УРОК 19

GRAMMAR COMMENTARY

19.1. Aspect-Tense Markers with Predicatives (continued)

We are already familiar with the marker of completion of an action 既 jì, as well as the grammatically opposed function word 肇 zhào.

The third marker of the same group is 將 jiāng. It indicates that an action will take place in the future:

賜汝彝一,將寳 cì rǔ yì yī jiāng bǎo "I give you one sacrificial vessel, [and you] will use it as a treasure."

19.2. Interrogative Pronouns

An entirely new group of pronouns appearing in the pre-classical language are interrogative pronouns. They are used to formulate a specific question.

In the early pre-classical language, only one interrogative pronoun is noted: 曷 hé. It would be more accurate to call it a universal interrogative word. It can replace the subject, object, and adverbial modifier indicating the characteristics of an action. Accordingly, it can be translated as "who?", "what?", "whom?", "how?", "why?", etc., for example:

邦將曷吉 bāng jiāng hé jí "How will the state achieve success?"

19.3. Inversion of the definition of the complement

The definition of the complement, like any other part of the sentence, comes immediately before the word (phrase) to which it refers. When this definition needs logical emphasis, it changes its position in the sentence, i.e., it is inverted.

In this case, the complement attribute takes a position before the subject, becoming a kind of topic of the utterance, and its usual place is occupied by the third person personal pronoun 厥 jué: