alt.hn

1/14/2025 at 10:02:56 AM

The rise and fall of the English sentence (2017)

 https://nautil.us/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-english-sentence-236880/

by cal85

1/14/2025 at 10:09:38 PM

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.

by idlewords

1/14/2025 at 11:45:33 PM

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.

by formerphotoj

1/14/2025 at 11:56:18 PM

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.

by idlewords

1/15/2025 at 12:18:13 AM

I've read that Washington sent back, unopened, british letters which had been sent to him but without being addressed with all the proper military formalities.

Was that his way of ensuring he didn't get labelled as an unlawful combatant?

> such orders from all eras are written in beautiful handwriting

the 1876 orders to bring ammunition sent at Greasy Grass ("Custer's Last Stand") are an obvious counterexample: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Little_Bighorn#/...

are you sure you haven't been looking at transcriptions? (as in the upper right of the example above)

by 082349872349872

1/15/2025 at 4:01:15 AM

Where can one read those

by billfruit

1/15/2025 at 12:40:25 AM

That the XVIII, with its love of symmetry: oft observed in contrast as well as in comparison, and with its love of ornament: ascending from initial observation; continuing through main example; and ending upon a final period, is well exemplified by Gibbon, who in this inimitable style filled not just one, nor yet three, but a full six volumes of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776), is a fact to which all must acquiesce, yet, even so, the "short-form" was also present during this era, perhaps most memorably in the tricolon, as brief as it was lacking in invention, with which Prince William Henry, Duke of Gloucester and Edinburgh, greeted Gibbon's second volume: "Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh, Mr. Gibbon?"

by 082349872349872

1/15/2025 at 4:02:15 AM

Also Macaulay in his 5 volumes of the History of England.

Not to mention Carlyle, who elevates it to an even more lofty style that one wonders if he has not overcooked it.

by billfruit

1/15/2025 at 12:47:03 AM

Truuuue, but that was John High-I-Quincy Adams, that one study estimated had an IQ around 170: https://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jcampbel/documents/SimontonPre...

Even if he didn't, there's a lot of evidence that Johnny Boy was exceptionally bright, to say the least. You can't really expect that level of writing skill from a typical 10 year old.

by kstrauser

1/15/2025 at 1:26:21 AM

I'm not sure about the idea of retrospectively assigning IQ scores to dead people who never took an IQ test.

For what it's worth, I believe a reasonably intelligent child could have written that. Here's another letter, this one written by a 12-year old girl in 1842, which is similar to the other except for being, if anything, a bit more composed.

https://100yearsofstories.wordpress.com/2016/01/06/my-deares...

> My dear Papa,

> It is with much pleasure I write to you these few lines to inform you that our vacation will commence on the 18th of the month when I hope you will find me improved in all my studies in which I have done my best. Miss Sykes and Miss Martha present their compliments and hope though late you will accept their thanks for the very nice hare you were so kind as to send.

> With love to all at home, you remain my dear papa.

by karaterobot

1/15/2025 at 2:17:15 AM

Especially since an IQ of 170 would have put you within the top 1,500 people in the world, and within the top 2 in the U.S. I wouldn't trust any sort of scoring process that yields a number far into the upper tail.

by LegionMammal978

1/15/2025 at 1:50:34 AM

We also don't know to what extent mom might have helped with these letters to dad.

by antonvs

1/15/2025 at 1:17:06 AM

> You can't really expect that level of writing skill from a typical 10 year old.

Can't you? I've taken the quote from the parent comment and replaced every punctuation mark and coordinating conjunction that separates independent clauses with an interpunct, and bracketed the relative clauses.

> 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] • I own [I am ashamed of myself] • [If I can but keep my resolution] I will write again at the end of the week • give a better account of myself • I wish you would [give me some instructions with regard to my time] • advise me how [to proportion my Studies and my Play] in writing • I will keep them by me • endeavor to follow them • I am with a present determination of growing better • [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]]

As you can see, there is no nesting deeper than one level except at the very end. There's a range of vocabulary, but most of the words were common in English at the time of writing and have simply fallen out of fashion. 'Fickle' is usually now 'impatient'; neither expresses a more complex idea than the other. Assuming the letter is representative of genuine sentiment, I find his desire for personal development more impressive than his language; indeed his commitment to reply to correspondence promptly is the most positive reflection of his character.

by seabass-labrax

1/15/2025 at 8:00:48 AM

I think we're biased by the fact that old-fashioned writing style always sounds more fancy and formal. I don't know how much kids' writing you've read recently (school writing, not social media), but I reckon most reasonably smart 10 year olds today absolutely could write like that. My daughter is 10 and (parental bias notwithstanding) she's smart but not genius-level, and she has writing that complex in her school books.

by ascorbic

1/15/2025 at 1:46:03 PM

Definitely biased. The older things we read tend to be great works by smart people so we attribute that style to intelligence. But it was just written style, among a certain class, once upon a time.

