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?

  • floofloof
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    11 months ago

    French and other languages still have the distinction, while English has switched to using “has” everywhere.