I was reading along in a novel when I got to a line of dialogue that included the sentence “Thy shall be done.” After a moment of appalled bafflement, I decided the author must have written “Thy will shall be done” and some idiot grammar software (or, worse, an idiot human copyeditor) had seen “will shall” and just deleted the first apparent synonym, leaving gibberish in its wake. But then I decided to check Google Books, and discovered that there is a long tradition of this as “kids say the darndest things” humor; from Babyhood; the Mother’s Nursery Guide, Vol. 4 (1888), p. 38:
–A little boy of our acquaintance had had his use of shall and will so often corrected that one night in saying the Lord’s Prayer he said, “Thy shall be done” in place of “Thy will be done.”
–Y., New York.
And from Terrot Reaveley Glover: A Biography by H. G. Wood (Cambridge University Press: 2015), p. 212:
This entry in her father’s diary for 1906 shows Anna’s response to his religious instruction. ’22 July 1906. Heard Anna’s prayers. “Thy shall be done”, she said—so we discussed God’s will and its application to the nursery. But if you have a fight, I said and she chimed in, That would be Thy won’t be done.’
And then (since by now everything on earth has been discussed at the Hattery) I did a site search and found that, indeed, just a couple of years ago Jen in Edinburgh wrote in a comment:
Vaguely on the subject of archaic language – when I was little, I didn’t realise that ‘will’ in the prayer was a noun – I thought the line just meant something like ‘your things will be done’. And I knew that if you were being very polite you didn’t say ‘will’, you said ‘shall’, and if you’re talking to God you should be very polite, and so I misremembered it as ‘thy shall be done’. It still almost catches me out, sometimes.
Apparently this was so alien to my sense of English that I forgot it more or less instantly, and will probably do so again. At any rate, “Thy shall be done” is a thing, not a typo.
Shurely it ought to be “Thy shalt be done,” by analogy to all the thou-shalt-nots in the same register of ecclesiastical English?
Makes sense, but GooBooks says “No results found for ‘Thy shalt be done’.”
Not related, really, but I feel compelled to mention the Swedish second order modal construction skulle vilja.
>att vilja leva “to want to live”
jag skulle “I would/should/was about to”
jag skulle leva “I should/would live”
jag skulle vilja leva “I’d rather live, I’d like/prefer to live”
Third order modals from the ‘net:
Jag skulle vilja kunna åka til Cypern “I’d like to be able to/allowed to go to Cyprus”
Skulle vilja kunna fråga fritt och utvungent: […] “Rather wanting to be able/allowed to to ask freely and openly: [..]”
Some verbs can be made into (quasi-)modals by dropping the infinitive marker, allowing further stacking.
Jag skulle vilja våga tro “I’d like to dare to believe” (psalm)
Jag skulle vilja hinna fråga “I’d like to have time to ask”
I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with a row of four infinitives:
Jag skulle vilja kunna våga tro. “I’d like to be able/allowed (/allow myself) to dare to believe.”
Jag skulle vilja kunna sluta fråga “I’d prefer being able to stop asking.”
How about five?
Jag skulle vilja måste kunna våga tro “I’d like to be obliged to allow myself to dare to believe.”
I just don’t understand how anyone could take “thy” for a noun phrase. There are errors that make sense to me and others that don’t.
I suppose if thy is not in your vocabulary at all, it would be natural enough to take it as a noun by default in “thy will be done.” Come to that, “will” as a modal verb must be much commoner than as a noun.
But it’s not learned in isolation, it’s part of the Lord’s Prayer: “thy kingdom come; thy will be done.” How do you take it as a noun in the first part?
True …
And the rhythm: “thy KINGdom COME; thy WILL be DONE.” Everything conspires to help you understand the grammar. As a wee lad, I certainly didn’t understand it in toto, but I never had any doubt that “thy” was modifying the noun “will.”
Thy shall be blown (maybe blowed is better here) to kingdom come, thy will be right done…
Leaving aside “thy kingdom come”, the stress pattern “thy WILL be DONE” could easily be taken as stressing the inevitability that Thy, will, without question, be done: as contradicting “thy won’t be done.” That might even have helped along Jen fae Embro’s childhood substitution of “shall.”
I’m still working on “thy kingdom come.” Give me time …
“Thine shall be done” works, with thine a pronoun.
When I learned Fadervor, or at least when I tried to understand it, I think I was vaguely aware of subjunctives and interpreted komme dit rige, ske din vilje [som i himlen således også på jorden] accordingly. But what less language-nerdy kids make of it is a good question. The only verb forms of that shape in the current language are the infinitives.
(And helliget vorde dit navn is just beyond reach).
But what less language-nerdy kids make of it is a good question.
Yes, that’s what I’m slowly and painfully learning.
I was in school during the transition from the 1930 translation
to the 1978 translation
.
I can’t remember ever having trouble understanding it in the first place — which is probably why I never felt any moral panic by the introduction of new translation.
