6 ms·

The rise and fall of the English sentence (2017)

100 points by cal85 2y ago

cvoss 2y ago
If you're confused by the glaring bracket-matching errors in the opening quotation, it is missing two left brackets at the start of the sentence and three right brackets at the end of the sentence. That would correctly balance and nest the bracket pairs and bring the total number of clauses to 8, as described in the first paragraph. I wonder if the missing brackets are an artifact of some weird automated typesetting/rendering or if an editor who never bothered to read the article came through and said, "Quotations shouldn't start and end with random brackets!"
- sdwr 2y ago
  I didn't catch the missing brackets, but I did stop reading after the Sumerian quote that bracketed each nested clause independently.
bmacho 2y ago
> In current English, writing uses more varied vocabulary than conversational speech, and it uses rarer and longer words much more often. Certain structures (such as passive sentences, prepositional phrases, and relative clauses) appear more often in written than spoken language. Writers generally elaborate their ideas more explicitly through syntax whereas speakers leave more material implicit. And written language stacks clauses inside each other to a greater depth than spoken language. This is one of the most striking differences between speech and text; sentences like the opening line of the Declaration of Independence simply do not occur in conversation. Meanwhile, in the CS department: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/language https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/language
asjir 2y ago
The compound: state hate crime victim numbers Translated into Polish is: liczby ofiar państwowych zbrodni nienawisci Which translates back into: numbers of victims of governmental crimes of hate So except for the state turning into governmental makes everything a genitive case. I didn't notice the relationship until translating
- zahlman 2y ago
  I don't think you've translated it properly. The translation sounds as though the state/government is performing the crime; the intention (I hope!) is that the state/government is tallying the numbers.
  - garaetjjte 2y ago
    Isn't that ambiguous in English version?
    - DangitBobby 2y ago
      Yes, it could also be interpreted as a command, such as "state the hate-crime numbers aloud".
      - MathMonkeyMan 2y ago
        "Time flies like an arrow." - Time is flying. It is doing so in the same way that an arrow flies. - I command you to measure how long these flies take, and do so the way an arrow would. - There are certain flies, known as "time flies," who are pleased by an arrow.
leogao 2y ago
> Sentences like the opening line of the Declaration of Independence simply do not occur in conversation. maybe not in your conversations
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- naniwaduni 2y ago
  They probably do occur in the author's conversations, they're just not salient in conversation since who goes listening for sentence breaks in speech, sentences aren't real.
pattisapu 2y ago
Is there something special about loading complexity into the level of the sentence as opposed to individual words? Agglutination in many Native American languages and compounding in many Indo-European languages come to mind as examples where interesting nesting and complex relational structures can be found at the level of the word. The article suggests that speakers of English or German can do "mental arithmetic" whereas speakers of Ket have lots of "math facts." I don't know anything about Ket, but German, Sanskrit, and other languages seem to have a lot in the way of mental arithmetic when it comes to making up long compound words, which are not such a static or stable currency as in, say, English.
TRiG_Ireland 2y ago
The Hittite example is expanded on in Deutscher's excellent book Through the Language Glass, which is a really good read. It's about linguistics, the mind, and the history of ideas, and is beautifully written, to boot.
MarkusWandel 2y ago
Constructing elegant, deeply nested sentences is an art in English as well as German (my first language). But it is an art, more for connoisseurs than those who really need to communicate. An art that I appreciate more is at the opposite end. Constructing elegant prose out of relatively simple sentences, like Ernest Hemingway. "He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy's parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky, and the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish the first week. It made the boy sad to see the old man come in each day with his skiff empty and he always went down to help him carry either the coiled lines or the gaff and harpoon and the sail that was furled around the mast. The sail was patched with flour sacks and, furled, it looked like the flag of permanent defeat." Long sentences for sure, but is there any nesting in there at all? I can't see any.
