
The Rise and Fall of the English Sentence - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/54/the-unspoken/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-english-sentence
======
gerdesj
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.

~~~
jacobolus
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.)

------
crazygringo
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...

~~~
veddox
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 ;-) )

~~~
mrkgnao
A (not necessarily original) example would be nice.

~~~
veddox
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.

------
empath75
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.

~~~
umanwizard
> 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.

~~~
jabretti
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.

~~~
kmm
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...](https://ru.wiktionary.org/wiki/Викисловарь:Использование_словаря_Зализняка)

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.

~~~
jasode
_> 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/](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...](https://www.ncra.org/files/MCMS/2ED22AD5-E440-4ECB-B7B4-97011F0363AB.pdf)

~~~
umanwizard
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.

~~~
jasode
_> 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.

~~~
umanwizard
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.

~~~
jasode
_> 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.

------
leggomylibro
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...](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/26/5c/0b/265c0bee514fc65ca2ea5f283453a53d
--katt-bucky.jpg)

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.

~~~
KC8ZKF
But verbing weirds language...

[http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/01/25](http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/01/25)

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

[https://xkcd.com/1443/](https://xkcd.com/1443/)

------
jeffbr13
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.

------
veddox
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...

~~~
umanwizard
> 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](https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/6399)

~~~
veddox
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.

------
aisofteng
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.

~~~
veddox
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 ;-)