(Long after my days of school prayer came the 2011 translation
… which I dislike, translationwise, not for being too modern, but for the choice of “Vår Far” og “helliges”, which sound stilted and unidiomatic against the otherwise down-to-earth wording.)
The “old-fashioned” wording of the Lord’s Prayer remains current for many U.S. Anglophones who don’t necessarily otherwise use an archaic register even for churchy/liturgical purposes, but it is interesting to note that the “traditional” version has actually been very lightly updated over the centuries to smooth out some archaisms. There are at least three changes from the real old-fashioned Reformation-era text, leaving aside purely orthographic ones:
1. “who art in heaven” rather than the older “which art in heaven.”
2. “on earth” rather than the older “in earth”
3. “those who trespass” rather than the older “them that trespass”
Another change is a prosodic one – “temptation” has evolved from a four-syllable word into a three-syllable one, but there are old musical settings still in occasional use that require it to be sung/chanted tetrasyllabically.
moral panic by the introduction of new translation
I cherish the memory of a letter I once read in the Spectator from a high chieftain of the Prayer Book Society, objecting to the change from “Our Father, which art in heaven” to “Our Father, who art in heaven”, on the grounds that the “original” was better because the Father is not “personal” like the Son.
There seemed to be a pleasing symmetry in a functionary of an organisation which apparently exists to safeguard the “language and doctrine” of the Book of Common Prayer from horrid liberals, being betrayed into a seriously heretical statement by an egregious misunderstanding of the language of the Prayer Book.
We who learnt the correct version, in Scotland, ask to be forgiven our debts as we forgive our debtors, of course. None of this English “trespassing.” Also, more in line with Scots mercantile culture. No mean, but careful.
So, Hat, was the “thy shall” in your current novel said darnedestly by a kid? Was the novelist being funny?
I know a Greek-American fellow who grew up in such an insular immigrant enclave in NYC that he was eleven or twelve years old before he became aware that the Πάτερ Ημών was extant in English translation at all.
I don’t think there was as much reason for misparsing in Norwegian and Danish as in English. Vilje is unambiguously a noun in both languages, and din can’t be anything but the 2p possessive pronoun. I hoped the Swedish detour would lay grounds for a speculation about Swedish vilja, which is homonymic with the infinitive of the verb, but as I read the various Swedish translations, I don’t really see any ambiguity. Din makes it quite clear where the verb and the noun are,
Swedish heligat varde dit namn must have sounded just as weird for a first grader as helliget vorde dit(t) navn did in Danish and Norwegian, but that means hard to understand, not possibly misparsed.
I notice that the Kusaal version of the Fadervor also has an unusual construction: it begins
Ti Ba’ onɛ bɛ arezana ni, ka fʋ yʋ’ʋr mɔr girima, fʋ na’am na kena, ka fʋ bɔɔdim maal dunia zug,
our father he.NOMINALISER exist heaven at, and your name have honour, your realm IRREALIS come.here, and your wanting make this.world on
with ellipsis of the kɛl “let” (imperative) of kɛl ka “cause that …”
I never encountered this in Real Life: whenever kɛl was ellipted, so was ka. I suspect that this is a concession to the fact that tone is not marked in the orthography: in actual speech, the forms without kɛl ka can be recognised as not being standalone main clauses (meaning “your name has honour, your realm will come, your will has happened in this world”) by the absence of the “insubordinate” tone overlay, but you couldn’t tell that from the written forms without ka.
Two Arabic loanwords and one Hausa in the space of two half-verses, too. These are exotic concepts …
So, Hat, was the “thy shall” in your current novel said darnedestly by a kid? Was the novelist being funny?
No, it was completely straight. I don’t know whose fault the error was, but I deprecate it in the strongest terms. Deprecate, I say!
*waves cane*
Steady on, Hat! Think of your blood pressure!
I’m… actually not sure what the accepted modern translation of the Lord’s Prayer into Russian is. The version I’ve learned was straight-up Church Slavonic.
(Well, almost straight-up; for the second line I learned the rhyming version иже еси на небеси instead of the apparently correct …на небесех. Google tells me that this is a common misunderstanding, and in quotes it actually gets more results than the correct form.)
The Scottish Presbyterian version of the Lord’s Prayer is of course the KJV (Matthew VI, 9-13). The Anglican version also alters the final two lines: instead of ‘For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.’ it has ‘For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen.’. Why?
Challenge accepted:
Ich möchte mich glauben trauen dürfen müssen. Only four infinitives, and most people would probably break the sequence by going for zu trauen. But note the bracket mich … trauen “dare”.
und vergib uns unsere Schuld
wie auch wir vergeben
unseren Schuldigern
That right there is why Merkel originally wanted to just watch Greece go bankrupt. Debt is guilt, it’s a moral failing.
When I read the title I was going to comment, and then I realised I was already part of the post 😀
When I say little, we’re talking about something I learnt off by heart possibly before I was school age – I don’t supposed I was consciously parsing it at all to begin with, and even if I was, ‘kingdom come’ is more commonly encountered as a place (or a time?) to which things are (e.g.) blown.