- Keysh 2y ago
  I think there is some, but it’s pretty limited. E.g., “He was an old man [who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream] and …”
- joe5150 2y ago
  The relative clause "which is the worst form of unlucky" is embedded, among other complexities here. Obviously this doesn't make the text less readable, so I don't think nesting per se is the problem.
- jcul 2y ago
  It's been so long since I've read this that I can't even remember the plot. But I remember loving it as a teenager. I must go and reread it soon. That, and For whom the bell tolls, which I can remember slightly clearer.
- munchler 2y ago
  Yes, using conjunctions to compose small sentences into larger ones is a form of recursive nesting. For example: "[He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream] and [he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish]." "[It made the boy sad to see the old man come in each day with his skiff empty] and [he always went down to help him carry either the coiled lines or the gaff and harpoon and the sail that was furled around the mast]."
idlewords 2y ago
It's fun to read letters written by children in the 18th century, as it gives you a little glimpse into what it was like to learn to write at this level of complexity, and what aspects of written language children were being taught to master. Here for example is a letter from John Quincy Adams to his father, written when he was ten: >DEAR SIR,—I love to receive letters very well; much better than I love to write them. I make but a poor figure at composition, my head is too fickle, my thoughts are running after birds eggs play and trifles, till I get vexed with myself. Mamma has a troublesome task to keep me steady, and I own I am ashamed of myself. [...] If I can but keep my resolution, I will write again at the end of the week and give a better account of myself. I wish, Sir, you would give me some instructions, with regard to my time, and advise me how to proportion my Studies and my Play, in writing, and I will keep them by me, and endeavor to follow them. I am, dear Sir, with a present determination of growing better, yours. >P. S.—Sir, if you will be so good as to favor me with a Blank Book, I will transcribe the most remarkable occurances I meet with in my reading, which will serve to fix them upon my mind.
- formerphotoj 2y ago
  I shall be pleased to thank you for favoring us with this most poignant example; my heart doth flutter a few nanoseconds at the innocence of youth both present and lost to short-form video. I exhale, with a touch of melancholy, but feel gratitude nonetheless.
  - idlewords 2y ago
    Another fun format to read is military orders in the Revolutionary War/Napoleonic Wars era, how generals wrote (with a quill!) when actual bullets were whizzing around them. Even Civil War era orders still sound extraordinarily formal, and such orders from all eras are written in beautiful handwriting.
    - billfruit 2y ago
      Where can one read those
    - 2y ago
unsupp0rted 2y ago
> All evidence suggests that humans around the world are born with more or less the same brains. Which is great news because if there were conflicting evidence, or even an expressed desire to seek it out, that would be a good way to get refused research funding and to get drummed out of academia and polite society.
- forgetfreeman 2y ago
  While you aren't wrong per se, I fail to see the fault in aggressively disincentivizing the act of searching for an outlet to stick a fork in.
  - bigstrat2003 2y ago
    The fault is that science is - or should be - about the pursuit of truth. I don't subscribe to the HBD hypothesis, but if it is true, then that's all that matters. We need to understand the world as it really is, not as we wish it was, so we should never disincentivize lines of inquiry based on the fact that some people might use the results in unsavory ways.
    - forgetfreeman 2y ago
      If the truth presents no actionable benefit, but at the same time puts a club in the hands of sociopaths, why would any reasonable person go seeking it?
      - gnkyfrg 2y ago
        How would you know the difference until you find the truth? Are you suggesting we shouldn't have sought nukes? That eve should not have eaten that fruit? Who determines which truth isn't worth pursuing or dangerous to? Maybe we should pursue no truth?
        forgetfreeman 2y ago
        Truly, it is impossible to discern when one is actively looking for trouble until one has actually found it. A priori assumptions are clearly a sham and we should all wake up every morning delightfully surprised that the sun has risen yet again.
RunSet 2y ago
