To nonnative English speakers seeking greater mastery of English, some sentence constructions they encounter in their readings just don’t seem to follow the grammar rules that they have taken too much pains to learn. A Forum member who goes by the username Hairstyler asked for my help sometime ago in deconstructing four such grammatically puzzling sentences.
Sentence #1: “It costs little and helps much—everyone is honored who gives honor. Politeness and honor have this advantage, that they remain with him who displays them to others.”
Question: Can the clause “everyone is honored who gives honor” be changed to “everyone who gives honor is honored”? And what does the word “that” in that sentence represent?”
Sentence #2: “Therefore pay respect that you may be respected, and know that to be esteemed you must show esteem.”
Question: Why is it that the sentence above doesn’t have a subject? What sentence structure does it have?
Sentence #3: “It is preposterous to take to heart that which you should just throw over your shoulders.”
Question: In the sentence above, what does the word “which” represent and why is “that” positioned before “which”?
Sentence #4: “Much that would be something has become nothing by being left alone, and what was nothing has become of consequence by being made much of.”
Question: Please explain why the word “being” is positioned before the phrases “left alone” and “made much of” in the sentence above. Are those phrases adjective attributes that need to add the word “being” before them to become noun attributes?
My answers to Hairstyler’s questions:I was wondering why you have come up with so many abstruse and convoluted English sentences—people just don’t talk or write English like that anymore—so I was tempted to check where you were getting all of them. I wasn’t surprised to find out that they are from a Victorian English translation of a book written originally in Spanish. They are from
Oraculo manual y arte de prudencia (“The Art of Worldly Wisdom”), written in 1637 by the Spanish-born Jesuit priest Balthasar Gracian (1601-1658) and translated into English by the Australia-born British folklorist and literary critic Joseph Jacobs in 1892.
I raise these points not to question the grammatical and structural integrity of those four baffling sentences. It’s simply that those four
aphorisms—which, as you may already know, are pithy formulations of someone’s sentiment or perception—used the peculiar English syntax of a bygone era in an attempt to capture the flavor and cadence of ideas expressed in the linguistically more difficult Spanish tongue.
So, if those sentences sound inscrutable to you, it’s not necessarily because your English isn’t good enough. It’s just that their English is too arcane or convoluted to the modern mind and ear—even to native English speakers, I dare say.
Now let’s deconstruct Sentence #1: “It costs little and helps much—everyone is honored who gives honor. Politeness and honor have this advantage, that they remain with him who displays them to others.”
Yes, the clause “everyone is honored who gives honor” is grammatically equivalent to “everyone who gives honor is honored.” That form is called a
discontinuous noun phrase construction. It breaks the noun phrase “everyone who gives honor” to allow for the insertion and earlier appearance of the verb phrase “is honored.” This grammatical technique delays the modifying phrase “who gives honor” until the end of the clause, giving it greater emphasis.
So, you ask, what’s the word “that” doing in that aphorism’s second sentence, “Politeness and honor have this advantage,
that they remain with him who displays them to others”? It’s actually the usual subordinating conjunction at work in a complex sentence, grammatically linking the dependent clause “they remain with him who displays them to others” as a modifier of the noun “advantage” in the main clause.
Let’s deconstruct Sentence #2: “Therefore pay respect that you may be respected, and know that to be esteemed you must show esteem.”
You asked why that sentence doesn’t have a subject, and what kind of sentence structure it has.
Take note that that sentence is in the
imperative form. As we know, imperatives normally omit the subject and doer of the action and sometimes even the receiver of the action, as in this command: “Attention!” Similarly, that sentence you presented is the emphatic form of this sentence: “Therefore
you must pay respect that you may be respected, and
you must know that to be esteemed you must show esteem yourself.”
Let’s deconstruct Sentence #3: “It is preposterous to take to heart that which you should just throw over your shoulders.”
In that sentence, you asked, what does the word “which” represent and why is “that” positioned before “which”?
Take note that that sentence is a
complex sentence consisting of two clauses:
the main clause “it is preposterous to take to heart (something)” and the
subordinate clause “(it is) something you should just throw over your shoulders.” These clauses are then linked and combined into a complex sentence by the subordinating conjunction “that”: “It is preposterous to take to heart something
that you should just throw over your shoulders.”
However, the peculiar syntax of Victorian English knocked off the subject “something” (probably because it detracted from the aphoristic quality of the statement) and replaced it with the relative pronoun “which.” With “something” gone from the main clause, the complex sentence would work properly only if “which” is positioned after the subordinating conjunction “that.” Grammatically, in that position, “which” can serve both as subject of the subordinate clause and as object of the main clause: “It is preposterous to take to heart that
which you should just throw over your shoulders.”
In modern-day English, that aphorism could be stated more simply as follows: “If you find something preposterous to take to heart, just throw it over your shoulders.” A less prepossessing, nonchalant rendition—but admittedly no longer sounding aphoristic—is this: “Just throw over your shoulders what you find too preposterous to take seriously.”
Let’s deconstruct Sentence #4: “Much that would be something has become nothing by being left alone, and what was nothing has become of consequence by being made much of.”
You asked me to explain why the word “being” is positioned before the phrases “left alone” and “made much of” in that sentence. Also, you asked if those phrases are
adjective attributes that need to add the word “being” before them to become
noun attributes.
That sentence does sound like a jumble because it is a tougher, even more convoluted form of Victorian English. Before attempting to simplify it, though, let me first answer your question about its use of the word “being” twice.
Yes, I suppose you can say that the word “being” was added to each of the phrases “left alone” and “made much of” to make them acquire the attribute of nouns. A simpler grammatical explanation, however, is that the addition of “being” was meant
to turn those adjective phrases into gerund phrases, which as you know function as nouns in sentences. The presence of the preposition “by” before those gerund phrases clearly indicates that they are functioning as
objects of the preposition in their respective clauses.
In terms of sentence structure, that aphorism is in the form of a compound sentence consisting of two coordinate clauses joined by the coordinating conjunction “and.” Roughly, a simpler but fully stated rendition of it in modern English would be as follows: “Many consequential things turn to nothing when left alone, and some inconsequential things become consequential when we give too much importance to them.”
I trust that the grammatical deconstructions we performed on those four aphorisms in Victorian English have given you a clear idea how present-day American English has greatly simplified the grammar and syntax of the language.
This essay, 755th and 756th in the series, first appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the September 3 and 10, 2011 issues of The Manila Times
, © 2011 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.
