Re: Grammar in HS (Was: Re: Argument Structures)

On Fri, Aug 25, 2000 at 09:19:13AM -0400, John Cowan wrote:
> On Fri, 25 Aug 2000, andrew wrote:
>
> > I believe the oldest of these children are of an age where they are
> > entering universities in New Zild.  These are the same children who ten
> > years ago saw nothing wrong with starting sentences with 'And...' or
> > didn't recognise the existence of other verbs beyond 'got'.
>
> And just what's wrong with starting sentences with "and"?  Various monuments
> of our literature, notably including the KJV, do it all the time.
[snip]

I wouldn't use the KJV to argue for the use of "and" at the beginning of a
sentence... IIRC, those "and"'s are from the original language (Hebrew,
perhaps the Greek as well?), and they don't *quite* means the same thing
as "and" and English. In particular, I remember reading something about
the use of the conjunction "and" to introduce a *different* or new train
of thought in a passage. Something like that... sorry, it's been a while
since I read that, so this may not be completely accurate. My point,
though, is that translated documents often aren't exactly the best guides
for style, because they necessarily have to reflect the structure of the
original language if the translator wants to preserve the original meaning
as much as possible.


T