> Speech also proceeds under the whips of two tyrants: time and memory. Our memories aren’t nearly capacious enough to allow us to compose and precompile each sentence before beginning to utter its first syllable. Instead, speaking is like driving with a general sense of the destination, but no clear route planned—we utter the first syllables of a sentence while taking a leap of faith that we’ll be able to choose the right words en route and formulate phrases adequately as the words tumble out of our mouths and bring us to an intersection in our thoughts that demands our next move. I have read (but can not presently find a source to confirm) that Edsger W. Dijkstra was raised by a grandmother who forbade him to begin speaking a sentence without first knowing its conclusion.
indigo945 2y ago
Languages with very simple sentence structure are, for the most part, oral languages. It’s the languages that have a culture of writing, developed over a long span of time, that display a fondness for stacking clauses onto one another to create towering sentences. Chinese, the language with the oldest extant tradition of writing, does not have a fondness for towering sentences. For example, it forbids nesting other clauses into relative clauses. The number of characters, that means, words or half-words, that Chinese speakers prefer in a sentence on aesthetic grounds is four. Many of the world’s oral languages are quite unlike European languages. Whatever "European languages" means. English sentence structures do not easily translate into Finnish or Basque. But this minor nitpick is really a distraction from the infinite multitude of bad takes in this article. Their [Barbarian language's] sentences contain few words. They rarely combine more than one clause. [...] An English speaker might say: Would you teach me to make bread? But a Mohawk speaker would break this down into several short sentences, saying something like this: It will be possible? You will teach me. I will make bread. In English, you might say: He came near boys who were throwing spears at something. A Kathlamet approximation would go like this: He came near those boys. They were throwing spears at something then. Well, yes. And you will be able to find any number of sentences in other languages that become awkward when translated into English, because - gasp! - not all languages share the same set of grammatical features, nor the same aesthetic sense. In current English, writing uses more varied vocabulary than conversational speech, and it uses rarer and longer words much more often. Really? When writing, where the author has time to deliberate, they're able to produce more intricately (and, thus, by Western standards, aesthetically) nested sentences than when under the pressure of speaking? This is beyond surprising! Linguists take great pains to point out that languages with simple sentences erupt with complexity elsewhere: They typically pack many particles of meaning into a single word. For example, the Mohawk word sahonwanhotónkwahse conveys as much meaning as the English sentence "She opened the door for him again." Linguists take great pains to point out that the distinction between what counts as a "single word" and what counts as a "sentence" is entirely arbitrary. German speakers write "Eiscreme", English speakers write "ice cream" - this is entirely within the completely arbitrary realm of orthography. But of course, if you're out to "prove" that racially inferior languages don't have subordinate clauses, it's extremely convenient to just declare them a "pack [of] many particles of meaning" when they show up where you don't want them. Linguist John McWhorter offers an astounding example from the Siberian tongue Ket, a language in which verbs take pronoun prefixes to mark who is performing an action. There are two different sets of prefixes that attach to different verbs, and you simply have to know which verb takes which set. Moreover, many verbs simultaneously take two pronoun prefixes that mean the same thing (but many don’t—you just have to know), which trigger subtle shifts in meaning. For instance, digdabatsaq means “I go to the river and come back a bit later,” but digdaddaq (which involves the double use of the same pronoun prefix d) means “I go to the river and stay for a season.” The same word with just one pronoun—digdaksak—means “I go to the river and stay some days or weeks.” Astounding news, folks - languages have syntax and semantics! It's also crazy how in such inferior languages, a simple sound change of a SINGLE LETTER (!!!) subtly changes the meaning! In English, this could never happen - for example, there's no difference in meaning between "I go to the river for a bit" and "I go to the river for a shit". If such a language seems unlearnable, well, that is exactly the argument that linguists such as McWhorter have been making: that an adult venturing into Ket would inevitably mangle it, just as an adult learner of English may never quite grasp its irregular verbs or idiosyncratic prepositions (why do you say in a club but on a team?). The unpredictable aspects of language, the things you just have to know, may be especially slippery for the adult mind—and there are so many more of these in Ket than in English. Guh! They almost had an epiphany here, and then they fumbled it on the finish line.
