The Rise and Fall of the English Sentence | Hacker News Reader

The Rise and Fall of the English Sentence

nautil.us

84 pointsdnetesn39 comments

A fascinating read but full of statements (without any citation or justification) such as: "sentences like the opening line of the Declaration of Independence simply do not occur in conversation".

Here the author seems to state that complex, multi-nested, compound or recursive statements do not arise in spoken English - obviously we must allow that the language has changed somewhat since the DoI was written - however, I know - for a fact - that I have personally uttered sentences that make the DoI's opening statement look quite concise, given my habit towards verbosity ... etc etc ad nauseam.

I apologise to anyone trying to parse the above paragraph. Spoken language does not have to worry about punctuation, spelling and can mess around with grammatical constructs. You can get away with a lot when speaking. You can use rhythm, pauses and all sorts of other tricks that are unavailable in print. You can also use facial and other gestures as well. You can fiddle with accents and other quirks as well.

That said, some written prose/documents seem to somehow transcend the limits of being pinned down on a page and take a life of their own. For example, Mr Shaksper (probably one of his famous variety of spelings) was quite handy with a pen according to a few people.

It was only when I got to "verbosity..." to check if you were doing that then and there - I hadn't noticed that anything was off.

The Declaration of Independence is in the style of an oration, not a conversation. People definitely use more complicated sentences than that in conversation – heck, I’ve had conversations where 4 different running threads were intermingled ad-hoc, and both participants were able to keep track of all four ongoing thoughts just fine – but not in the same high and formal style. (Some orators still use such a style, but probably less than 50+ years ago, as audiences have changed.)

That's funny: I found the second paragraph one of the most lucid and easy to read statements I've read on the Internet for a while (but I'm not a native English speaker).

Perhaps there's something to be said for long sentences.

Here, I'll let you borrow my em dash: —

To support the claim that the article is full of unjustified statements, you should offer more than one pedantic example.

I taught English as a foreign language in Brazil for several years, and at the intermediate level students would begin writing essays.

At the advanced level, I would teach about run-on sentences and how they're bad, and the class would always become tremendously confused. Finally I talked to one of the Brazilian teachers, asking why run-on sentences were such a difficult concept for my students to get.

He explained that in Brazil, long, complex, strung-together sentences are considered good writing -- that the more work they are to put together, the smarter they show the writer is, and the fact that they take more work to read is the reader's problem, not the writer's! Simple, easily digestible sentences are the mark of an uneducated writer.

So if I ever turned in a paper with sentence structure like the introduction to the Declaration, I'd probably have points taken off here in the US, yet it would be fine writing in Brazil...

Related to that, here's an observation about English vs. German writing:

English has a huge vocabulary, so educated authors show their mettle by using "big words": the one word from amongst all the approximately 600,000 English words that precisely fits the meaning they seek. (If it has Latin or French roots, so much the better...)

The German vocabulary is estimated at about half of its English counterpart. However, the grammar is quite a bit more complex. So if a German author wants to show off his learning, he does so by utilising the whole spectrum of grammatical constructs to find just the right inflection for what he wants to say. He proves his mastery not primarily by the wealth of his vocabulary, but by his command of the syntax.

(OK, that last sentence was probably superfluous. But it was too fun to exclude ;-) )

A (not necessarily original) example would be nice.

Here's a passage from Dawkins' "The Greatest Show on Earth":

"As we look back on the history of life, we see a picture of never-ending, ever-rejuvenating novelty. Individuals die; species, families orders and even classes go extinct. But the evolutionary process itself seems to pick itself up and resume its recurrent flowering, with undiminished freshness, with unabated youthfulness, as epoch gives way to epoch."

And a passage from Brecht's "Leben des Galilei":

"Eine Menschheit, stolpernd in diesem tausendjährigen Perlmutterdunst von Aberglaube und alten Wörtern, zu unwissend, ihre eigenen Kräfte voll zu entfalten, wird nicht fähig sein, die Kräfte der Natur zu entfalten, die Ihr enthüllt. Woführ arbeitet Ihr? Ich halte dafür, dass das einzige Ziel der Wissenschaft darin besteht, die Mühseligkeit der menschlichen Existenz zu erleichtern."