‘Thy won’t be done’ seems to be exactly the same misanalysis, which is nice.
The other thing I know of that I learnt as a mass of ritual words and then didn’t analyse for a long time are a bunch of traditional Christmas carols – I could probably dig out better examples, but off the top of my head I was an adult before I realised they were ‘herald angels’, not angels singing ‘hark the herald’ (with ‘hark’ presumably meaning ‘listen to’!).
These things are full of words behaving oddly – how often do you encounter a herald these days (except maybe the Glasgow Herald), or have anything delivered except a parcel? A few more words (like ‘thy’) behaving oddly makes little difference!
I see now that Paddy has already mentioned ‘kingdom come’ as a noun phrase, which is also interesting now I come to think about it.
The OED seems to suggest that it started off as a misreading of ‘thy kingdom (which we hope will) come’ as ‘thy kingdom (which has already) come’ (and which is presumably Somewhere Else?).
David M.: Only four infinitives, and most people would probably break the sequence by going for zu trauen. But note the bracket mich … trauen “dare”.
Yes. The self-inflicted constraint of only bare infinitives in the stack makes the selection of verbs quite small in Swedish too. More verbs could be fit into the frame if we allowed an obligatory object or complimentary phrase.
Jag skulle vilja kunne hinna låta dig gå “I’d rather prefer being able to take the time (being given the time?) to let you go.”
I owe a disclaimer: My Swedish Sprachgefühl breaks down at the subatomic level, Contamination from Norwegian is highly likely. All constructions should be verified with a certified grammarian before being put into service.
Jen: a bunch of traditional Christmas carols
Yes. Here too.
Her kommer dine arme små
“Here come your poor small [children]”
Usually sung as armer små “small arms”.
En fattig jomfru satt i lønn
“A poor virgin sat in secret”.
Lønn “secret” is throughly obsolete. The word is probably understood by many as either “acorn” or “salary”. It doesn’t help that it’s obviosuly chosen to rhyme with Himlens kongesønn “heavenly prince” rather than for scriptural accuracy
engler daler ned i skjul
“angels descend in hiding”. Understood by many as “in a shack”. The angels of the gospel did certainly not take the shepherds by stealth, and skjul also has the more concrete meaning of “shack, simple unheated bulilding”, which fits the manger. This word must also have been chosen for the rhyme (with jul “Christmas”),
Round John Virgin must have been one of the Merry Gentleman whom God Rested.
Me (parenthetical): ([…]… which I dislike, translationwise, not for being too modern, but for the choice of “Vår Far” og “helliges”, which sound stilted and unidiomatic against the otherwise down-to-earth wording.)
I don’t meant that the translators should avoid unusual wording. This is a prayer, a chant, meant to be recited together by a congregation. Rhythm and repetition with variation are important to the effect. This is very much the case also in the Greek original-as-we-know-it, no doubt having been reworked by daily use and poetic intent for generations before being written down. I don’t think Vår far and helliges serve the poetic purpose well enough, and that’s what makes it vaguely stilted rather than solemn.
Not that I’m really in the intended audience. I hear the Lord’s Prayer only at family occasions in my wife’s family’s Catholic church, and the Norwegian Catholic Church sticks firmly to the 1931 translation.
‘Yon’ was still very active in my grandmother’s vocabulary, although fairly passive in mine, so I didn’t have a problem with that. But the merry gentlemen must be a good candidate for universal misunderstanding!
Trond: the only Norwegian one I know is ‘furu vaerbitt over vannet’, and I’ve never been quite sure if that’s a genuinely collected mistake or just a pun 🙂
‘furu v[æ]rbitt over vannet’
Heh. I’ve never heard it, even if it’s the national anthem, and even if it invokes one of the most iconic pictures in Norway. That may speak for a genuine mistake. Or maybe a pun. I don’t know.
In Northern Ireland there is still thon.
https://m.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/imported/just-julian-thon-saddam-causes-mayhem-28147286.html
Ok, it’s a bit old…
Trond, I’m interested to see that the English change from “Hallowed be thy name” to “Let your name be held holy” (and “let” also added to subsequent clauses) has an exact parallel. Or influence, and if so which way?
J.W. Brewer ; Yes, the ‘lightly updated’ version is used in England too.
A few years ago, in a TV drama based on Dickens characters, the workhouse children were punished for saying ‘as we forgive them that trespass against us’ – the writer obviously unaware that that version would have been correct in the 19th century!
Brian Hillcoat ; I was under the impression that the coda ‘For thine is the kingdom…’ wasn’t in the Biblical account at all, but added for liturgical purposes. I checked ‘Bible Gateway’ and find it’s a case of ‘some manuscripts add…’
Hat: As a teacher in anglophone Canada I can assure you that the bulk of (my) L1 anglophone students (First and second year undergraduates, mostly) hadn’t the FOGGIEST notion as to the meaning of what few slivers of the Bible or Shakespeare they had somehow picked up before they began their University studies. Among the things I have had to explain in class:
-“Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?”: I had to explain that “wherefore” means “why” and is not simply a lengthened form of “where”, and thus Juliet did not suffer from poor eyesight and was NOT asking Romeo where he was. This explanation was something the BETTER students needed: the weaker students also needed to be told what “art” and “thou” mean. The realization that Juliet is saying “Romeo, why are you Romeo?” was quite a revelation to all of them.