pessimizer 2y ago
This also seems to be an 18th-19th century European/American thing. When I was beginning to learn Spanish, I was reading through Cuentos Mexicanos edited by Stanley Appelbaum, and I thought I was a moron because I was just getting completely lost. I stopped and counted, and I was in the middle of a 103 word sentence: "¡Ah!, si las mujeres ricas y orgullosas conociesen cuánto vale ese amor ardiente y puro que se enciende en nuestros corazones; si miraran el interior de nuestra organización, toda ocupada, por decirlo así, en amar; si reflexionaran que para nosotros, pobres hombres a quienes la fortuna no prodigó riquezas, pero que la naturaleza nos dio un corazón franco y leal, las mujeres son un tesoro inestimable y las guardamos con el delicado esmero con que ellas conservan en un vaso de nácar las azucenas blancas y aromáticas, sin duda nos amarían mucho; pero... las mujeres no son capaces de amar el alma jamás."* I've read a lot of late 19th century Mexican stuff now, and there's a lot of that. ----- * ("Ah, if the rich proud women could know how much that intense and pure love that burns in our hearts is worth; if they could see how we were organized within, completely occupied, to say it like this, in love; if they would reflect that for us, poor men to whom fate didn't produce riches, but to whom nature gave an open and loyal heart, women are an invaluable treasure and we protect them with the same delicate care with which they keep white aromatic lilies in a mother-of-pearl vase, without doubt they would love us so much; but... women aren't ever capable of loving the soul.")
- kstrauser 2y ago
  I invite you to discover David Foster Wallace. (But no, really, I picked up "Infinite Jest" to read for the accomplishment of it, prepared to grind through it as I did the detestable "Ulysses", and found myself genuinely wishing it had another 600 pages or so. I loved every page of that book, even the ones that contained only part of a longer sentence.)
grogenaut 2y ago
"The problem is, or rather one of the problems, for there are many, a sizeable proportion of which are continually clogging up the civil, commercial, and criminal courts in all areas of the Galaxy, and especially, where possible, the more corrupt ones, this."
fluorinerocket 2y ago
I recall that in high school English classes those kinds of recursive long sentences were heavily discouraged. I would love to write like Gibbon
ggm 2y ago
Terence Gilmartin did his best translating Proust, but he leaned on Scott Moncrieff who had gone before. The semicolon count in those pages is pretty high. I am very fond of the (apocryphal?) "peccavi" telegram from 1843: after annexing the Indian province of Sind, British General Sir Charles Napier sent home the least costly, least wordy report he could. There's also one Richard Rhodes uses, well two: Oppie had been banned from secret status and wanted to know the result of the H bomb tests so he asked if it was "girl or boy" -the sexist usage of the time made "girl" pretty obviously a fizzle. The guy charged with commissioning huge volumes of liquified duterium to make "mike" class bombs had to be told to stop when Lithium Duteride solid shells worked: "why by cows when you can get powdered milk"
metalman 2y ago
Some people are essentialy monosylibic, or less what with pictographs becomeing a prime mode of personal expression. Others can speak in sentences, or compose there thoughts in paragraphs,and there are those who hold forth at book length. It is the fundamental concept of composition, that is oft, forgotten, or dismissed. As the only true value in the written word, is as a place holder?, the perfect muse?, for that which must be spoken aloud, or its just a technical manual, lists,....mind porn, and has no lasting import from lack of issue
hank808 2y ago
There are three earlier submissions of this article: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fnautil.us%2Fthe-rise-and-fall-of-the-english-sentence-236880%2F https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fnautil.us%2Fthe-rise...
mitchbob 2y ago
https://archive.ph/c9tLE https://archive.ph/c9tLE
chozang 2y ago
The article mentions in passing the Pirahã and Dan Everett, author of "Don't Sleep - There Are Snakes". The Pirahã have a very interesting language and culture, and the furor that Everett's writings incited is fascinating.

