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Can "he who" be simplified to "who"? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4890 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes  Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 9 of 14 10 August 2015 at 9:12pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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It's a nice sentence, but I think you'd have to change the entire construct to make it
sound more modern. 'He who,' 'comes to,' and 'shall be' all sound archaic. In casual spoken English you'd probably say something along the lines of "if you try and destroy Samarkand you'll end up being destroyed yourself" - which doesn't have near the same force or power of the original. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5237 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 10 of 14 11 August 2015 at 4:16pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
My choice was based on the original quote, so I used himself. So although you could happily swap himself for themselves to cover everyone, you'd lose the gender specific aspect of the orignal wording. Makes me glad I'm not a translator! :) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5227 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 11 of 14 13 August 2015 at 2:17pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Sorry for asking such a dumb question and thank you for the answers, I should have slept before posting (something I often fail to do), but you know... I'm glad, however, you devoted some time to the interesting side question that arose -- why exactly this sentence sounds the way it does :)
I appreciate the comments, but no, I'm not wondering if I should use this construct in normal conversation, nor trying to make it sound more modern, or casual. I think it's quite safe to assume the right contexts to use it can be picked up, well... from context: this is engraved in stone, at the gates of a city in the middle of the Silk Road, facing an invasion by Genghis Khan's hordes in the XIIIth century... as depicted in a film made in the 50s -- this has to sound powerful, solemn, a tad archaic maybe, and goddamn scary to possible aggressors, traitors, and spies who enter the walls of the city. Or to anyone superstitious, anyway. But I am indeed one who often enjoys speaking like Don Quixote, or like I am quoting the Bible, which is one reason why I love to pick this kind of stuff. However, I'm not clear you people quite agree on this:
OTOH,
But it may be just a matter of individual differences in perception. Any further thoughts on this? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5229 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 12 of 14 13 August 2015 at 3:57pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Both versions sound formal and stilted. Not to knock that--the original phrase, as written, formal and stilted as it may be, sounds great. I prefer the first, but I think it's just the rhythm. When I say the phrase, "he" takes a stress which gives the phrase an initial punch. But who, as I read it, receives no stress by itself, so using the "who" version the first stressed syllable is comes, so it feels like I'm sliding into the sentence, rather than starting it with a bang. HE who COMES vs. who COMES. And the phrase, given it's subject matter, seems to fit better with an initial stress.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 13 of 14 13 August 2015 at 4:25pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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From a purely grammatical perspective the construction with jusy "who.." has a clause that acts as the subject in its own right (it could be other functions, but subjects are most common), whereas the clause in the "he who.." is a relative clause attached to a fairly neutral word. In English the tendency with the 'independent' clause has been to use "whoever" instead, and to me as a second language learner that sounds like a much more modern alternative. And this has the consequence that if you use "he who" then you are much more likely to think in concrete terms, because the generalized meaning would be expressed by "whoever..."
However from the same purely grammatical standpoint the same schisma exists between for instance "when(ever)...." and "the moment when ".. ", and the same applies to "where(ever) .." and "the place where ...", and here with the adverbial functions the 'clean' versions still function smoothly. In for instance French the tendency has been to cut down on the independent "qui.." clauses and use "celui qui" or maybe thing like "qui que ce soit qui..". In Danish we have a few fixed phrases like "hvo intet vover intet vinder" (who nothing dares nothing wins), and here even the pronoun used is in an other stonedead form. In modern Danish we would say "den der.." or "hvem der", i.e. we would use constructions based on dummywords with an added relative clause. Edited by Iversen on 13 August 2015 at 4:33pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5227 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 14 of 14 14 August 2015 at 10:10pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I guess it depends on the learner. If I bumped into "he who" in a modern English text, I would certainly think it is oddly specific in the absence of additional context, as if women were effectively being ruled out. However, I wouldn't (and didn't) bat an eye at it -- [in]accurate as it may be (any input on this?), it's obviously a portrait of how people were supposed to speak back then, unlike many modern films and series where they don't even try.
Thank you very much for this! I forgot whether the sentence was read aloud, but "he who comes" certainly sounds much powerful to me -- in Spanish prosody there's no word stress (except for monosyllabic words, that is) so the rhythm is quite constant and I tend to overlook stress-dependent rhythm patterns in my TLs. Incidentally, the Spanish counterpart sounds much better as well if you say 'Aquel que venga...' instead of 'Quien venga' or 'El que venga' (this last one sounds oddly specific as well -- but that "el" is the masculine article, not the pronoun :) Edited by mrwarper on 14 August 2015 at 10:11pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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