(To be clear, this is probably one of the most intelligent group of students I have ever had: they had sharp minds, but unfortunately, while they had not failed high school, their high schools had definitely failed them. Okay, rant over).
-“’tis”: I once had a student who did not parse this as a contraction of “it” + “is”: he thanked me after he told him what it was, as it meant that a lot of older English (mostly Biblical) quotes (he knew far more of them than most of his peers) suddenly now made more sense.
-I once explained to a group of advanced French students (!) that Edgard Allan Poe’s “Quoth the raven” means “The raven says”: some had no idea what “Quoth the raven” means, with the more intellectually adventurous ones thinking that “quoth” is an older form of “quote”, and since there is no third person singular -s it must be an order to the reader: “Quote the raven!”.
(The reason they had asked was because many were taking an “English poetry” class, and the instructor had a bit of an ideological fixation on the hidden meaning of the poem -it involved marxism, and feminism mixed with racism…or maybe vice-versa, it had been a while- with the students growing desperate enough to ask another teacher -me- if I could perhaps illuminate what its surface meaning is).
-In linguistics I stopped giving “thy” and “thigh” as a minimal pair quite some time ago, as almost all my students had no idea what “thy” was. I am thus unsurprised that some have guessed that it must be a noun.
Rodger C.:
I always assumed at some level that the modern English versions of the Lord’s prayer with “let” had been influenced by the version(s) of some other Germanic language(s), as I would expect a modern “indigenous” English version to use “may”.
@Kate Bunting: the KJV (sometimes called the AV over there?) has the coda/doxology in the version in St. Matthew but not in the version in St. Luke. Which is parallel to how it reads in Greek. Now, of course, not all Greek MSS of the New Testament are uniform with respect to every verse or line and you can work yourself into a tizzy trying to follow the arguments among modern academics and hereticks as to how to best resolve those discrepancies. But the authoritative Greek text (authoritative in the sense of being approved of by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople, regardless of the views of various dubious Western academics who overwhelmingly did not grow up going to church services held in Greek) is now freely available on the internet, and it includes the doxology in Matthew 6:13: “ὅτι σοῦ ἐστιν ἡ βασιλεία καὶ ἡ δύναμις καὶ ἡ δόξα εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας· ἀμήν.” http://www.myriobiblos.gr/bible/nt2/matthew/6.html
ἀμήν
Which gives me a slender excuse to quote the first of a delightful collection of old Russian proverbs I recently discovered: Аминем беса не отбудешь [You won’t get rid of a devil with an ‘amen’].
I’ve always heard it called the Authorized Version (not abbreviated)
“KJV” is an Americanism, at least originally. Though it has the merit of accuracy; AFAIK the Authorised Version has never actually been, like, authorised.
Yeah, that seems to be universal among native speakers who haven’t studied the history of English. Somehow nobody even reconstructs wherefore from therefore – probably because therefore isn’t in people’s active spoken vocabularies either, and because of the stupid -e.
In any case it’s not German, where the present subjunctive is retained here* – and apparently universally understood because it remains very common in journalism, though as a sort of evidential rather than an optative.
* geheiligt werde dein Name
dein Reich komme
dein Wille geschehe
Rodger C. : I’m interested to see that the English change from “Hallowed be thy name” to “Let your name be held holy” (and “let” also added to subsequent clauses) has an exact parallel. Or influence, and if so which way?
I didn’t even know there’s an English translation with “Let your name be held holy”, but it’s not surprising. Let’s see… Google is not my friend, but I find several translations with “Let your kingdom come, let your will be done”, e.g. the New Heart English Bible:
That’s indeed similar. I would guess that the international community of biblical translators are exchanging ideas and constructions.
Etienne: always assumed at some level that the modern English versions of the Lord’s prayer with “let” had been influenced by the version(s) of some other Germanic language(s), as I would expect a modern “indigenous” English version to use “may”.
The New Testament for Everyone:
I’ve been pondering today on the translations with la and let. The Biblical literalists may turn on me for heresy, but I think that when the original prayer calls for the father’s name to be held holy, his rule to come and his will to be done on earth, it does so without outright begging the father to get involved in earthly matters, but rather by calling upon the community of believers to make it happen and on God to give them the power to do so. In English the wide target is probably achieved with ‘may’, althought it’s still more of a wish than a call for action.
It’s not straightforward in modern Norwegian. One solution involves the archaic (and to some probably ambiguous) subjunctive/optative måtte:
… but that may be even vaguer as a call for involvement, be it by God or believers, than English ‘may’ — closer to its cognate ‘might’.
