The Lord Has Come and Is Not Gone Yet
Now you hear Christmas carols on every corner of the street. Last weekend, I had a Christmas concert with my choir at an old people’s home. It was fun to sing #German , French and #English carols, among others “Joy to the World”.
For sure, you must have heard its lyrics once: Joy to the World, the Lord is come…
When I heard this line in English for the first time, my curiosity as a linguist was awakened. Apparently, this sentence sounds very natural for my German co-singers. Modern German “(Der Herr) ist gekommen” is a mirror copy of “is come”.
Out of curiosity, I looked up this grammar issue in one of the old textbooks from my student days:
“The perfect and pluperfect of intransitive verbs could be expressed in Old English by the verb to “be” and the participle, as we still do in sentences like 'Babylon is fallen'….“
Nowadays, we hear both “Babylon has fallen” and “Babylon is fallen” whereby “fallen” in the latter is regarded as an #adjective . “Is fallen” is an expression describing the state “being fallen” for modern English users.
Accordingly, the feeling I got when reading “the Lord is come” is a mixture of perfect and present (“be + adjective”).
While pondering these language aspects, the following question came to mind:
How does its translation in Japanese go?
This Christmas evergreen is also very well known in Japan under the title “Morobito Kozorite“ (もろびとこぞりて).
There, “the Lord is come” reads as follows:
主は 来 ませ り [Shu wa Kimaseri]
Ki (verb for “come”) + masu (auxiliary verb expressing respect) + Ri (auxiliary verb for perfect tense)
The ending Ri (り) is archaic Japanese (古語). Thus, I looked up its use in a bulky Japanese dictionary at hand, Koji-en published by Iwanami Shoten (広辞苑/岩波書店):
り〖助動〗
完了した結果が続いていることをいう。
= RI: an auxiliary verb expressing that an action has been completed and the result of which has continued to be present.
Wow! That reflects the same feeling of a mixture of perfect and present as I mentioned above.
The Lord has come, and he is still there. The Japanese translation “来ませり” implies exactly that. How beautiful!