“you and me.” I’m a Pittsburgher, so I do have a strange dialect, but I don’t think that’s it. I think I figured out what it is, though. “Killed” is both the simple past and past participle of “to kill.” So when I hear “is killed,” despite being the participle, my brain refuses to hear it that way. It hears the simple past tense and tells me it’s wrong.
When you say “Caesar is slew by Brutus,” you hear what I’m hearing. If I say “Caesar is slain by Brutus,” I hear what you’re hearing.
Ahhhh. Much better.
What the hell? Who says “tomorrow, [subject] is…”? You’d either say “tomorrow my wife has to work,” or “tomorrow my wife will go to work,” or “tomorrow my wife is going to go to work.” In the latter case, you need to have the second verb phrase. You can tell because while you can say “I’m gonna eat tomorrow,” you can’t say “I’m gonna Chicago tomorrow.” That is, you can say “Tomorrow my wife is going to [verb],” but not “Tomorrow my wife is going to [noun].”
Secondly, why would you say “Tomorrow, Johnny is on the green team.”? It’s “Johnny will be on…”
As you say, it’s informal. Everyone knows it’s wrong. It’s no different than “Who dat?”
Well it may be another dialectal thing, but a sentence like “the SDMB is down for maintenance this evening” sounds completely normal and correct to me. As does “… will be down for maintenance”. The present/non-past tense version seems particularly prevalent in what I think of as the “itinerary” tense: “Tomorrow we are in Paris, Tuesday we’re in Brussels, and then we travel to Cologne overnight”.
(Speaker of British English.)
It sounds perfectly normal to me, as an American, to hear the present tense used in certain contexts to mean the near future. For some reason The SDMB is down this evening doesn’t sound quite as natural as The SDMB goes down this evening, but that in itself may be a matter of dialect.
to focus too closely on the sentence structure and grammar could mean that the intent and function is overlooked. Although archaic, this sentence is not only
declarative, it is imperative. - Christ is risen …SO…do whatever Christians do
Now that this thread is risen again, I’d like to ask about this. At the time of the King James translation (1604 - 1611) would has risen have been gramatical? If it would have been, how certain are we that the two forms were exactly equivalent? It seems unlikely to me that different forms are ever precisely equivalent, although the difference may be hard to explicate (and probably varies by the individual in such cases). I also find it very hard to read any sentence with be instead of have as the modal and NOT read into it at least some element of the distinction I hear between He has gone and he is gone (which I agree I hear as copula + adjective).
The KJV only uses a form of ‘be’ with ‘risen’. This includes phrases like ‘If the sun be risen’, ‘my people is risen up as an enemy’, and ‘When therefore he was risen from the dead’.
Other Bibles for this part of Mat 28:6 :
Wycliffe: “for he is risun, as he seide”.
Tyndale : “he is rysen as he sayde”.
Verbs that use ‘has[t]’ include ‘ridden’, ‘done’, ‘driven [out]’, ‘eaten’.
It appears ‘gone’ went with both. For the have form, there is ‘hast gone a whoring’, ‘I have not gone after Baalim’, ‘have gone the way which the Lord sent me’, and of course ‘all we like sheep have gone astray’.
Of the second: ‘thy sister in law is gone back unto her people’, ‘the children of Israel were gone forth out of Egypt’, ‘when ye be gone over Jordan’, ‘thou art gone backward’.
Shakespeare has ‘has gone’ only once; but ‘is gone’ in many places.
Here are some interesting comparisons on the early variation with the verb ‘go’. Sources are the Wycliffe Bible (14th Century), Tyndale’s translations (early 16th Century), and the KJV (early 17th Century). Verses and Chapters are per the KJV.
Some of the verbs don’t always match up:
2 Sa 6:13
WYC And whanne thei, that baren the arke of the Lord, hadden stied six paaces,
KJV when they that bare the ark of the LORD had gone six paces
Acts 23:19
WYC And the tribune took his hoond, and wente with hym asidis half
TYN The hye captayne toke him by the hond and wet a parte with him out of the waye:
KJV And the chiliarch having taken him by the hand, and having gone apart in private,
1 Thes 1:8
WYC but youre feith that is to God, in ech place is gon forth;
TYN youre fayth also which ye have vnto god spred her silfe abroade in all quartars
KJV but in every place your faith which [is] towards God has gone abroad,
But notice this one, with the earlier use of ‘had’ :
Genesis 27:5
WYC and he hadde go in to the feeld
TYN And as soone as Esau was gone to the felde
KJV And Esau went to the field
Mark 10:17
WYC And whanne Jhesus was gon out in the weie
TYN And when he was come in to the waye
KJV And when he was gone forth into the way
These are both passive constructions. My point was that we don’t normally find active-voice be+past participle.
Ah, very interesting. So if the analogy to the French avoir/être alternation is right, then, it is the unaccusative subclass of intransitive verbs that (archaically) allows for this, right?
Maybe true, but irrelevant. The OP is specifically asking about an aspect of the structure of this sentence.
False: The sentence is most definitely declarative and not imperative in its grammar. The imperative would be “Christ be risen”.