Instead I’d suggest a very unusual use of the indicative må: Without any other changes from the 2011 translation:
The problem with either måtte or må is that the prayer could be misconstrued, since V1 first and foremost is the syntax of questions. Måtte riket ditt komme? “Did your kingdom have to come?” Må viljen din skje? “Does your will have to be done?” But I think it works, since it’s also the syntax of the still borderline idiomatic optatives (‘måtte’) and imperatives. Må is a verb without agent, and thus without a living imperative, but here I think it will be understood as an imperative without an agent, making it a general call for resolve. Now, would English ‘must’ do the same thing?
Me: The Biblical literalists may turn on me for heresy
Or even more likely; Bad Greek.
I think that when the original prayer calls for the father’s name to be held holy, his rule to come and his will to be done on earth, it does so without outright begging the father to get involved in earthly matters, but rather by calling upon the community of believers to make it happen
The original* Greek just has imperatives; the passive imperatives ἁγιασθήτω, γενηθήτω should of course be condemned by all right-thinking Strunk-and-Whiteists for their mealymouthed avoidance of a specified agent.
* Assuming that that is original: it seems quite likely that the original original was in Aramaic.
FWIW, in my Standard Danish at least, måtte is the only preterite subjunctive verb form that sort of survives as a special way of expressing a wish, despite the category being long dead (and merged with preterite indicative before that). Måtte dit navn blive holdt helligt would work. (The latest official version is Helliget blive dit navn). But very possibly there are people who think both are equally obsolete.
(Hi-falutin’ or board minutes register Swedish reportedly kept it alive until the latter part of the 20th: Om vi finge göra om beslutet = ‘If we were allowed to change the decision’).
Me: but rather by calling upon the community of believers to make it happen
No, I think I’ll say “by uniting the community of believers in a common desire to make it happen”
but here I think it will be understood as an imperative without an agent, making it a general call for resolve
No, “making it a promise of resolve”.
David E.: The original* Greek just has imperatives; the passive imperatives ἁγιασθήτω, γενηθήτω should of course be condemned by all right-thinking Strunk-and-Whiteists for their mealymouthed avoidance of a specified agent.
So I’m acquitted on both accounts (heresy and bad Greek)?
Lars M.: Måtte dit navn blive holdt helligt would work.
Yes, in Norwegian too, except that I think there’s too little resolve, just a hope that at some undefined time it will come to be.
I was just thinking, with regard to this question of agency, about the Kusaal version of the Fadervor. The kɛl* of kɛl ka “let …” is definitely a direct-command imperative syntactically, and although the subject pronoun fʋ “you” is replaced by zero (as in English) you can actually still demonstrate that the reference is specifically second-person by various tests.
However, fʋ is also used (again, as in English) for nonspecific subjects (“one”) in proverbs and the like, e.g.
Fʋ ya’a bɔɔd tampiing siind, fʋ pʋ lɛm zɔt lieŋ daug nyɔɔgɔ.
“When you want to get honey out of a stone, you don’t have any pity for the axeshaft any more.”
In Genesis, God says Kɛl ka li an nyain “Let there be light”, and it doesn’t seem to imply that he’s telling himself to let light exist.
So there is no need to suppose that the subject of the “let” is actually “our Father.” It could be any random “you.”
It seems to me that the English “let” is clearly calqued on the Kusaal kɛl …
* It does have a unique imperative flexional suffix -la, where all other verbs with a distinct imperative flexion have -ma. This seems (based on Boulba) to be the last survivor of a specifically imperfective-aspect imperative form; but in present-day Kusaal it just seems to be a morphological irregularity, not any kind of distinctive category.
I don’t think the stress pattern is that useful in working out the meaning of, “Thy will be done,” because the way prayer is pronounced in English, the sentence structure is rather obscured. It does not sound at all like the next line, “in [on] on Earth as it is in heaven,” is an adverbial modifier. Moreover, since will, be, and done are all (potentially) forms of auxiliary verbs, and the sentence is a mandative subjunctive, the whole thing may be quite opaque to many native English speakers.
Of course, this is not sometime I myself learned in a religious context, so there was no attempt at exegesis. I just learned it as verse—and sung verse, not spoken. At my elementary school, there was a tradition of the sixth-graders performing a particular choral setting of The Lord’s Prayer. It was a very popular song, and the younger grades would sometimes clamor to sing it if there was some extra time in music class. (The Lord’s Prayer would presumably never fly today* in a public school. However, in those days, at the winter choral concerts, we were allowed perform Christmas carols, so long as we mixed in plenty of paeans to other appropriate seasonal festivals; there was always one Hanukkah song per grade, for instance. The words of The Lords Prayer, although it is taken from Christian scripture, are not particularly sectarian—although if someone worshipped a chthonic deity, “Our father who art in heaven,” might be more objectionable; or if they did not believe in the holiness of forgiveness; or….)
Separately: I learned about wherefore in eighth grade,** from an English teacher who was very angry that a humorous literary magazine for middle school students had gotten the meaning wrong! I agree with her that, in that context, the mistake was inexcusable. However, it is not surprising that many native English speakers have no clue what wherefore means. The word is archaic—obsolete in demotic usage—and even though the parallel therefore is still very common, the fact that therefore is so obviously not a compositional compound keeps a lot of people from seeming the parallels between the two.