I realize that those excerpts are from two different genres, but perhaps they will serve as example. Of course, English writers do not rely exclusively on vocabulary to create good style, just as Germans do not shun all big words. But in general, writers will try to capitalize on the strengths of their respective languages.

This appears to be a recent development in English writing, perhaps related to Americans' fondness for directness over pretense as well as accessibility to all socioeconomic classes. In the past, more words were often viewed as better; Charles Dickens, in particular, is sometimes singled out and mocked by modern writers for his tendency to ramble. It extended to the names people chose for their characters; in Ian Fleming's time, long pretentious names like "Percival Aloysius Merriwether IV" and so forth were the norm in popular literature. Fleming looked down at a book of ornithology and saw just the sort of short, nondescript name his faceless hero needed: James Bond.

She seems to reverse cause an effect by talking about certain languages as being somehow esoteric or exoteric, and blaming the relative ‘success’ of those languages on those supposed properties.

I think languages tend to go along for the ride with whatever culture happens to speak them, and that if they managed to conquer a lot of territory or do a lot of trading, the language would become more popular. And popular languages have people that study them and write grammars and dictionaries and make the language more accessible.

English is one of the most irregular languages in the world and has a lot of properties that she would classify as esoteric, and that obviously hasn’t had much impact on its success. Turns out that having a massive army is more important than having an easily learned language.

She also at one point jumps from Hittite to Akkadian to demonstrate the development of subordinate clauses, but the languages aren’t related at all — Hittite is Indo-European and Akkadian is Semitic. Then she jumps right to Finnish, which is from yet another unrelated family of languages.

> English is one of the most irregular languages in the world

I would be surprised if you could find any reputable linguistics expert who agrees with this statement.

It would be equally interesting if you could find one who disagrees with the statement, so they can tell us about other languages that are more irregular and in what ways.

The problem is that "more irregular" is not well-defined.

Language works[1] in stacked layers a bit like the OSI model.

* Raw sound is interpreted as phonetic units

* These are then reinterpreted as phonemes according to phonological rules. For example, you perceive "butter" as being pronounced "b - uh - t - r", but, in American English at least, that "t" is pronounced more like a Spanish "r" than anything you would recognize in isolation as a "t".

* Phonemes are organized into morphemes (units of meaning, e.g. "happier" has two morphemes, "happy" and "er").

* Morphemes are combined into words according to morphological rules.

* Words are combined into sentences (or other types of utterance) according to syntax. Popularly when people say "grammar" they mean morphology + syntax.

You could talk about "regularity" or "irregularity" completely separately for any of these layers and even then you would have to carefully define what you meant and how to measure it. And it's not clear that English is particularly bad in any of them.

The phonology example I gave might sound weird but all languages have stuff like this and English is far from being the most confusing[2]. For morphology you could propose a standard like "frequency of verbs with irregular conjugation" (or nouns with an irregular declension) and point to the prevalence of verbs like "sing/sang/sung" in English, but these are not English specific; most Germanic languages have roughly the same set of these "strong" verbs. (In Icelandic, "to sing" = "syngja" but "he sung" = "hann söng", rather than something like "hann syngði" which you would expect regularly and which doesn't actually exist[3]). For syntax I don't have a clue how you would even begin to measure regularity or irregularity.

Another thing "irregular" could refer to is the writing system. But first of all, writing and [spoken] language are kinda separate things (and a huge chunk of languages have no writing system at all). We could start writing English with a totally different alphabet tomorrow and it would still be recognizable as English and not fundamentally different. This has actually happened to several languages in the past; for example, Korean was written with Chinese characters and now it is written with the totally unrelated Korean alphabet, but it's still Korean either way. Serbs today may write Serbian with either the Cyrillic or the Latin alphabet, but either way, it's still Serbian.

But even if we accept for the sake of argument that talking about writing systems is meaningful, English is still far from the most irregular. In Japanese for example, it is basically completely impossible to even begin to predict how to write a word if all you know is its pronunciation. And then there is diglossia: people in Egypt, for example, would believe that what they are speaking and what they're writing are both "the Arabic language", but the written form and the spoken form are so dramatically different in every way that from an objective perspective they are separate languages, a bit like how during the Middle Ages people spoke French, Spanish, etc. but wrote in Latin.

