
Cicero's Periodic Sentence (2012) - cribbles
http://www.catskill-merino.com/blog/ciceros-periodic-sentence
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eecc
Being Italian I can attest that I spent most of our high-school studying and
celebrating such style of writing, and the rest of my life being criticized
for it. Dammit ;)

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hodgesrm
It's interesting to speculate whether Latin supports this style better than
other languages like English, or whether it's just a matter of taste.

One difference between these two languages is that classical Latin does not
have implicit word order in sentences whereas English is incomprehensible
without it. Mentally you have to keep the pieces of a Latin sentence in your
head until you reach the end to get the basic meaning. In English you
generally know the subject and main verb up front--the rest is details.

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Amezarak
The article alludes to it, but I think that English sentences have undergone a
fairly major shift since, say, the mid-1800s or so. Maybe even the early
1900s.

I read a lot of older books, and sentences like that aren't uncommon. There's
all kinds of strange word orders, clauses piled on clauses piled on clauses,
etc. It takes some getting used to, but after a while it quits bothering you.
If you made me speculate, I'd guess the Latin education of most English
writers had something to do with it.

Nowadays, it's actually quite striking how short and simple most of our
sentences are.

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tomcam
I hit on the idea of reading old court transcripts to see how people actually
talked back then. It’s much closer to modern syntax than I expected.

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Amezarak
I would say that there was a dramatic difference between written text and
speech back then, and nowadays that difference is considerably smaller - text
has become much more speechlike.

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tomcam
Neat observation. I agree.

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tomcam
Gawd. I loves me some terse, unadorned post-Hemingway English. Long sentences
like that are an unnecessary cognitive burden.

