounds a lot worse though—clearly ungrammatical.
*For you are so late, you will need to reheat your supper.
This for is distinct from the for in fixed expressions “for he’s a jolly good fellow” or “for I must tell you (not to go to the Elves for counsel)”, which is not a conjunction but a sort of interjection (like well but semantically closer to hey).
@PlasticPaddy: Notice also that in forms like that, the “for” on its own is not enough to license a second clause. “For he’s a jolly good fellow” needs to be followed by another conjunction (which in America, and in Britain).
About word order, consider:
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die
A way to read these lines from the Ode to a Nightingale might be to think of the “now” as equivalent to the “now therefore” at the end of a resolution whose earlier clauses all begin with “whereas” — i.e., “Because I have often been almost in love with death, it now seems rich to die.” I should think that the reason “seems it rich” communicates more emotion than “it seems rich” is almost purely prosodic, with the function-word “it” tucked away interstitially and thereby allowing “seems” and “rich” to expand within their separated sound spaces.
I understand the “jolly good fellow bit” to be preceded by “We drink to him”.
In German, it’s trivial – subordinating conjunctions like weil trigger verb-final order, coordinating ones like denn don’t, regardless of meaning (my examples are exact synonyms).
Added wrinkle: in colloquial German, weil has begun to behave like a coordinating conjunction in this regard – “Ich freue mich, weil bald ist Weihnachten” is perfectly cromulent in spoken German, but it would be corrected to “… weil bald Weihnachten ist” if a teacher saw it in a school essay.
“Ich freue mich, weil bald ist Weihnachten” is perfectly cromulent in spoken German
That’s weird, never heard the like around here. Of course, no matter where one is, there’s always enough cromulent waywardness to sate the five thousand, even without magic tricks.
But now you’ll probably start hearing it all around you.
All these sentences with weil + adverb have a “bad smell” to me. Normally there is a subject “weil er langsam fährt”. Here the sentence means “weil Weihnachten bald kommt” or “weil es bald Weihnachten ist /wird”.
Yes – in dia- and mesolects where denn doesn’t exist, weil occurs with both word orders (and no sign that it’s losing one of them, BTW).
I have no idea if that’s the case around Cologne.
But now you’ll probably start hearing it all around you.
I know, dammit.
Once I won on the other side even. Among the non-intellectual Germans with whom I used to hold intercourse, I occasionally heard this kind of double participle: so was habe ich damals gesehen gehabt. I mentioned this to a German math professor I was working for (copyediting the English and math in the typescript of his first book). He claimed that nobody ever said such a thing.
Almost exactly a year later I was at his house, talking informally with him and a few other people (family members I think), when he suddenly used the double participle. Of course it was rude of me to break the flow of conversation by jumping on him about having denied that anyone said that, but I did anyway. At least he thought it was funny.
This was Hans Baues, who worked in homotopy theory. Just this week I looked up his name while skimming Mac Lane 1972 on category theory. Hans died in March of this year.
For over ten years now I have rarely heard that double participle. Sigh.
“For” in this usage seems to be to be equivalent to “as”, but different in meaning from “because” and “since”. The only times it sounds better than “as” (versus “as” sounding better) to my ears is when “as” might be ambiguous.
“This will happen, for the prophet predicted it.”
“Because” would imply the prophet’s prediction will cause it to happen, which is not what we want. We want to say we trust the accuracy of the prophet’s predictions.
“Since”, again, makes it sound like the prophesy will cause it to happen.
“As” does not have that implication that the prophesy will cause it to happen. But, in this contest, too easy be taken for the “This will happen as the prophet predicted it”. That is, too easy to read (or hear) it as if the comma wasn’t there, with the meaning that it will happen just like the prediction, with no variation, which is a different claim.
skimming Mac Lane 1972 — Respect! I find it hard to peruse that work at more than a page an hour.
Double participles, previously.
Though I didn’t touch on this in 2016, Danish also has the be/have distinction for perfects (be for changes of state, more or less) and this will combine with the double perfect thing:
Jeg har haft gået i to timer ~ jeg har været gået ned til vandet — gå is a change-of-state verb if the destination is mentioned, because it implies arrival.
I find it hard to peruse that work at more than a page an hour.
Consider the lowly water-bug. It skims placid parts of the water looking for small edible bits, avoiding the rapids and ignoring the carp.
The book is “for the working mathematician”. Mac Lane assumes the w.m. knows his subjects, so doesn’t spend much time on concrete motivations. Thus he can go to town on notation. I’m reviving my little knowledge of homology, homotopy and group theory by peering right through the notation (and reading the notes at the ends of chapters), to discover what I need to know better in order to understand what might be in category theory for me.
