The Rise and Fall of the English Sentence
November 19, 2017 4:31 PM Subscribe
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. This puts an upper bound on complexity. But written text, which can be more deliberately planned out and revised, is able to transcend this.Linguist Julie Sedivy on the rise (and eventual fall?) of sentence complexity in written and oral languages.
This was a very enjoyable read. I'm not a linguist and cannot evaluate the rigour of the conclusions, but the idea that small scientific communities develop esoteric languages is quite interesting and certainly fits my experience.
posted by Alex404 at 5:09 PM on November 19, 2017 [3 favorites]
posted by Alex404 at 5:09 PM on November 19, 2017 [3 favorites]
👉📝🔥
posted by Talez at 5:19 PM on November 19, 2017 [4 favorites]
posted by Talez at 5:19 PM on November 19, 2017 [4 favorites]
I feel suspicious of this argument, simply because it looks very much like the descendant of an older philological argument that treated parataxis as the "primitive" state out of which Attic Greek hypotaxis would triumphantly emerge.
posted by praemunire at 5:30 PM on November 19, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by praemunire at 5:30 PM on November 19, 2017 [1 favorite]
Makes me think of a quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald: ""All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath."
posted by zardoz at 5:40 PM on November 19, 2017 [2 favorites]
posted by zardoz at 5:40 PM on November 19, 2017 [2 favorites]
praemunire, read to the end, where she suggests that the trend toward creating compound nouns in [technical] English, while simplifying sentence structure, may be turning it into something more similar to some very insular languages.
posted by agentofselection at 5:44 PM on November 19, 2017 [3 favorites]
posted by agentofselection at 5:44 PM on November 19, 2017 [3 favorites]
Would this imply that German, with its famous compound nouns like Gesamtkunstwerk and Waldeinsamskeit, is more esoteric than English?
posted by acb at 6:25 PM on November 19, 2017
posted by acb at 6:25 PM on November 19, 2017
Would this imply that German, with its famous compound nouns like Gesamtkunstwerk and Waldeinsamskeit, is more esoteric than English?
I'm not sure that German compound nouns are what she has in mind with the ...unpredictable aspects of language, the things you just have to know... that characterize an "esoteric" language, since their meaning can be determined by simply breaking them into parts (right? I don't know much German...). If there were a whole ton of rules governing how nouns can be compounded, and also a slew of irregular formations where with some nouns you can ignore the rules, or you have to use different rules, and you just have to know those exceptions, then that would be the kind of thing I understood her to mean here.
posted by thelonius at 7:10 PM on November 19, 2017
I'm not sure that German compound nouns are what she has in mind with the ...unpredictable aspects of language, the things you just have to know... that characterize an "esoteric" language, since their meaning can be determined by simply breaking them into parts (right? I don't know much German...). If there were a whole ton of rules governing how nouns can be compounded, and also a slew of irregular formations where with some nouns you can ignore the rules, or you have to use different rules, and you just have to know those exceptions, then that would be the kind of thing I understood her to mean here.
posted by thelonius at 7:10 PM on November 19, 2017
I'm not a linguist, but I was going to say that German compound nouns seem to fit the exoteric description, precisely because they do break apart in fairly predictable ways. Put another way, they're not a significant barrier to learning German.
posted by hoyland at 7:13 PM on November 19, 2017 [3 favorites]
posted by hoyland at 7:13 PM on November 19, 2017 [3 favorites]
In fact, reading to the end of the paragraph with the word exoteric in it, I see German is mentioned along with English as an example. (I would assume all Germanic languages are.)
posted by hoyland at 7:14 PM on November 19, 2017
posted by hoyland at 7:14 PM on November 19, 2017
Languages getting less complex? The truth will shock you. Here's why.
The English language is already being shaped beyond recognition by attention-engineering, behaviour-enforcing, and reality-generating algorithms demanded by the flow of capital. The world will become Upworthy. I pay no attention to all this and go on revising, in the still days at the library, an uncertain Metafilteresque translation (which I do not intend to publish) of Borge's Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.
posted by runcifex at 7:24 PM on November 19, 2017 [6 favorites]
The English language is already being shaped beyond recognition by attention-engineering, behaviour-enforcing, and reality-generating algorithms demanded by the flow of capital. The world will become Upworthy. I pay no attention to all this and go on revising, in the still days at the library, an uncertain Metafilteresque translation (which I do not intend to publish) of Borge's Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.
posted by runcifex at 7:24 PM on November 19, 2017 [6 favorites]
since their meaning can be determined by simply breaking them into parts (right? I don't know much German...).
