The Use of "There"

I've recently received two very different questions, but they both deal with the use of "there" at the beginning of a sentence. Here's the question from Linda:

Of seventeen English translations of the Qur’an, ten interpret Surah 20: 8 using “He”:
“God! There is no god but He. The most beautiful names are His.”
Seven use “Him”:
“God! There is no god but Him. The most beautiful names are His.”
Translators using “He” include Arberry and George Sale, whose first language was English.
Translators using “Him” include Pickthal, an educated Englishman.

So which is correct? Is it ‘He’ as a predicate nominative? Or is it ‘Him’ in the objective case? What is the rule?

Not having read the Qur’an in over 40 years, I hesitate to rush in where translators fear to tread. But...here goes.

The problem really arises from one of my pet peeves: Sentences beginning with “There is” and “There are.” Long ago an editor taught me what a problem such sentences are, since “there” is an expletive, doing nothing in the sentence except introducing what it’s about. Shame on all those translators for creating a problem where (I suspect) none exists in Arabic.

Could you translate the passage as: “God! Only He is God”? Or: “God! He is the only God”?

If you feel you must stick with “There is,” then treat “but” as a preposition synonymous with “except,” which would require “him” as the pronoun.

Then Gabriela in Bucharest wrote:

In my teaching activity I have often come across sentences of this type:

There have been published no documents regarding this event.
There have been made a lot of changes in this system.

I find these sentences wrong but they are probably used in spoken English/ American English, in films, and so on. Am I right in correcting my students or can I accept these forms? In my opinion the sentences shoud be:

No documents have been published.....
A lot of changes have been made....

I explained the "expletive" problem to Gabriela, and then added:

Even more important, the beginning of an English sentence is a “hot spot,” where readers pay the most attention and react most strongly to what they read. They may understand the content of the middle of the sentence, but they don’t respond as much. (The same is true for sentences in the middle of a paragraph...we aren’t paying as much attention as we do to the beginning and end of the paragraph.)

Here is another problem: “There” is at the beginning of the sentence, so many speakers and writers think of it as the subject. And it sounds singular, so they often make a big mistake in subject-verb agreement: “There is two people here to see you.” “There’s a lot of problems facing us.” No, they should be: “There are two people...” and “There are a lot...”

So I urge my students to write sentences like “No documents have been published,” "Two people are here to see you," "We face a lot of problems"--and sometimes they listen to me!

Comments

[Jim]

Excellent. "There's" combined with a plural subject is easily my most common error. I recognize it as soon as I say it, but when speaking quickly it continually slips out. If I can train myself to leave out the "there" altogether I should be much better off. I think it'll help with the Portuguese that I'm trying to learn as well.