Working backwards.
Working backwards to get ahead. Analysis, synthesis and carp-fishing, even though I can have a pizza delivered any time I like.
Yeah, that was probably my problem, I was trying to jump from a beginning text to Mac Lane. Also I have a hangup about understanding all the details.
Double participles, previously. Also, my uncle used the 2pl simple past “wanted” a few weeks ago (in the form identical to the subjunctive), so I underestimated the variation there.
All these sentences with weil + adverb have a “bad smell” to me. Normally there is a subject “weil er langsam fährt”. Here the sentence means “weil Weihnachten bald kommt” or “weil es bald Weihnachten ist /wird”.
I don’t know what your hang-up is here, but there’s nothing “smelly” about that kind of sentence. “Bald ist Weihnachten” is a perfectly normal sentence also on its own, same like “Heute ist Weihnachten” or “In drei Tagen ist Weihnachten”. The subject is “Weihnachten”, and German has a freeer word order than English (although I think “Today is Christmas” works in English as well?)
@hans
Those sentences are ok. I think my problem is with “weil bald Weihnachten ist” or even “weil Weihnachten bald ist”. For some reason “weil heute Weihnachten ist” is better for me. But maybe this is just because “because soon…” is not possible in English for me, whereas “because today…” is possible.
Yes, it looks like you’re transferring acceptability judgments from English to German 🙂
@Hans: “Today is Christmas,” is fine in English, although, unlike in German, it is ambiguous which component is the subject, since forms of the verb be (supposedly) take their predicate components in the subjective case. Today is most commonly either a noun or an adverb, but in, “Today is Christmas,” it looks like it has to be a noun, and thus it is a valid possible subject.
The loss of the adjective-adverb distinction* in German seems to change the analysis a little bit there. While heute usually functions as an adverb, the noun—linking verb—complement pattern in both English and German normally takes either a noun or an adjectival descriptor as the complement. However, the lack of adjective-adverb distinction makes it easy to parse, “Heute ist Weihnachten,” as just an inverted, “Weinachten is heute,” without any need to worry about what kind of modifier role heute is playing.
In my fourth- or fifth-grade English** textbook, I remember there being a discussion of how English word order is actually a lot freer than one might think. It was clear and illustrative enough that I still actually remember the examples the book used. It started with a sentence containing a subject, a main verb, and a prepositional phrase:
However, it is possible to move predicate modifier to the beginning of the sentence:
And once that is done, it is also possible reverse the order of the subject and the verb:
German utilizes the third type of sentence a lot more than English, and it can sound stilted in English. However, the second form (with the modifier first but the subject and very order unchanged) is pretty normal in English, while it can be problematic in German. In neither language can you normally start a declarative sentence with the verb.
* I think it’s weird that English, although it kept the West Germanic adjective-adverb disctinction that German lost, completely changed how the adverb forms were marked. In Anglo-Saxon, the usual adverbial marker was the suffix –e, but this was completely lost, and the modern suffix –ly (which is from –like etymologically) replaced it.
** When I was in elementary school, there were two separate subjects: Reading and English—with about twice as much class time spend on the former as on the latter. Reading covered reading for comprehension and understanding, and English everything else (except for Creative Writing, which was yet another subject, although not one that we had daily). Here (and now), in my children’s schools, the whole topic tends to be combined under the name Language Arts, which was also the overarching technical term for Reading and English together when I was a kid, although it was seldom used in practice (at least in the classroom; it may have been more common in conversations among adults).
Reading continued to be a separate subject in middle school (seventh and eighth grades in Oregon), but much less time was now spent on Reading than English. Although the class times were equal when one had both—due to there being seven (almost-)equal-length class periods—English was a year-long class, while Reading classes were just a semester. For the more advanced Reading classes, the class name was changed to Literature; so of the four levels of middle school Reading classes offered in my school district were Reading I, Reading II, Literature I, and Literature II. However, there were no advanced English classes, and all the English teachers also taught Social Studies. There was actually also a literature-reading component to my middle school English class, covering the last two weeks of each six-week grading period, and reading as a separate subject finally disappeared in high school.
You can say
Zina anɛ Bʋriya daar.
“Today is Christmas.”
in Kusaal without a problem. Zina “today” is unequivocally the subject. The verb a “be something” (sic: the orthography is a bit weird on word division; nɛ is actually a focus particle) has to have a preceding subject, and there’s no other candidate.