English styles changed. For example, Hemingway was brutally brief.

I believe (but don't know) that the further from the Anglosphere one goes today the longer and more ornate the written language tends. Anyone know how to confirm or deny? I have only anecdata from those who were high-school educated in Farsi or Russian before moving to the US.

by RhysU

1/14/2025 at 9:52:05 PM

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.

by MarkusWandel

1/15/2025 at 2:16:25 AM

> is there any nesting in there at all? I can't see any.

There's an enormous amount of nesting in there. However:

1. You probably aren't familiar with the linguistic definition of the term - see e.g. https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/projects/stylistics/topic7/... for a summary

2. Your brain deals with it without you recognizing it

3. Hemingway often avoids punctuation to give the illusion of an un-nested stream.

Here's a version with some of the nesting annotated, just to give an idea of how nested it is. It may look excessive, but in fact it's missing some nesting because I don't have infinite time:

"[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]]]].]"

As an example of missing nesting, "[In the first forty days [a boy had been with him.]]" should be more like "[In [the first forty days]], [a boy] [had been [with him]]."

by antonvs

1/16/2025 at 1:18:38 AM

Your definition of nesting is slightly different from what's being used elsewhere in the thread: the article discusses the nesting of clauses, and the essential component of a clause in English is a verb. "in a skiff in the Gulf Stream" isn't a complete clause (and doesn't contain any) because there's no verb. "who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream" is a clause - to fish is the verb - but still not a complete sentence unless interpreted as a question. I'm sure you know that but the terminology isn't consistent between comments in this thread.

by seabass-labrax

1/14/2025 at 11:39:12 PM

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]."

by munchler

1/14/2025 at 11:00:13 PM

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.

by joe5150

1/14/2025 at 11:22:21 PM

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.

by jcul

1/14/2025 at 10:54:26 PM

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 …”

by Keysh

1/14/2025 at 9:28:19 PM

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.

by pattisapu

1/14/2025 at 7:55:07 PM

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!"

by cvoss

1/14/2025 at 8:07:46 PM

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

by sdwr

1/14/2025 at 11:28:46 PM

> 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.

by RunSet

1/14/2025 at 11:56:36 PM

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.")

by pessimizer

1/15/2025 at 12:53:34 AM

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.)

by kstrauser

1/14/2025 at 9:13:33 PM

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

maybe not in your conversations

by leogao

1/14/2025 at 10:53:26 PM

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.

by naniwaduni

1/14/2025 at 8:47:10 PM

> 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

by bmacho

1/14/2025 at 9:32:10 PM

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.

by TRiG_Ireland

1/15/2025 at 4:31:04 AM

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"

by ggm

1/15/2025 at 10:11:27 AM

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

by metalman

1/15/2025 at 4:20:05 AM

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

by fluorinerocket

1/14/2025 at 9:07:52 PM

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

by asjir

1/14/2025 at 9:51:43 PM

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.

by zahlman

1/14/2025 at 11:54:53 PM

Isn't that ambiguous in English version?

by garaetjjte

1/15/2025 at 12:14:14 AM

Yes, it could also be interpreted as a command, such as "state the hate-crime numbers aloud".

by DangitBobby

1/15/2025 at 4:29:52 AM

"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.

by MathMonkeyMan

1/14/2025 at 10:15:09 PM

> 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.

by unsupp0rted

1/15/2025 at 1:30:57 AM

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.

by forgetfreeman

1/15/2025 at 1:42:15 AM

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.

by bigstrat2003

1/15/2025 at 6:36:34 AM

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?

by forgetfreeman

1/15/2025 at 8:13:57 AM

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?

by gnkyfrg

1/17/2025 at 8:10:10 AM

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.

by forgetfreeman

1/17/2025 at 6:13:51 PM

[dead]

by gnkyfrg

1/15/2025 at 3:19:38 AM

"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."

by grogenaut

1/14/2025 at 11:47:10 PM

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.

by indigo945

1/15/2025 at 12:50:07 AM

I was also a bit skeptical of the article's claim that oral languages don't have as many relative classes. The only example of a 'European' oral tradition given is Norwegian, which as many people know is quite distant from other European languages more obviously in the Romance or Germanic families. Being exclusively oral is just one of many features of indigenous American languages; why pick on that as the reason why their grammar is different rather than mere geographical and linguistic distance from Europe?

Your example of Chinese is a good one. The aesthetic appeal of four-character combinations seems to have been adopted by Japanese, which uses these constructs for bureaucratic or legal terms, whereas colloquial Japanese speech might use a relative clause instead - exactly the opposite situation to what the article describes!

by seabass-labrax