Possibly, but in English we'd say "I am death" (or Death). No "the".Hi,
These words are from a poem.
I am become death, the destroyer of the worlds.
Does that mean I am the death?
Do you mean, Why is it "I am become" and not "I have become"?what I'm wondering about is why this sentence is passive? why not active?
Yes, that's what it means here.So you mean it's equal to I have become?
Yes, that's what it means here.
"I am become death" means "I have become death".
Excellent point. I was wondering how far back it could be traced.Maybe it should be added that both French and Germanic perfect tenses have also the same root in late Proto-Indo-European times or not very long after them.
French influence isn't really necessary, as this use of "to be" as a perfect auxiliary with some intransitive verbs is an old feature of English, inherited from its Germanic past. German and Dutch still do it, in fact in roughly the same way as Italian and French. It is perfectly "normal" archaic English, like "I am come", or "thou art fallen".
How art thou fallen from heaven, O day star, son of the morning!
Out of the Great Sea to Middle-earth I am come. In this place I will abide, and my heirs, unto the ending of the world.
I'm not sure either. I certainly know less about this matter than you do, I have never studies linguistics seriously. What I said is what I read somewhere, I don't even remember where. I'm really curious what's the truth then. Saying "truth" I mean specialists opinions of course ;-)I am not sure, actually, that this particular way of forming the perfect tense can be traced back as far as that (though of course the languages concerned do go back to Indo-European). But I would need to do a bit of homework on that, and don't have any books here.
Here are a few thoughts though:
1) In Romance languages it only goes back to late Latin. This kind of thing doesn't happen in classical Latin, at least not for this class of verbs.
2) I'm not sure how far it goes back in Germanic either. It is even possible that it might have developed under Romance influence. (In which case I should have been a bit more cautious in my previous post...)
3) Ancient Greek (and I think Sanskrit) formed the perfect tense in a completely different way.
4) The Slavonic construction with -l, though similar and also quite old, is, I think, of a different origin.
I may be wrong on any or all of these, of course.
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