The rise and fall of the English sentence (2017)

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.

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"

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.

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!"

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.

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

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

maybe not in your conversations

> 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

> 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.

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.

"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."

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