100 points by cal85 2y ago

If you're confused by the glaring bracket-matching errors in the opening quotation, it is missing two left brackets at the start of the sentence and three right brackets at the end of the sentence. That would correctly balance and nest the bracket pairs and bring the total number of clauses to 8, as described in the first paragraph. I wonder if the missing brackets are an artifact of some weird automated typesetting/rendering or if an editor who never bothered to read the article came through and said, "Quotations shouldn't start and end with random brackets!"

sdwr 2y ago
I didn't catch the missing brackets, but I did stop reading after the Sumerian quote that bracketed each nested clause independently.

bmacho 2y ago

> In current English, writing uses more varied vocabulary than conversational speech, and it uses rarer and longer words much more often. Certain structures (such as passive sentences, prepositional phrases, and relative clauses) appear more often in written than spoken language. Writers generally elaborate their ideas more explicitly through syntax whereas speakers leave more material implicit. And written language stacks clauses inside each other to a greater depth than spoken language. This is one of the most striking differences between speech and text; sentences like the opening line of the Declaration of Independence simply do not occur in conversation. Meanwhile, in the CS department: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/language https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/language

asjir 2y ago

The compound: state hate crime victim numbers Translated into Polish is: liczby ofiar państwowych zbrodni nienawisci Which translates back into: numbers of victims of governmental crimes of hate So except for the state turning into governmental makes everything a genitive case. I didn't notice the relationship until translating

zahlman 2y ago
I don't think you've translated it properly. The translation sounds as though the state/government is performing the crime; the intention (I hope!) is that the state/government is tallying the numbers.
- garaetjjte 2y ago
  Isn't that ambiguous in English version?
  - DangitBobby 2y ago
    Yes, it could also be interpreted as a command, such as "state the hate-crime numbers aloud".
    - MathMonkeyMan 2y ago
      "Time flies like an arrow." - Time is flying. It is doing so in the same way that an arrow flies. - I command you to measure how long these flies take, and do so the way an arrow would. - There are certain flies, known as "time flies," who are pleased by an arrow.

leogao 2y ago

> Sentences like the opening line of the Declaration of Independence simply do not occur in conversation. maybe not in your conversations

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
naniwaduni 2y ago
They probably do occur in the author's conversations, they're just not salient in conversation since who goes listening for sentence breaks in speech, sentences aren't real.

pattisapu 2y ago

Is there something special about loading complexity into the level of the sentence as opposed to individual words? Agglutination in many Native American languages and compounding in many Indo-European languages come to mind as examples where interesting nesting and complex relational structures can be found at the level of the word. The article suggests that speakers of English or German can do "mental arithmetic" whereas speakers of Ket have lots of "math facts." I don't know anything about Ket, but German, Sanskrit, and other languages seem to have a lot in the way of mental arithmetic when it comes to making up long compound words, which are not such a static or stable currency as in, say, English.

TRiG_Ireland 2y ago

The Hittite example is expanded on in Deutscher's excellent book Through the Language Glass, which is a really good read. It's about linguistics, the mind, and the history of ideas, and is beautifully written, to boot.

MarkusWandel 2y ago

Constructing elegant, deeply nested sentences is an art in English as well as German (my first language). But it is an art, more for connoisseurs than those who really need to communicate. An art that I appreciate more is at the opposite end. Constructing elegant prose out of relatively simple sentences, like Ernest Hemingway. "He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy's parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky, and the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish the first week. It made the boy sad to see the old man come in each day with his skiff empty and he always went down to help him carry either the coiled lines or the gaff and harpoon and the sail that was furled around the mast. The sail was patched with flour sacks and, furled, it looked like the flag of permanent defeat." Long sentences for sure, but is there any nesting in there at all? I can't see any.

