Surely many people have heard, “all your base are belong to us”. It is a popular internet meme from 2000.
The Wikipedia page calls it “broken English”, but it seems as if some translations of The Bible use the same construction, as evident in this question:
Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new. —II Corinthians 5:17
If “all things are become new” is correct, then could “all your base are belong to us” also be correct? Do both of these follow the same form?
Best Answer
No, they are completely different constructions.
Become in the phrase “are become” is the past participle, and the construction is an older form of “have become”. (It’s just a coincidence that become has the same form in its infinitive and its past participle).
Older English often used forms of be to form the perfect of some verbs, particularly verbs of motion, and verbs of change of state, where today we would use forms of have. You can find many examples of “is come”, “are arrived”, “is changed” and so on. The parallel construction is still used in French: “je suis arrivé” (“I am arrived”) as opposed to “j’ai vu” (“I have seen”).
But belong does not function as the past participle of belong: a parallel construction would be “they are belonged to”, which is not grammatical because belong is transitive (takes an object) so its perfect was never formed with be. In any case, the meaning of “all your base are belong to us” is not perfect.