Dear Rainer, Philip Sidney is not the only writer to begin sentences with a conjunction. I have just picked up the first book I could find by Goethe, and immediately spotted a sentence beginning with "Und" (_Die Leiden des Jungen Werther_, May 26th): "Und da k�me ein Philister". Next I opened my collected Shakespeare at random, and found, "But I'd say he had not" (_The Winter's Tale_, Act 2, Scene 1). Many verses in the Bible start with "And it came to pass". The world is full of sentences beginning with conjunctions, often from very eminent writers, but that still doesn't make it grammatically correct.
Only too well aware of the discrepancy between theory and practice, I confess I had difficulty deciding how best to give the grammatical rule, while at the same time accepting that the rule is often broken. After many attempts I came up with "One should not normally begin a sentence with "But", which seemed the best way round it. Just for the record, I never begin sentences with "And" or "But". An editor once changed something I had written to include a sentence beginning with "And", and published it without telling me what he'd done. I nearly blew a fuse. :-) Best wishes, Stewart. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Spring, aus dem, Rainer" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Lute Net" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Wednesday, September 22, 2004 9:50 AM Subject: RE: Vihuela vs guitar > > Dear Stewart, > > > > > 1) One should not normally begin a sentence with "But", since "but" > > is a word used to co-ordinate two parts of a sentence. > > Have a look at Sidney's Arcadia :) > > Best wishes, > > Rainer aus dem Spring To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
