For instance, can one say “Smart is the Eastern system”?
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It is permitted. But it's unusual; you shouldn't do this unless you have a reason to (like if you're writing poetry, or the exposition works better if you mention the copula first). If you do it often, people will think your writing is pretentious, or maybe that you're trying to be overly florid.– Peter ShorCommented Jun 27, 2019 at 13:28
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I can't think of any context in which writing smart is the eastern system would be better than the eastern system is smart.– Peter ShorCommented Jun 27, 2019 at 13:36
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1@PeterShor: Always with the value judgments. ^_^ How about “In the West we don’t do smart; smart is the Eastern system.”– RobustoCommented Jun 27, 2019 at 13:57
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1@Robusto: that works fine, so I was wrong.– Peter ShorCommented Jun 27, 2019 at 14:41
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1@Anixx That’s a literary translation of some verse of Pushkin, and poetry is one of the places where you expect to find rhetorical devices in use. I’m not sure why the translator chose the full Greek term at the end rather than rhyming harem with terem. Perhaps they were avoiding the obvious rhyme for whatever reason, but few monoglot readers of English will know either Russian терем or its hypothesized Greek etymon τέρεμνον. The OED does attest terem as a Russian loanword, though.– tchrist ♦Commented Jun 27, 2019 at 15:10
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1 Answer
Given that subject-copula-complement is the usual ordering of elements for copular sentences in English, any deviation from that ordering is by definition unusual, including your complement-copula-subject ordering.
That does not make it ungrammatical. It makes it “sound funny”, makes it jump out dramatically from the more plodding and pedestrian text surrounding it. We call this rhetorical device anastrophe, or sometimes hyperbaton in the modern sense of that word.
Figures of speech like these are seldom encountered in casual, spontaneous speech. You find them in poetry often enough, sometimes for the sake of the meter but other times for dramatic effect. For dramatic effect can they also be found amidst the polished prose of literature, oratory, or the Sunday sermon. Robert Louis Stevenson penned these lines:
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
Examples aplenty of this can be found in (the more literary) English translations of the Bible, from Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord and Blessed art thou among women to the many repeated beatitudes like Blessed are the peace-keepers...
Such devices as these a non-native speaker should seldom if ever attempt in English. You should instead invest your time learning the usual way that ordinary people talk. The texts you are only now learning to compose should be free of rhetorical flourishes lest these be mistaken for unwitting blunders stemming from rank unfamiliarity with the expected norms of the English language.
Only after having taken full command of the English language should you even consider embarking on a study of its poetry, rhetoric, and literary techniques. Now is not the time for that.