Peter,

Conjoined clauses could both begin with "et" in the sense of "both ..., and".  However, there was no punctuation at the time, so it's a little hard to tell sometimes what ws a sentence beginning and what was a clause beginning.  But Latin also had as set of words rather like our conjunctive adverbs, words like "etiam", lit. "and now" but could mean any of "even, still, yet, also, besides".  Usually these words would occur in second position in a clause, but, given the relatively free word order of Classical Latin, they could occur elsewhere.

Herhb


-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar on behalf of Peter Adams
Sent: Mon 9/11/2006 4:28 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Conjunctive Adverbs
 

In a message dated 9/11/06 11:15:16 AM, [log in to unmask] writes:


> By the way, the fuzziness of the categories "conjunction" and "adverb" 
> becomes particularly clear when you consider all the "But, ." and "And, .", 
> where, in speech, the "but" or "and" would have clause intonation.  Of 
> course, there is a proscription on beginning sentences with conjunctions, a 
> proscription that is a handy way for writing teachers to eliminate one source of 
> problems.  But, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with starting a sentence 
> with a conjunction.  So are "but" and "and" in these usages conjunctions, 
> adverbs, qualifiers, conjunctive adverbs, .?
> 
Great question, Herb.   So does anyone have any idea when or where or why 
this proscription originated?   Is beginning a sentence with et prohibited in 
Latin?



Peter Adams

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