The rise and fall of the English sentence (2017)

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.

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.

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!"

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 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.

"¡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.

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* ("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.")

maybe not in your conversations

Meanwhile, in the CS department: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/language

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"

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

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.

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.