The Monastic Rules of Visigothic Iberia - eTheses Repository ...

and have to gloss the form with a Romance alternative that may or may not be correct, or else
they would have had to have learnt the forms formally. This incongruity in the history of
synthetic passives and deponents in early Romance is one of extreme importance. Despite
this, neither of the terms appear in the index to Wright‟s most important works (1982, 2002).
His explanation that they would have been subject to a „Romance‟ pronunciation, but perhaps
unintelligible, reveals little about their history and is in many ways unsatisfactory.
Whilst it is one thing to accommodate recognisable archaisms, it is quite another to
accommodate forms that might be utterly alien. A fitting example could be taken from the
Lord‟s Prayer, as it is written in the King James Bible of 1611. The first lines are familiar to
many English-speakers: “Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy
kingdom come.” The form of early modern English used here is still largely intelligible,
albeit through passive competence, and it possesses a bookish and archaic feel to it that some
of the higher-register Latin literature might have possessed to a Latin-speaker. However, it is
understandable only to a certain extent. Probably the majority of listeners would understand
“art” to be part of the verb „to be‟, likely, but erroneously, the third person singular, and
would recognise “thy” to be equivalent with „your‟. 575 Few listeners, if questioned, would be
575 Incidentally, “art” is the present second person singular of the verb „to be‟ and was a relic of the
earliest English translations from Latin, which uses the second person “qui es in caelis”. In itself, this
is sufficient to cause confusion. In a recent internet blog written by an academic linguist, the blogger
admits: “When I was a kid in Newfoundland, we said the Lord's Prayer every morning at school [...] I
knew 'art' was a verb, in "Our Father, who art in heaven", but I understood it as some verbal
counterpart of the noun 'art', as in skill, work, magic, the opposite of the 'dark arts' -- you know,
arcane, mysterious art. 'To art' in this sense would mean something like, 'to work (magic)'. So I
thought we were intended to be addressing "Our Father, who works (magic) in heaven..." It wasn't
until much later that it occurred to me that this was in fact just an arcane, mysterious form of the verb
'to be'.” (http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003856.html).
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