Myself, I’d say the same (mutatis mutandis) is true of “Today is Christmas.” I don’t think you can take “Christmas” as the subject.
In that sentence, “today” and “Christmas” are both subjects. The object is to assert their equality at the time the assertion is made.
Compare “a bachelor is an unmarried man”. Here too are two subjects. The object is to assert their equality at all times the assertion is made. Such an assertion is called a definition.
both subjects
In grammar, a subject complement or predicative of the subject is a predicative expression that follows a linking verb (copula) and that complements the subject of the sentence by either (1) renaming it or (2) describing it. It completes the meaning of the subject.[1] In the former case, a renaming noun phrase such as a noun or pronoun is called a predicative nominal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject_complement
I’m fine with two subjects. I have long envied the Finnish equative case, though (assuming I’ve understood how it works).
It’s impossible in German main clauses, but obligatory in subordinate clauses…
@juha: I indicated how to avoid the notion of “the” subject. You insist there is only one subject in a sentence, using a lot of auxiliary words to prop up that view – complement, follows, predicative, linking, renaming, describing. None of these are needed when the notion of “the” subject is dropped.
It’s just an idea, not an attempt to replace one set of norms by another.
My school grammars had things call omsagnsled til grundled and omsagnsled til genstandsled — subject and object predicates. They only really made sense in Latin where the cases match, because in Danish the oblique case only exists for personal pronouns and like in real English, we say det er mig = ‘It’s me’. (Peevers and Swedes say ‘It is I’ ~ det är jag, I don’t know if the latter is a survival or represents some past triumph of peevery).
On Thursday, The Man Who Was Thursday would say “Today is me.” Unless he was Swedish. Which is absurd. QED.
What is or isn’t a subject a) depends on your grammatical framework and b) is language-specific. To establish what is a subject in German, one can do substitution tests. If you do that, you’ll find that a sentence like “Bald ist Weihnachten” patterns with sentences where sein doesn’t express identity / equation, but placement in space or time, e.g. “In drei Wochen ist Weihnachten” or “Bald kommt Weihnachten” or “Bald sind Ferien”; the latter example shows where the subject ist, due to the concord with the Verb.
I don’t think you can take “Christmas” as the subject.
I agree. I don’t care what the logical arguments are, as a native speaker of English I find the idea absurd.
“Brüder sind wir” and “wir sind Brüder”. Verb concord won’t help you identify “the” subject, because both nouns concord with “sind”. It will, however, help you realize that there are two subjects.
It doesn’t help you realize that the sentences are about the Brüder family, spoken by one member speaking for all.
There are holiday songs entitled both “Soon It Will Be Christmas Day” (by Ben Peters, from Lynn Anderson’s 1971 The Christmas Album) and “Christmas Will Be Soon” (presumably by Neil Cicierega, from Lemon Demon’s 2012 I Am Become Christmas).
I don’t think you can take “Christmas” as the subject.
I agree. It’s merely one of the two subjects.
In the register of English in which it is possible to say “A mighty and world-renowned linguist am I, at whose frown mere Chomskys tremble”, it might be possible to take “Christmas” as the subject in “Today is Christmas.”
However, I myself only use this register on Thursdays.
That is still subjective mono-the-ism. It’s a linguistic mindset hard to relegate.
“Brüder sind wir” and “wir sind Brüder”. Verb concord won’t help you identify “the” subject, because both nouns concord with “sind”. It will, however, help you realize that there are two subjects.
There are sentences where concord doesn’t help because both potential nouns agree in number, like your example. There are others where it does:
“Wir sind Papst” / “Das Problem sind die Linguisten”. The element determining the concord is the subject, the other one is the predicate (noun). I am only talking about terms for sentence roles triggering morphological or syntactical phenomena like concord, not about logical relationships. Now, if you accept the convention of calling the element that triggers verb concord “subject” (a convention which works for Nom-Acc languages like German, but may not be appropriate for languages with different alignments), then there are three ways to handle sentences where the subject role cannot be determined based on verb concord alone – 1) saying they have two subjects, which will make them structurally different from otherwise totally parallel sentences where concord makes identifying subjects easy; 2) maintaining the distinction but saying that in such sentences the roles cannot be determined, which is unsatisfactory (but many things in life are) or 3) looking at whether the syntactic roles of subject and predicate (noun) are further distinguished in the language (e.g. the predicate noun is sometimes a category noun without the article, like in “Wir sind / er ist Papst”). I prefer approach 3).
