An Unfortunate Thing in English

I'm not a comparative linguist, so I'm speaking outside of my field here, but it occurred to me that there is one unfortunate aspect of English syntax when it comes to prayer.

In English, we pray the "Our Father;" the possessive adjective precedes the noun. In Latin, Spanish, and German, the possessive adjective appears after the noun (Pater noster, Padre nuestro, Vater unser).

It would appear that French, like English, also places the possessive first...maybe we learnt it from them.

Anyway, my point is that we anglophones end up putting ourselves first in the prayer, whereas others put God first...by merely following grammatical nuance.

Does this have any kind of significance in the way we pray? Maybe. Maybe not. But the next time you pray the Our Father, you might want to think about which of those two words you put the most stress on. Are we more concerned with the fact that He is our Father, or the fact that He is our Father.  (Most of us are probably just muttering ourFatherwhoartinHeaven so it doesn't really make much of a difference, anyway.)

Obviously, we can force the stress on either word, but the fact of the matter is that, in English, we somehow think that the possessing of something deserves more primacy in the sentence than the actual object being possessed. We can imagination owning something before we even get to what we own.

In effect, when your brain is computing the words in the sentence, it probably ends up imagining who does the owning first. Other languages want the listener to imagine an object of some type (in this sense "father"), and then qualify what they are imagining (no, not that father, this Father). I suppose this makes English more efficient, since we aren't constantly correcting the prototypes that words generate...but its efficiency may, in this instance, come at a small fractional cost of humility.

Comments

[Thomas]

Peter,

Although you are the first one I have heard to raise this issue about the Our Father, you have hit on a topic of strong debate regarding Latin-English translation. If you have read classical poetry or other Latin literature, you know that great care is given to word order choice, and the first and the last words (naturally) are considered to have the most emphasis. Latin's freedom with regard to word order gives you the ability to place emphasis very precisely. The debate is how much of good English style is worth sacrificing to preserve the nuance.

For instance, the beginning of the current English version of the Roman Canon (aka Eucharistic Prayer I) says "We come to you, Father, with praise and thanksgiving through Jesus Christ..." while the original Latin runs more like "You therefore, O most merciful Father, through Jesus Christ Your Son Our Lord, we humbly entreat...".