tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Feb 09 01:05:15 2004
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Re: other person imperatives
On Sun, 08 Feb 2004 13:42:51 -0700, [email protected] wrote:
> In Finnish, the third-person imperative is quite rare in everyday
> speech, outside of a few idomatic phrases, such as "Onneksi olkoon",
> "Congratulations", which really means something more like, "May it
> (turn out to) be for happiness/luck."
It is extinct in Modern Greek outside of fixed espressions such as "Zito
o vasilias!" = "Vive le roi!" (I believe the French uses the subjunctive
here as a kind of third-person imperative [jussive?] -- and so does the
English "Long live the king!") and "Esto" = "So be it / Let ... be [e.g.
in geometry questions: Let x be the length of the hypotenuse]".
Cheers,
Philip
HovpoH 1636.43
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