Keysh 2y ago
I think there is some, but it’s pretty limited. E.g., “He was an old man [who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream] and …”
joe5150 2y ago
The relative clause "which is the worst form of unlucky" is embedded, among other complexities here. Obviously this doesn't make the text less readable, so I don't think nesting per se is the problem.
jcul 2y ago
It's been so long since I've read this that I can't even remember the plot. But I remember loving it as a teenager. I must go and reread it soon. That, and For whom the bell tolls, which I can remember slightly clearer.
munchler 2y ago
Yes, using conjunctions to compose small sentences into larger ones is a form of recursive nesting. For example: "[He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream] and [he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish]." "[It made the boy sad to see the old man come in each day with his skiff empty] and [he always went down to help him carry either the coiled lines or the gaff and harpoon and the sail that was furled around the mast]."

idlewords 2y ago

It's fun to read letters written by children in the 18th century, as it gives you a little glimpse into what it was like to learn to write at this level of complexity, and what aspects of written language children were being taught to master. Here for example is a letter from John Quincy Adams to his father, written when he was ten: >DEAR SIR,—I love to receive letters very well; much better than I love to write them. I make but a poor figure at composition, my head is too fickle, my thoughts are running after birds eggs play and trifles, till I get vexed with myself. Mamma has a troublesome task to keep me steady, and I own I am ashamed of myself. [...] If I can but keep my resolution, I will write again at the end of the week and give a better account of myself. I wish, Sir, you would give me some instructions, with regard to my time, and advise me how to proportion my Studies and my Play, in writing, and I will keep them by me, and endeavor to follow them. I am, dear Sir, with a present determination of growing better, yours. >P. S.—Sir, if you will be so good as to favor me with a Blank Book, I will transcribe the most remarkable occurances I meet with in my reading, which will serve to fix them upon my mind.

formerphotoj 2y ago
I shall be pleased to thank you for favoring us with this most poignant example; my heart doth flutter a few nanoseconds at the innocence of youth both present and lost to short-form video. I exhale, with a touch of melancholy, but feel gratitude nonetheless.
- idlewords 2y ago
  Another fun format to read is military orders in the Revolutionary War/Napoleonic Wars era, how generals wrote (with a quill!) when actual bullets were whizzing around them. Even Civil War era orders still sound extraordinarily formal, and such orders from all eras are written in beautiful handwriting.
  - billfruit 2y ago
    Where can one read those
  - 2y ago

unsupp0rted 2y ago

> All evidence suggests that humans around the world are born with more or less the same brains. Which is great news because if there were conflicting evidence, or even an expressed desire to seek it out, that would be a good way to get refused research funding and to get drummed out of academia and polite society.

forgetfreeman 2y ago
While you aren't wrong per se, I fail to see the fault in aggressively disincentivizing the act of searching for an outlet to stick a fork in.
- bigstrat2003 2y ago
  The fault is that science is - or should be - about the pursuit of truth. I don't subscribe to the HBD hypothesis, but if it is true, then that's all that matters. We need to understand the world as it really is, not as we wish it was, so we should never disincentivize lines of inquiry based on the fact that some people might use the results in unsavory ways.
  - forgetfreeman 2y ago
    If the truth presents no actionable benefit, but at the same time puts a club in the hands of sociopaths, why would any reasonable person go seeking it?
    - gnkyfrg 2y ago
      How would you know the difference until you find the truth? Are you suggesting we shouldn't have sought nukes? That eve should not have eaten that fruit? Who determines which truth isn't worth pursuing or dangerous to? Maybe we should pursue no truth?
      - forgetfreeman 2y ago
        Truly, it is impossible to discern when one is actively looking for trouble until one has actually found it. A priori assumptions are clearly a sham and we should all wake up every morning delightfully surprised that the sun has risen yet again.

