Saturday, November 10, 2018

Is this valid in your English? It is in mine.


In the following snip of dialogue, correlate in one man's sentence is followed by its relative pronoun in another man's sentence. I have underlined correlate and the relative.

Henrikas Klovas
Follow the link, “Starting in the late 3rd century BCE, politicians began distributing grain to the lower classes, mostly to men who could vote, in an effort to gain popularity and get elected…”

Hans-Georg Lundahl
Which takes care of a certain claim that "the present concern" St Paul was talking of to Corinthians was not a question on relative values overall of marriage and virginity, but a famine.

It needed no famine to have grain distributions in Roman Empire.


I can restate my sentence this way:

The fact, that “[s]tarting in the late 3rd century BCE, politicians began distributing grain to the lower classes, mostly to men who could vote, in an effort to gain popularity and get elected…”, takes care of a certain claim that "the present concern" St Paul was talking of to Corinthians was not a question on relative values overall of marriage and virginity, but a famine.

Or, if even this is too big a mouthful for you, like this:

The fact, that “[s]tarting in the late 3rd century BCE, politicians began distributing grain to the lower classes, mostly to men who could vote, in an effort to gain popularity and get elected…”, is a fact that takes care of a certain claim that "the present concern" St Paul was talking of to Corinthians was not a question on relative values overall of marriage and virginity, but a famine.

It seems, today all Bibles I can access have replaced "the present concern" with "the thing you were writing about", but that is another matter.

My point is, as given in next sentence of mine : It needed no famine to have grain distributions in Roman Empire.

In other words, "it is better for a man not to marry" was written as an answer about God's normal everyday preferences for Christian lives and not as an answer about what urgency measure to take in a famine.

Perhaps some people don't think it is good grammar to use the other guy's last sentence as correlate for a relative pronoun starting your first one, but I do.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
St Andrew Avellini
10.XI.2018

PS, Since someone wondered about the use of neuter pronoun:

Hans-Georg Lundahl
neuter pronouns also refer to verbs and sentences

that is for instance their only function in Spanish, where lo can never refer to a neuter noun, since Spanish has only masculine and feminine ones

it is also one of the neuter pronouns' functions in Latin and Greek

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