[HN Gopher] The rise and fall of the English sentence (2017)
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The rise and fall of the English sentence (2017)
Author : cal85
Score : 59 points
Date : 2025-01-14 10:02 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nautil.us)
(TXT) w3m dump (nautil.us)
| cvoss wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I didn't catch the missing brackets, but I did stop reading
| after the Sumerian quote that bracketed each nested clause
| independently.
| bmacho wrote:
| > 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
| asjir wrote:
| The compound: state hate crime victim numbers
|
| Translated into Polish is: liczby ofiar panstwowych 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 wrote:
| 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.
| leogao wrote:
| > Sentences like the opening line of the Declaration of
| Independence simply do not occur in conversation.
|
| maybe not in _your_ conversations
| naniwaduni wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| ..."
| idlewords wrote:
| 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.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| > 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.
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