* All the way back in 1930, when my grandmother was in kindergarten, her cousin in the same class told her that it wasn’t appropriate for Jewish girls like them to sing Christmas songs with the rest of the class. However, when Grandma asked her mother about it, my great-grandmother (who was intensely committed to being seen as a fully culturally integrated—hip, even—American, rather than a hidebound Jew) told her that singing Christmas songs in school was fine.
** The next year, when we studied Romeo and Juliet in Freshman English, we also covered this—since the teacher went through the whole famous balcony scene with us very carefully, pointing out all the nuances.
“Never mind the why and wherefore” always confused me. I tend to interpret “why” in this phrase as a cause and “wherefore” as an ultimate cause. But then remind myself that it is probably overinterpretation.
Also, there are so many contemporary Google Books examples of “thy shall be done” which is apparently a contraction of “thy will shall be done”, whether induced by automatic or human copyediting or authors’ idea how it shall be done, that it is not just a kiddie joke.
J.W. Brewer – I see you are correct about the King James Bible. I mostly use the ‘Revised Standard Version’ which I was given at my confirmation in the 1960s, which doesn’t include the doxology in Matthew but has a note ‘Other authorities, some of them ancient, add…’
Incidentally, at school I wasn’t taught that ‘shall’ was more polite, but that ‘I shall’ was a prediction and ‘I will’ expressed resolution (as in the BCP marriage service).
The mainstream view, as I understand it, is that we don’t have an Aramaic text of the Lord’s Prayer that represents a direct survival from the very earliest days of the Church as opposed to being a still-early translation of the Greek text. But the name-hallowing concept is found in more elaborated form in the Kaddish, which is one of the few synagogue prayers recited in Aramaic rather than Hebrew and I believe (although there are conjectural reconstructions) not historically extant in Hebrew in any surviving MS. Some relevant excerpts from one English translation (I don’t think there’s a single standard/dominant one):
“Glorified and sanctified be God’s great name …”
“May His great name be blessed forever and to all eternity”
“Blessed and praised, glorified and exalted, extolled and honored, adored and lauded be the name of the Holy One …”
The composer of the Kaddish was obviously running through the equivalent of a thesaurus so there are presumably a whole bunch of different Aramaic verbs involved there. I don’t know if there’s a better-than-random-guessing theory as to whether one of those verbs is the most likely candidate to be the one that came out as ἁγιασθήτω in the Greek Lord’s Prayer. Purely on an English-internal basis I think “sanctified” is probably the closest one to “hallowed” for those Anglophones for whom “to hallow” is so archaic as to be incomprehensible even in context, but I’m hesitant to speculate about the nuances of semantic difference between the various Aramaic verbs just based on how one translator has chosen to render them in English. A further complication is that I don’t know how similar or different the dialect/register of Aramaic the Kaddish is in is to what would have been extant in the Holy Land in the time of Christ’s earthly ministry. The earliest MS evidence of the Kaddish is supposedly from circa the 10th century C.E. but I don’t know what the range of theories may be as to how much earlier than that the text may have been in use.
@Kate Bunting:
At school, I was taught the “traditional” doctrine, viz that in the first person “shall” is merely future, whereas “will” expresses actual intent, whereas in the second and third persons it’s the opposite way round. This was illustrated with the moving story of the foreigner getting into difficulty swimming in deep water, whose “I will drown and no-one shall save me” was naturally interpreted by Brit bystanders as a declaration of suicidal intent, so that (in a spirit of British fair play) they simply let him get on with it.
However, even though my school at that time was in no way averse to prescriptivism, I recall that there was a certain scepticism regarding the actual validity of this “rule.”
יִתְגַּדַּל וְיִתְקַדַּשׁ שְׁמֵהּ רַבָּא
Magnified and sanctified be His great Name …
I don’t know Babylonian Jewish Aramaic, but in Syriac I think that these would be imperfective ethpa’al, with the imperfective having a jussive sense, and the verb form being reflexive/passive causative.
I think Palestinian Jewish Aramaic was closer linguistically to Syriac than to Babylonian (it had the 3rd person n- for y- thing, for example) but I suspect that in the early centuries CE the differences between Jewish, Christian and Mandaean Aramaic were more cultural than strictly linguistic: a bit like Hindi/Urdu.
There are Hatters who will know …
Imperatives without agents are an alien concept to German, and to English as I understand it.
Ah, third-person imperatives, so “should” is actually the closest that SAE can get – and that’s closer than the Vulgate’s subjunctives (sanctificetur)!
So, when the Vulgate was made, the third-person “imperative II” (sanctificatum esto) was gone, but a “should” construction had not yet formed, the subjunctive which makes it all sound like a wish was the closest thing available, and we’ve been living in error ever since. Great.
