Now I Am Become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds — J. Robert Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer famously quoted this from The Bhagavad Geeta in the context of the nuclear bomb. The way this sentence is structured feels weird to me. “Now I am Death” or “Now I have become Death” sound much more natural in English to me.

Was he trying to simulate some formulation in Sanskrit that is not available in the English language?

  • twistedtxb@lemmy.ca
    0·
    1 year ago

    For the lazy:

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

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

    • Fuck Lemmy.World @lemmy.world
      0·
      1 year ago

      Yup it’s still like this in Dutch. It’s “ik ben … geworden” instead of “ik heb … geworden”.

      I think grammatical simplifications like this are part of the reason why English is so popular as a second language around the world. It’s just easier to learn than many other languages. Another big simplification for example is that nouns are not gendered like in most other European languages.