[1]: this is all a rough oversimplification

[2]: This Quora answer is pretty interesting: https://www.quora.com/Which-language-has-the-most-complex-ph...

[3]: I think, anyway. But I don't really know Icelandic so someone can feel free to correct me.

"In Japanese for example, it is basically completely impossible to even begin to predict how to write a word if all you know is its pronunciation"

Do you mean using the Kanji characters, or is there something else (other than the silent "u" that hides) that would trip you up when trying to write something in the hiragana or katakana letters?

I'm referring to kanji, which is what most words are written with.

Kanji you are right, but I’m not sure most words are written with it (happy to be corrected, I only did a tiny bit of Japanese study and was only in Japan for a week or so). Plus it is possible to write a word using either of the other two alphabets even if you don’t know the kanji.

Mandarin, Cantonese and likely other Chinese languages are maybe a better example. I don’t think they have a phonetic system that you could fall back on

You could in principle write anything you want in any script you want. But if you write a word that is typically written in kanji in hiragana instead, you are not writing according to standard Japanese writing conventions.

This is a non sequitur, it is like saying "Chinese writing is not irregular because you could always just write everything in Cyrillic"

Well not really - if a Japanese speaker write a word to another Japanese speaker they could conceivably write the word out through either of these alphabets - they're mutually understood and they are able to perfectly (iirc) represent all of the words used in the language.

I don't think anyone would suggest that it's possible to do this with Chinese and Cyrillic characters. I actually think you'd be the first to suggest this is the same thing. I'm really confused why you'd say this.

Russian stress is unpredictable, not even per word, but among different inflections of the word. That holds for both nouns and verbs.

For the nouns there's an attempt at classification that uses both numbers and letters[0] and even then, a lot of commonly used words fall out of it. English, on the other hand, only has half a dozen umlauted plurals (foot-feet, tooth-teeth, ..), a tendency to keep some plurals invariant (one fish, two fish), and just one suppletive plural (person-people)

The verb has many forms, some of which like the past passive participle, are unpredictable especially with regard to stress. This compared to English, which has the simplest non-trivial conjugation you can imagine (just add an -s), and about hundred verb roots that are semi-irregular (semi- because there's a lot of patterns)

0: https://ru.wiktionary.org/wiki/Викисловарь:Использование_сло...

And that's not even mentioning things like genders, which in most languages follow no rules at all, which makes them all "irregular". English closest cousin, Dutch, has 3 genders which for are completely random for all but compound words and derivations.

The claim that English would be the most irregular language in the world boggles my mind. What even is irregular about English? How can you even make such a claim without deep knowledge of many languages from many different language families.

>What even is irregular about English?

I'm guessing it comes both the inconsistent pronunciation and irregular verbs. People then assume non-English languages have more consistency and regularity. It's a non-rigorous intuition that English is messier than every other language.

There are several poems that poke fun at it. It would be interesting to see equivalent "meta" poems about Russian, Spanish, etc.

(1) irregular pronunciation:

http://www.wordhord.com/humor/english-pronunciation-poems/

(2) irregular verb tenses:

Tense Times With Verbs by Richard Lederer[1]

  The verbs in English are a fright.
  How can we learn to read and write?
  Today we speak, but first we spoke;
  Some faucets leak, but never loke.
  Today we write, but first we wrote;
  We bite our tongues, but never bote.
  Each day I teach, for years I taught,
  And preachers preach, but never praught.
  This tale I tell; this tale I told;
  I smell the flowers, but never smold.
  If knights still slay, as once they slew,
  Then do we play, as once we plew?
  If I still do as once I did,
  Then do cows moo, as they once mid?
  I love to win, and games I’ve won;
  I seldom sin, and never son.
  I hate to lose, and games I lost;
  I didn’t choose, and never chost.
  I love to sing, and songs I sang;
  I fling a ball, but never flang.
  I strike that ball, that ball I struck;
  This poem I like, but never luck.
  I take a break, a break I took;
  I bake a cake, but never book.
  I eat that cake, that cake I ate;
  I beat an egg, but never bate.
  I often swim, as I once swam;
  I skim some milk, but never skam.
  I fly a kite that I once flew;
  I tie a knot, but never tew.
  I see the truth, the truth I saw;
  I flee from falsehood, never flaw.
  I stand for truth, as I once stood;
  I land a fish, but never lood.
  About these verbs I sit and think.
  These verbs don’t fit. They seem to wink
  At me, who sat for years and thought
  Of verbs that never fat or wrought.

