English term
Poland
till death do us part
| 4 +8 | it's the subjunctive |
philgoddard
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Responses
United States
Six languages into flawless English
Native in: English
Works in: German to English, French to English, Spanish to English, and 4 more.
it's the subjunctive
"This phrase [till death do us part] derives from the revised Book of Common Prayer of 1662, and the 'subjunctive' do goes back to the original edition of 1549."
| agree |
Morad Seif
8 mins
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| agree |
Charles Davis
: Yes, "do" is subjunctive. A few footnotes in the discussion area.
6 hrs
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| agree |
Victoria Britten
7 hrs
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| agree |
B D Finch
: Worth also noting that the phrase is from the marriage service.
9 hrs
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| agree |
Christine Andersen
: The words are still used in the modern Anglican service https://www.yourchurchwedding.org/article/wedding-vows/ although the language in most of the rest of the Church services is more modern.
9 hrs
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| agree |
Tony M
10 hrs
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| agree |
AllegroTrans
11 hrs
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| agree |
sam@fr-uk
12 hrs
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Discussion
It never occurred to me that I had misunderstood the meaning!
Come is subjunctive; indicative would have been cometh or comes at this time.
Here is Matthew Poole's commentary on this:
"Till he come; seek with patience and faith until he doth, as certainly he will, come; for this passage is a virtual or implicit promise that God will come to them if they seek him"
http://biblehub.com/commentaries/hosea/10-12.htm
Poole, writing in the 1670s, still uses "doth" as the indicative, though "does" was common in Southern English by then, and still uses periphrastic do, now obsolete in this context. But the main point I want to emphasise is that he says until he doth come (indicative), even though until he do come or until he come (subjunctive) were still standard when referring to future action. Poole wants to emphasise that God's coming, though future, is real, not hypothetical, so he uses the indicative, doth, after "until". So this illustrates why the subjunctive was normally used after till/until.
- The correct form of this phrase, the one that appears in the Book of Common Prayer, is "till death us do part", not "till death do us part", as it is often misquoted.
http://www.eskimo.com/~lhowell/bcp1662/occasion/marriage.htm...
Placing the object pronoun between the auxiliary do and the verb would not have been grammatically correct. The word order, with the object before the verb (instead of "till death do part us"), is perhaps consciously archaic; object-before-verb had been common in Old and Middle English.
- Use of periphrastic do here is typical of the 16th century. It is not emphatic. "Till death part us" could have been said.
- "Do" is subjunctive, as Phil says. The subjunctive was normally used after a number of conjunctions, including "till" or "until", when the action expressed was understood to be hypothetical or unreal (in this case, because it lies in the future).
- The indicative form at this time would have been "doth", not "does". "Doth" was gradually displaced by Northern English "does" from the late 16th century.