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Is this sentence in italics correct grammatically? Is it written in inverted order? If we rewrite this sentence, is it Came from Twitter?

From Twitter came, "@dannyhakim Pictures of flooded Arkville, N.Y., here: http://t.co/ldJCEFb and here:http://t.co/tp44UFd #irene #catskills" -- CNN

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Looks like standard English to me - no different to John said "Hi", as opposed to "Hi", said John. Voting to close as "general reference - too basic". – FumbleFingers Sep 1 '11 at 20:45
Thursagen's answer below is correct - it is grammatically correct, but just barely. The only way I, as an American English speaker would use it would be slightly ironically, as in "From Twitter cometh..." – Chris B. Behrens Sep 1 '11 at 20:58

closed as general reference by FumbleFingers, Daniel δ, simchona♦, kiamlaluno, z7sg Ѫ Sep 5 '11 at 22:35

This question is too basic; it can be definitively and permanently answered by a single link to a standard internet reference source designed specifically to find that type of information. See the FAQ for guidance on how to improve it.

2 Answers

up vote 1 down vote

This sentence is grammatically correct. If you were to rewrite it, it would be came from Twitter, but it would have been placed at the end of the sentence:

"Pictures of flooded Arkville, N.Y., here: http://t.co/ldJCEFb and here:http://t.co/tp44UFd #irene #catskills" came from Twitter by @dannyhakim-- CNN

Also involves changing the location of who sent it, for clarity.

The sentence "From Twitter came" means that the picture loaded of Arkville flooded was obtained from Twitter. That is, the person sent these pictures via Twitter.

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up vote 1 down vote

This is an example of heavy noun-phrase shift in English. The long quotation from Twitter is a very heavy noun-phrase (meaning it is very long), but it is still the syntactic subject of the verb "came". Since the subject is very long, it can be hard to understand the standard word order "X came from Y." In this case, it becomes more grammatical to say "From Y came X."

Note that this kind of shifting is still subject to many grammatical restrictions in English. Among others, the prepositional phrase "from Y" must be moved as a unit, the sentence can't start with the verb, and the order "came X"="verb subject" is only possible for unaccusative verbs like "come".

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