[1] https://www.ncra.org/files/MCMS/2ED22AD5-E440-4ECB-B7B4-9701...

Calling the pronunciation irregular is putting the cart before the horse. The spoken language is the fundamental thing. It's the spelling that is irregular; the pronunciation just is what it is.

Writing isn't the same thing as language. Language is an innate human activity; whereas writing is a piece of technology that some cultures use and others don't.

>Calling the pronunciation irregular is putting the cart before the horse.

Spelling sometimes precedes the pronunciation. That's why Detroit is not pronounced "day-twah" like the French would say it. Because English borrows so much from German, French, Latin, Greek, with some Scandinavian and native Indian thrown in, Americans often look at the spelling and derive an Americanized English pronunciation. Put another way, a lot of English sounds the way it does because of the way it is written. The spellings originated from different parent languages but the pronunciation did not tag along with it. This adds to the inconsistency.

As far which causal direction (pronunciation->spelling vs spelling->pronunciation) has the higher quantity in English, I don't know.

I agree that in the large scheme of evolution from apes to humans, spoken language is more fundamental and will come before writing.

It's true that writing can influence language (as can lots of other things). I wasn't claiming otherwise. The magnitude of each direction does not matter and is not related to the point I was trying to make.

The point I was trying to make is: an inconsistency between writing and language, which are two different things, is not evidence of an internal inconsistency in the language.

It is like saying the Linux syscall API is "irregular", because it is incompatible with the Windows one.

The fact that "bough" and "trough" are spelled the same is not a fact about the English language so it doesn't prove anything about whether English is irregular or not. It is a fact about the writing system commonly used to represent English.

Edit: with your comment about apes to humans, you make it sound as if writing was invented in some earlier stage of evolution (but after language). Actually this is not true. Writing was invented by biologically and behaviorally modern humans indistinguishable from you and me. It is still an optional part of the human experience and not used by all cultures. The complete opposite is true of [spoken] language.

>The fact that "bough" and "trough" are spelled the same is not a fact about the English language so it doesn't prove anything about whether English is irregular or not. It is a fact about the writing system commonly used to represent English.

I understand your separation of concepts here. Let me try to go meta and explain what many people are talking about:

umanwizard : English _aural_ is totally separate from English _visual_ ; in this division, "inconsistency" makes no sense; (English aural would be like Linux and English visual is like Windows)

others: "English language" is _both_ the aural+visual together. The aural & visual evolved together and influenced each other. Therefore, inconsistencies _can_ be identified. It doesn't matter if there was an "English spoken" before "English writing". The context for many people saying "English is inconsistent/irregular" is to say that "English aural+visual is inconsistent".

I'm not saying you must agree that "English language=aural+visual". I'm informing you that the combined unit is what they're talking about. The combined concept enables those meta poems to exist. It also means that when you tell a linguist that "English is inconsistent", the linguist knows what you're talking about. Likewise, when a linguist mentions that "English is inconsistent", _we_ know what he's talking about.

>, you make it sound as if writing was invented in some earlier stage of evolution

No, that wasn't my intention. Just repeating the commonly held assumption that vocal grunts and pointing fingers at objects to communicate happens before systematic writing.

At the point where I had reached the end of your first sentence, I was about to respond with your second sentence. As Lederer's poem shows, the irregularity exists in the spoken language, and for the most part, the written language merely reflects that, at least in approximately phonetic languages.

People being amused by irregular verbs is, in my opinion, a sign of how much regularity there is in English. For an example of irregularity in Russian there is a short story by M. Zoschenko, "The fire iron" (Кочерга, М.Зощенко [1]). The plot of the story is about some office workers who are trying to write an order for five fire irons but don't know how to write "five fire irons" so they toss around ideas to order three and two in different orders or request "a fire iron, five items of" etc. It makes no sense in English, obviously, but in Russian the issue is that a noun, when used with quantity, has to be in different cases depending on the quantity and for quantity of 5 the case is genitive plural[2], which is rarely used naturally with "fire iron" so most people don't know how to make one.