RunSet 2y ago

> Speech also proceeds under the whips of two tyrants: time and memory. Our memories aren’t nearly capacious enough to allow us to compose and precompile each sentence before beginning to utter its first syllable. Instead, speaking is like driving with a general sense of the destination, but no clear route planned—we utter the first syllables of a sentence while taking a leap of faith that we’ll be able to choose the right words en route and formulate phrases adequately as the words tumble out of our mouths and bring us to an intersection in our thoughts that demands our next move. I have read (but can not presently find a source to confirm) that Edsger W. Dijkstra was raised by a grandmother who forbade him to begin speaking a sentence without first knowing its conclusion.

indigo945 2y ago

Languages with very simple sentence structure are, for the most part, oral languages. It’s the languages that have a culture of writing, developed over a long span of time, that display a fondness for stacking clauses onto one another to create towering sentences. Chinese, the language with the oldest extant tradition of writing, does not have a fondness for towering sentences. For example, it forbids nesting other clauses into relative clauses. The number of characters, that means, words or half-words, that Chinese speakers prefer in a sentence on aesthetic grounds is four. Many of the world’s oral languages are quite unlike European languages. Whatever "European languages" means. English sentence structures do not easily translate into Finnish or Basque. But this minor nitpick is really a distraction from the infinite multitude of bad takes in this article. Their [Barbarian language's] sentences contain few words. They rarely combine more than one clause. [...] An English speaker might say: Would you teach me to make bread? But a Mohawk speaker would break this down into several short sentences, saying something like this: It will be possible? You will teach me. I will make bread. In English, you might say: He came near boys who were throwing spears at something. A Kathlamet approximation would go like this: He came near those boys. They were throwing spears at something then. Well, yes. And you will be able to find any number of sentences in other languages that become awkward when translated into English, because - gasp! - not all languages share the same set of grammatical features, nor the same aesthetic sense. In current English, writing uses more varied vocabulary than conversational speech, and it uses rarer and longer words much more often. Really? When writing, where the author has time to deliberate, they're able to produce more intricately (and, thus, by Western standards, aesthetically) nested sentences than when under the pressure of speaking? This is beyond surprising! Linguists take great pains to point out that languages with simple sentences erupt with complexity elsewhere: They typically pack many particles of meaning into a single word. For example, the Mohawk word sahonwanhotónkwahse conveys as much meaning as the English sentence "She opened the door for him again." Linguists take great pains to point out that the distinction between what counts as a "single word" and what counts as a "sentence" is entirely arbitrary. German speakers write "Eiscreme", English speakers write "ice cream" - this is entirely within the completely arbitrary realm of orthography. But of course, if you're out to "prove" that racially inferior languages don't have subordinate clauses, it's extremely convenient to just declare them a "pack [of] many particles of meaning" when they show up where you don't want them. Linguist John McWhorter offers an astounding example from the Siberian tongue Ket, a language in which verbs take pronoun prefixes to mark who is performing an action. There are two different sets of prefixes that attach to different verbs, and you simply have to know which verb takes which set. Moreover, many verbs simultaneously take two pronoun prefixes that mean the same thing (but many don’t—you just have to know), which trigger subtle shifts in meaning. For instance, digdabatsaq means “I go to the river and come back a bit later,” but digdaddaq (which involves the double use of the same pronoun prefix d) means “I go to the river and stay for a season.” The same word with just one pronoun—digdaksak—means “I go to the river and stay some days or weeks.” Astounding news, folks - languages have syntax and semantics! It's also crazy how in such inferior languages, a simple sound change of a SINGLE LETTER (!!!) subtly changes the meaning! In English, this could never happen - for example, there's no difference in meaning between "I go to the river for a bit" and "I go to the river for a shit". If such a language seems unlearnable, well, that is exactly the argument that linguists such as McWhorter have been making: that an adult venturing into Ket would inevitably mangle it, just as an adult learner of English may never quite grasp its irregular verbs or idiosyncratic prepositions (why do you say in a club but on a team?). The unpredictable aspects of language, the things you just have to know, may be especially slippery for the adult mind—and there are so many more of these in Ket than in English. Guh! They almost had an epiphany here, and then they fumbled it on the finish line.

