Still

I'm reading A Corpse in the Koryo, a noirish novel by James Church about a North Korean detective caught up in things he doesn't entirely understand (I love novels about cops trying to be cops - particularly detectives - in societies that don't quite want them to succeed, whether it's Imperial Rome, Nazi-occupied London AUs or real Nazi Berlin, Moscow in the bad old days or (probably) the near future. The orthagonal conflict - solve the murder/don't rock the political boat - is fascinating.

However, what caught my eye - snagged it, in fact - this morning was this, spoken to the young Inspector O by a friend of his grandfather's and recalled in flashback:

"Your grandfather is a great man. Still we need him, and we will need you, too, before this is over."

Still we need him?

Modern English doesn't put adverbial modifiers like that in the front of sentences any more. Before the verb (we still need him) or at the end (we need him still), yes. But not before the subject. To begin with, it sounds archaic - long we talked, fiercely they fought, deeply they delved - but there's worse. What does begin a sentence is a conjunction, and "still", challenging "round" for how many parts of speech it can be, is a conjunction. And like its near synonym "yet", as a conjunction it doesn't mean "continuing, to the present", it means "but, nevertheless".

"Your grandfather is a great man. But we need him, and we will need you, too."

Okay. That's weird - what? We usually need punks?

True, this usage of "still" generally has a comma after it, but it's more frequently seen without the comma than it is fronted but not meaning "but". That's a weird usage. It really took me right out of the book for a moment.