“because soon…” is not possible in English for me
Are you sure? It is for me. “I am feeling happy, because soon it will be Christmas.”
@jc
To me this is acceptable as “because…soon it will be Christmas!” (maybe that is how you say it😊). Without the ellipsis I find it a bit jarring and would prefer “because it will be Christmas soon” (or if you want to emphasise “soon” even more, “because it will soon be Christmas”).
I agree with JC. There’s nothing odd about “because soon it will be Christmas.” I thought the original feeling of ungrammaticality must be about starting a clause with “soon is”, which I think is not possible (except in something like “Soon is not good enough”, in which the “soon” would be a sort of quotation of something being responded to).
@ki, jc
Yes, would you say “Because soon will be Christmas”, jc? Or “Because next comes Easter”?
would you say “Because soon will be Christmas”
The problem there is not “Because soon” but “soon will be Christmas,” which is not native-speaker English — it’s something a German speaker might say. I agree with JC and Keith that there is nothing wrong with “because soon…” from the point of view of the average English speaker; it’s just your personal idiolect that finds it unacceptable. We all have such quirks.
A friend of mine uses it all the time. He’s Welsh-speaking, but I don’t think that actually has any bearing; it’s just him.
The fact that I notice him using it all the time is presumably significant.
This may be an Americanism.
“Because soon it will be Christmas” is unremarkable; “Because soon will be Christmas” is Wrong Wrong Wrong. Because of specific English-grammar quirks requiring the overt presence of a dummy pronoun as syntactic subject (a variant of the so-called “weather it”) which I imagine other languages could, and in practice do, get by just fine without. Now obviously German uses analogous dummy pronouns in stock phrases like “Wie geht’s?” or “Es regnet” but the use might not be coextensive with that in English.
Yes, would you say “Because soon will be Christmas”, jc? Or “Because next comes Easter”?
I wouldn’t say “Because soon will be Christmas” because I wouldn’t say “Soon will be Christmas.” It has nothing to do with the “because”. “Soon” is an adverb and can’t under normal circumstances be the subject of a clause.
“Because next comes Easter” seems OK in a situation where “Next comes Easter” would be appropriate.
Yes, would you say “Because soon will be Christmas”, jc? Or “Because next comes Easter”?
No (as expounded by JWB) and yes, respectively. Soon is a sentence adverb and as such mobile, at least in my English, and can’t function as subject or subject complement. In the second sentence I am less sure what is going on: I am equally happy with “Easter comes next” and “Next comes Easter”, but I don’t know what the role of next is. There is no article, so it doesn’t look like a deadjectival construction like “The poor should eat the rich.”
I will make further inquiries.
@hat, jc
Thanks for pointing this out. I was not stigmatising any of these constructions, it is perhaps true that I associate some similar clipped, abbreviated or (for me) strangely ordered phrasing with Edgar G. Robinson dialogue. I also have a poor mental disambiguator, so I would notice and have more problems with some appositional constructions where the meaning is obvious (I may even flip between “because soon he will come” and the for me much more expected “soon he will come, because…”).
Soon is a sentence adverb and as such mobile, at least in my English, and can’t function as subject
Interestingly (well, interestingly to me), Kusaal sentence adverbs can function as subjects, e.g.
alazugʋ kɛ ka ba ba zɔtif la
therefore.LINKER let and they run.IMPERFECTIVE.you that
“therefore you are feared”
Literally, “therefore (focused subject) makes them fear you.”
Adverbs in general, including sentence-level ones, are basically just a subtype of noun in Kusaal, though they do have some distinctive properties. Words like alazug “therefore” are formally sentence-level adverbs; the language doesn’t really have conjunctions, apart from the ubiquitous linker particles ka “and/but/that”, yɛ “that” and the clause-catenater n.
The OED s.v. next in sense II.9.b, “As subject complement with come, follow, and verbs of similar meaning or function” gives us this quotation, which seems to me to be the most apropos: “September, who came next, seem’d in his Looks to promise a new Spring”, from E. Budgell, Spectator 425 (1712).
Easy does it.
Just to confuse everyone: if you port Next comes Easter. into German, you get Als Nächstes kommt Ostern. – “as the next [thing]”.
Near the start of this thread, in 2016…
I don’t know enough Spanish, but it just dawned on me that the example works in French if you translate it literally, except you need to insert “that”: pour que je puisse acheter…
Same with Spanish para.
Probably not relevant in California, but Scandinavian also does the for at jeg kunne købe frokost thing. Well, Continental North Germanic does, I can’t speak to Atlantic or Finnish.