4 ms·
Cicero's Periodic Sentence (2012)
- british_india 9y agoLeo Tolstoy's "War & Peace" has several magnificent periodic sentence examples.
- eecc 9y agoBeing Italian I can attest that I spent most of our high-school studying and celebrating such style of writing, and the rest of my life being criticized for it. Dammit ;)
- Kenji 9y agoAbsolutely unreadable. What a disgusting way to transfer information.
- hodgesrm 9y agoIt's interesting to speculate whether Latin supports this style better than other languages like English, or whether it's just a matter of taste. One difference between these two languages is that classical Latin does not have implicit word order in sentences whereas English is incomprehensible without it. Mentally you have to keep the pieces of a Latin sentence in your head until you reach the end to get the basic meaning. In English you generally know the subject and main verb up front--the rest is details.
- Amezarak 9y agoThe article alludes to it, but I think that English sentences have undergone a fairly major shift since, say, the mid-1800s or so. Maybe even the early 1900s. I read a lot of older books, and sentences like that aren't uncommon. There's all kinds of strange word orders, clauses piled on clauses piled on clauses, etc. It takes some getting used to, but after a while it quits bothering you. If you made me speculate, I'd guess the Latin education of most English writers had something to do with it. Nowadays, it's actually quite striking how short and simple most of our sentences are.
- tomcam 9y agoI hit on the idea of reading old court transcripts to see how people actually talked back then. It’s much closer to modern syntax than I expected.
- laretluval 9y agoLatin absolutely supports more contorted word orders because the case marking and gender agreement means you can recover hierarchical relations among words in the sentence without relying on word order.
- tomcam 9y agoGawd. I loves me some terse, unadorned post-Hemingway English. Long sentences like that are an unnecessary cognitive burden.