1. http://fanread.ru/book/7894628/?page=1

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_declension#Numerals

How about the examples of Ket, from TFA?

So, skipping the question of exactly how you determine "regularity" or rank languages based on it...

What if the important factor isn't "risk of errors", but instead "resilience when errors exist"? In other words, suppose the problem isn't the average rate of technical errors, but how that rate compares to the "minimum requirement" for information to flow.

Example this: I writeng not good English. Butt still u today under standing enuf. Can business do, if slow.

English has always been scattershot; just chuck words together, it works fine. According to this article, most languages are pretty simple,

Get Fuzzy wasn't my favorite comic, but I remember this one - "you can wordify anything if you just verb it":

https://i.pinimg.com/736x/26/5c/0b/265c0bee514fc65ca2ea5f283...

But the author makes a good point...how many people would have the foresight to know that they're going to "verb" 'wordify' at the beginning of the sentence? I wouldn't. I don't even know what I should be nouning, most days.

But verbing weirds language...

http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/01/25

Ain't nothing wrong with a little weirding...

https://xkcd.com/1443/

This article should be catnip to all interested programmers.

Particularly interesting is the final tenth or so, drawing attention to the explosion noun-compound constructions in the body of scientific writing, even when compared to the peak of contemporary publications (i.e. Nature-published articles).

I also enjoyed the deliberately stupidified translations which invite refactoring into better English, and draw attention to the actual mechanisms of the underlying language.

A very interesting look at language evolution! One effect she didn't mention, though, is that language grammar has a propensity to decrease in complexity over time. Thus, Shakespeare's English was more complicated than our own, Goethe's German more than today's German and Plato's Greek more so than Koiné Greek, which is still more difficult than modern Greek...

I'm not a linguist, however, so I can't judge the relative strengths of this effect vs. the insularity she talks about...

> language grammar has a propensity to decrease in complexity over time.

Please provide a citation, as this seems obviously wrong on its face (if it were true, given that language has been in use for tens of thousands of years, we would all be grunting one-syllable words with no grammar at all).

I suspect that your statement is very narrowly based on the fact that most of the commonly studied languages in just one language family (Indo-European) have lost just one "complicated" feature (noun declensions).

This Quora answer[0] puts it better than I could: "No language is "more simple" than other languages. Old English had just 2 tenses, present and past, now there are 16 of them, future and future-in-the-past forms developed over the time, the continuous aspect appeared, the perfect appeared, so the verbal system acquired much more forms than it used to have. On the other hand, the nouns lost the gender and cases. It is always like that, if something is lost, some new features appear to compensate the loss.

A good example of a language that gets more and more complicated over the course of time is Chinese. The Old Chinese had no parts of speech, no number, no tense, it was a monosyllabic isolating language. Now Chinese is developing in the direction of getting more complicated, its words are mostly two-syllable now, parts of speech appeared in it, tenses begin to appear, etc.

And some languages can become more simple during some period, and then again get more complicated. Hindi is like that, first it lost all the cases which were in Sanskrit, but later it developed a new system of cases."

[0]: https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/6399

Sadly unable to find the source I got that from (an article I read several months ago). It did feature noun declensions quite prominently though, you're right in that respect ;-)

My understanding was that as major languages spread and came into contact with speakers of other languages, the cross-pollination led to a net loss in complexity of the original language (due to the fact that it had to accommodate speakers from a wide range of backgrounds). Of course, this effect only applies to those languages that do attain a sufficiently large reach, so my statement above was oversimplified.

Again, I am no linguist, so I cannot backup my claims with any scientific literature. My anecdotal experience would, however, confirm the general trend. (Drawing on what I know about English, German, Greek, kiSwahili and the Bantu languages.)

What you say about Chinese increasing in complexity strikes me as quite intriguing. Though the self-imposed isolation of the Chinese throughout much of history might account for that, as that must have created quite a strong linguistic insularity.

As expected, an article about language on HN draws out pretentious commenters that sound like teenagers showing off for English class and not realizing how ridiculous they sound.

I find it a pleasant change to talk about natural language once in a while, rather than the latest-and-greatest web frameworks that so often dominate other discussions here...

Plus, I seldom get the chance to practice my prose writing these days ;-)

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