…though actually, sollen in German (dein Name soll geheiligt werden, dein Reich soll kommen, dein Wille soll geschehen) would be ambiguous between stating as a fact that this is how it ought to be and stating that it’s said to be so. “Your name is supposedly being made holy, your kingdom is allegedly coming, the story goes that your will is happening”… That’s not the interpretation I’d come up with first, though.
In the interest of maximising pedantry*, I suppose I should confess that γενηθήτω is, properly speaking, deponent, so you could say it’s not a pukka passive. (It is 3rd person imperative, though.) And no such extenuation can be found for ἁγιασθήτω. Strunk-and-White Bad!
* This is
SpartaLanguagehat!Moreover, since will, be, and done are all (potentially) forms of auxiliary verbs, and the sentence is a mandative subjunctive, the whole thing may be quite opaque to many native English speakers.
An excellent point.
the fact that therefore is so obviously not a compositional compound
But English still has thereby, whereby, therewith, thereupon, whereupon, etc. Granted these expressions are now elevated/formal but they are still current for most native speakers.
…for most well-read native speakers.
David M.: Imperatives without agents are an alien concept to German, and to English as I understand it.
Sure, and to Norwegian as well. Until now. What I meant to say is that replacing the (preterite/)archaic subjunctive måtte with the present indicative må creates something unusual, and that unusual thing seems (in my head) to take flavour of imperative, even if the verb lacks an agent. But maybe imperative is the wrong term. I could try saying that since preterite/subjunctive måtte in that position makes an optative, the present/indicative må in the same position becomes hortative.
Unusual in literary language but not unheard of.
Google finds a large corpus of blog/forum comments. Here are a few:
Lykke til må det gå godt 😀
“Good luck may it go well :-D”
Å så gøy krysser fingrene for dere:) må det gå godt nå 🙂
“Oh what fun crossing (my) fingers for you:) may it go well now :)”
masse lykke til ,må det gå bra med både mor og barn
“Lots of good luck ,may it go well with both mother and child”
Må du få en god dag, og helg❤️klem
“May you have a good day, and weekend❤️hugs”
I may add that even if this construction is colloquial rather than literary, especially the greeting in the last example tastes of Danish.
These won’t change meaning much if we replace må with måtte, but the wish sounds firmer with må.
It’s all imperatives in Middle Bulgarian in that prayer. It’s kind of its thing.
You comment prompted me to consult my Holy Bible (something I don’t do very often), mainly to see if it said “Authorized” or “Authorised”. To my surprise it says neither: it says “Appointed to be read in Churches”.
“Appointed Version” just doesn’t have the same pizzazz.
I think I was wrong about “King James Version” being originally American, though. It’s just that Americans never took to calling it “Authorised”* (and quite right, too.)
* Or even (what with being American and all) “Authorized.”
OED (2017):
I must say, “versioned into the King James version” is awkward phrasing; “quirky Aramaic throat-clearer,” on the other hand, is quite nice.
David Eddyshaw: the Vulgate uses subjunctives in The Lord’s prayer, and since this was the immediate source of the original translations into the various older forms of Modern Germanic languages (+Celtic + Romance minus Romanian) this is more immediately relevant than the forms used in the original Biblical Greek (to say nothing of the Palestinian Aramaic original, obviously) -which in turn makes me wonder: the Reformation was the trigger for the study of Greek (+ Hebrew) in Protestant Europe: were the various translations of the Lord’s Prayer modified in any way over time to bring them more in line with the Greek original?
I sense a doctoral dissertation could be written on the topic, if it has not been already…
quirky Aramaic throat-clearer
I vaguely recall reading of a Higher Critic who, having disposed to his satisfaction of the evidence for the authenticity of any of the logia attributed to Jesus in the New Testament, concluded that the only thing we can say for certain is that he had a verbal tic of starting off with Ἀμὴν ἀμὴν λέγω ὑμῖν (only in Aramaic.) Apparently there is some dispute over how unusual (if at all) this was in the local Aramaic. “Quirky” perhaps reflects that …
were the various translations of the Lord’s Prayer modified in any way over time to bring them more in line with the Greek original?
The translators of the KJV/AV made quite a thing of the fact that they regarded their version as being from the “original tongues”, but they were pretty flexible about it. The Lord’s Prayer actually has jussive subjunctives (still a live thing in the English of that time, of course.)
Bishop Morgan’s Welsh 1688 version, also translated from Greek, has 3rd person imperatives in the active and 3rd person subjunctives in the impersonal (passive, approximately), but there aren’t any impersonal imperative forms in the language.
(Deled dy deyrnas, Gwneler dy ewyllys “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done.”)
Actually, I see that there was a distinct imperative impersonal in Middle Welsh, but the form was identical to that of the subjunctive except when the subjunctive showed devoicing of stem-final stops (a relic of the -h- subjunctive.) That’s gone even in hifalutin Literary Welsh now, except in a few fossilised expressions, so the forms have in fact just fallen together.