pessimizer 2y ago

This also seems to be an 18th-19th century European/American thing. When I was beginning to learn Spanish, I was reading through Cuentos Mexicanos edited by Stanley Appelbaum, and I thought I was a moron because I was just getting completely lost. I stopped and counted, and I was in the middle of a 103 word sentence: "¡Ah!, si las mujeres ricas y orgullosas conociesen cuánto vale ese amor ardiente y puro que se enciende en nuestros corazones; si miraran el interior de nuestra organización, toda ocupada, por decirlo así, en amar; si reflexionaran que para nosotros, pobres hombres a quienes la fortuna no prodigó riquezas, pero que la naturaleza nos dio un corazón franco y leal, las mujeres son un tesoro inestimable y las guardamos con el delicado esmero con que ellas conservan en un vaso de nácar las azucenas blancas y aromáticas, sin duda nos amarían mucho; pero... las mujeres no son capaces de amar el alma jamás."* I've read a lot of late 19th century Mexican stuff now, and there's a lot of that. ----- * ("Ah, if the rich proud women could know how much that intense and pure love that burns in our hearts is worth; if they could see how we were organized within, completely occupied, to say it like this, in love; if they would reflect that for us, poor men to whom fate didn't produce riches, but to whom nature gave an open and loyal heart, women are an invaluable treasure and we protect them with the same delicate care with which they keep white aromatic lilies in a mother-of-pearl vase, without doubt they would love us so much; but... women aren't ever capable of loving the soul.")

kstrauser 2y ago
I invite you to discover David Foster Wallace. (But no, really, I picked up "Infinite Jest" to read for the accomplishment of it, prepared to grind through it as I did the detestable "Ulysses", and found myself genuinely wishing it had another 600 pages or so. I loved every page of that book, even the ones that contained only part of a longer sentence.)

grogenaut 2y ago

"The problem is, or rather one of the problems, for there are many, a sizeable proportion of which are continually clogging up the civil, commercial, and criminal courts in all areas of the Galaxy, and especially, where possible, the more corrupt ones, this."

fluorinerocket 2y ago

I recall that in high school English classes those kinds of recursive long sentences were heavily discouraged. I would love to write like Gibbon

ggm 2y ago

Terence Gilmartin did his best translating Proust, but he leaned on Scott Moncrieff who had gone before. The semicolon count in those pages is pretty high. I am very fond of the (apocryphal?) "peccavi" telegram from 1843: after annexing the Indian province of Sind, British General Sir Charles Napier sent home the least costly, least wordy report he could. There's also one Richard Rhodes uses, well two: Oppie had been banned from secret status and wanted to know the result of the H bomb tests so he asked if it was "girl or boy" -the sexist usage of the time made "girl" pretty obviously a fizzle. The guy charged with commissioning huge volumes of liquified duterium to make "mike" class bombs had to be told to stop when Lithium Duteride solid shells worked: "why by cows when you can get powdered milk"

metalman 2y ago

Some people are essentialy monosylibic, or less what with pictographs becomeing a prime mode of personal expression. Others can speak in sentences, or compose there thoughts in paragraphs,and there are those who hold forth at book length. It is the fundamental concept of composition, that is oft, forgotten, or dismissed. As the only true value in the written word, is as a place holder?, the perfect muse?, for that which must be spoken aloud, or its just a technical manual, lists,....mind porn, and has no lasting import from lack of issue

hank808 2y ago

There are three earlier submissions of this article: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fnautil.us%2Fthe-rise-and-fall-of-the-english-sentence-236880%2F https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fnautil.us%2Fthe-rise...

mitchbob 2y ago

https://archive.ph/c9tLE https://archive.ph/c9tLE

chozang 2y ago

The article mentions in passing the Pirahã and Dan Everett, author of "Don't Sleep - There Are Snakes". The Pirahã have a very interesting language and culture, and the furor that Everett's writings incited is fascinating.