Now I Am Become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds — J. Robert Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer famously quoted this from The Bhagavad Geeta in the context of the nuclear bomb. The way this sentence is structured feels weird to me. “Now I am Death” or “Now I have become Death” sound much more natural in English to me.

Was he trying to simulate some formulation in Sanskrit that is not available in the English language?

  • 31415926535
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    1 year ago

    Only tangentially related: Latin, the dead language, heavily tied into romantic, classical education. I recently found out that Latin in general wouldn’t say, I did this, but instead, this was done. Less of an emphasis on individual agency. Fascinating aspects about linguistics, how thought, sense of self has evolved over millenia.

    • redlaWw@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I don’t think that’s quite right - I’m not fluent in latin, but I know it has both passive and active conjugations for its verbs, so you can express both the idea of doing something and the idea of something being done.

      • pchem@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        Yes, but the tendency is there. Notably, “Alea iacta est” (commonly translated as “The die has fallen”) is closer in literal meaning to “The die has been thrown”.

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        1 year ago

        I took 2 years of Latin in high school, but that was decades ago, so you may be right