The expression translated in the King James Version as a solemn ‘Verily I say unto you’ is actually a quirky Aramaic throat-clearer
Obvs the KJV, like all other translations of the New Testament, is a translation of the Greek, not the Aramaic, since we don’t have it. But my understanding is intermediate: what the hypothetical Aramaic said would have been close to “Amen amen I tell you”, with a relatively late amen-first construction.
Bishop Morgan’s Welsh 1588* version, sorry. (I was being summoned to dinner. But that is no excuse. I am ashame.)
* The English seem to associate this date with some minor naval skirmish. I forget the details.
tastes of Danish: Actual current Danish prefers V2 in such routine wishes: Nu må du komme godt hjem, for instance. The pre-field adverb is mostly a filler, but the slot can be used for more marked material if needed: Ses vi i morgen? Ellers må du have det godt! = ‘Will I see you tomorrow? If not, be well!’
Without the filler, må becomes marked and emphatic. Comparing må and måtte, måtte carries less conviction, sort of “it would be nice if.” Må dit navn blive holdt helligt might actually be even better in Fadervor.
Yes!
It’s quite curious how not a single ship of the Spanish Armada was to be found at any time anywhere in the Irish Sea: they orbited the British Isles quite as if they were still contiguous dry land.
It’s also quite curious how armada in Spanish means ‘navy’ rather than ‘army’. Armey un armada, perhaps.
I don’t suppose you’d go through the Minch if you didn’t have to. (Or through Sruth na Maoile, whose English name has temporarily escaped me – the gap between Kintyre and Antrim.) There’s a whole big Atlantic out there, less full of rocks and strange currents.
The British Isles never were a single island, at least not in or after the last interglacial; at the end of the last glacial, Ireland was already isolated when Britain was still a peninsula. That’s why there aren’t any snakes in Ireland, for example.
That’s why there aren’t any snakes in Ireland, for example.
Not a bit of it. As is well known, the absence of snakes in Ireland is due to a miracle performed by a Welshman.
(i’ve just discovered that he is the patron saint of Nigeria. Our boy done good. However, there are snakes in Nigeria. These are deep waters.)
a miracle performed by a Welshman.
A Scotsman, I think you mean.
He seems to have left the snakes everywhere else he went – maybe he actually liked snakes and the Irish had annoyed him.
maybe he actually liked snakes and the Irish had annoyed him
Possible. Possible …
Regarding the coda:
No wonder all serious editions of the Greek New Testament since Tischendorff banish the coda to the critical apparatus.
That misunderstanding goes
right back to the beginning.
The Sea of Moyle. Unless you mean the North Channel, which is clearly not a name that was bestowed by a Scot.
The fact that it doesn’t have a decent English name may in fact be the reason why I can never remember it…
That’s where ammonites come from. (And it’s why snake heads were sometimes carved into them.)
It all fits, I tell you …
If WP is to be believed, Ghana hasn’t got a patron saint. This seems wrong. You’d have thought they’d be queueing up.
(Perhaps Nkrumah put it in the constitution.)
I was exactly wrong about Palestinian Jewish Aramaic substituting 3rd sg masculine imperfecitve n- for y- like Syriac in my comment above; I was misremembering the Babylonian Jewish Aramaic (and Mandaic) substitution of l- for y-. (This makes a lot more sense, as Syriac in fact goes with those dialects, not the Western/Palestinian ones, in the basic East/West division of Middle Aramaic.)
Palestinian Jewish Aramaic does in fact have some l- forms too, but that is by no means any kind of isogloss with Syriac. Even Biblical Aramaic does this, but only with the verb “be”, possibly to avoid “he is/wiil be/should be” looking like the Name of God (though it presumably means at least that l-forms were already Out There by then.)
Apologies for any confusion …
It is correct that in all of these dialects the original imperfective has been displaced by constructions with participles to the extent that it is usually to be interpreted as modal (subjunctive/jussive/imperative.) So that would be the correct way of reading the imperfectives in the Kaddish. (No surprises there, of course.)
I think that would already have been the case in first-century Palestine (and thus in the presumed original version of the Paternoster.)
Some earlier discussions of Bible translations that, while purported to be directly from Greek, manifestly are not.
Here’s an assortment of alternatives to “hallowed be thy name” from various recent-ish (as in over the last century or so) English translations of the New Testament:
may your name be kept holy
your name be honored as holy [no introductory verb …]
help us to honor your name
may your holy name be honored
may your name be honored
let thy name be hallowed
may thy name be kept holy
uphold the holiness of your name
may your name always be kept holy
let your name be treated as holy
let your name be kept holy
may your name be honored for its holiness
may your name be held in honor
may your name be revered as holy
may your name be revered
let your name remain holy
Leaving aside that some of these are obviously looser (more “dynamic” as they say in the Bible-translation biz) than others, I’m not sure if there’s any real pattern in the variation between “let NP be VERBED” constructions and “may NP be VERBED” constructions. Not sure how much of that is an inconsistent sense of the semantic difference between those constructions in English versus different senses of how to standardly represent the particular conjugated form of the Greek verb in English versus different senses of how the semantics/pragmatics shift when one is using an imperative construction toward God rather than a fellow human.