Yes, for sure--those big German words, when transliterated, almost sound like caveman talk the approach to forming compound nouns is so simple--basically, anything you can use to do something (like a tool) is a Zeug, a plane is a Flugzeug (Flying-tool), lighter is a Feuerzeug (fire-tool), etc... They're also very particular about not using silent letters and think that languages like French are just crazy for using so many of them. Bluntness and directness of speech is also highly culturally valued (they think Americans are crazy for how often we say "sorry" casually when we don't really mean it, for example; my mom used to scold me for that all the time once we reestablished contact and I started visiting Germany before she died).
posted by saulgoodman at 7:30 PM on November 19, 2017 [1 favorite]
Yes, for sure--those big German words, when transliterated, almost sound like caveman talk the approach to forming compound nouns is so simple--basically, anything you can use to do something (like a tool) is a Zeug, a plane is a Flugzeug (Flying-tool), lighter is a Feuerzeug (fire-tool), etc... They're also very particular about not using silent letters and think that languages like French are just crazy for using so many of them. Bluntness and directness of speech is also highly culturally valued (they think Americans are crazy for how often we say "sorry" casually when we don't really mean it, for example; my mom used to scold me for that all the time once we reestablished contact and I started visiting Germany before she died).
posted by saulgoodman at 7:30 PM on November 19, 2017 [1 favorite]
I must say I'm left feeling a bit confused. It feels like the substantive difference between using (possibly several) relative clauses and conveying the same information in a sequence of sentences referring to the previous ones is that, in the first case, your brain has to hold the outer clause(s) on standby, ready to be resumed. But, as noted by hippybear, you're doing a similar thing a fair bit of the time in German--holding all the other bits of the sentence, waiting for the verb.
I don't know. I think I'd feel more comfortable with the argument if the languages used as examples for "simple" sentences were not spoken primarily by indigenous peoples.
posted by hoyland at 7:40 PM on November 19, 2017
I don't know. I think I'd feel more comfortable with the argument if the languages used as examples for "simple" sentences were not spoken primarily by indigenous peoples.
posted by hoyland at 7:40 PM on November 19, 2017
This idea has been on my mind lately, as I’ve been translating a bunch of patent-related writing, with sentences that routinely top 100 words and sometimes 200: they’d be literally unspeakable in normal conversation. An entire complex sentence will be piled up in front of a noun to modify it; several of these may precede a “wherein” that marks the turning point between mere foreplay and serious action.
posted by adamrice at 7:50 PM on November 19, 2017 [7 favorites]
posted by adamrice at 7:50 PM on November 19, 2017 [7 favorites]
A dog is "der Hund"; a woman is "die Frau"; a horse is "das Pferd"; now you put that dog in the genitive case, and is he the same dog he was before? No, sir; he is "des Hundes"; put him in the dative case and what is he? Why, he is "dem Hund." Now you snatch him into the accusative case and how is it with him? Why, he is "den Hunden." But suppose he happens to be twins and you have to pluralize him- what then? Why, they'll swat that twin dog around through the 4 cases until he'll think he's an entire international dog-show all in is own person. I don't like dogs, but I wouldn't treat a dog like that--I wouldn't even treat a borrowed dog that way. Well, it's just the same with a cat. They start her in at the nominative singular in good health and fair to look upon, and they sweat her through all the 4 cases and the 16 the's and when she limps out through the accusative plural you wouldn't recognize her for the same being. Yes, sir, once the German language gets hold of a cat, it's goodbye cat. That's about the amount of it.
- Mark Twain's Notebook
posted by MovableBookLady at 7:51 PM on November 19, 2017 [22 favorites]
- Mark Twain's Notebook
posted by MovableBookLady at 7:51 PM on November 19, 2017 [22 favorites]
I, for one, welcome our new compound noun overlords.
posted by DiscourseMarker at 7:55 PM on November 19, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by DiscourseMarker at 7:55 PM on November 19, 2017 [1 favorite]
Verbing weirds language. —Calvin & Hobbes
posted by Cobalt at 8:53 PM on November 19, 2017 [2 favorites]
posted by Cobalt at 8:53 PM on November 19, 2017 [2 favorites]
The thing about German is that you the verb at the end of the sentence often find, and so even when you begin speaking you already have to have the entire thing you want to say to have planned.
What hippybear said: and what a German writer just said on LitHub in a much shorter and more amusing article.
posted by kozad at 9:07 PM on November 19, 2017 [3 favorites]
What hippybear said: and what a German writer just said on LitHub in a much shorter and more amusing article.
posted by kozad at 9:07 PM on November 19, 2017 [3 favorites]
Like hoyland, I'm skeptical of the notion of "simple" languages spoken by non-literate peoples.
Here's a sentence in Nishnaabemwin (a form of Ojibwe): "The women cut firewood to burn there where they live, and as for the men they put up firewood to try and earn money in order to feed their children." A couple levels of recursion; plus this is a polysynthetic language where each word can be mighty complex, e.g.wan-wnji-shamaawaad "by which (animate plural subjects) will feed (animate objects)". Nor is this an "isolated" language: it belongs to the Algonquian family, whose territory was the entire northeastern US + eastern Canada.
Or, here's a sentence from the Rigveda: "The man with food who hardens his heart against the poor man who comes to him suffering and searching for nourishment-- though in the past he had made use of him-- he surely finds no one with sympathy." Note, the Rigveda was composed orally, and has been passed down orally for almost three thousand years.
Writing allows a language to create more complications, sure. But it's not the only way to complicate language. Plus, if a Ket researcher recorded people's day-to-day English speech, she might well conclude that English speech is pretty simple.
posted by zompist at 9:08 PM on November 19, 2017 [8 favorites]
Here's a sentence in Nishnaabemwin (a form of Ojibwe): "The women cut firewood to burn there where they live, and as for the men they put up firewood to try and earn money in order to feed their children." A couple levels of recursion; plus this is a polysynthetic language where each word can be mighty complex, e.g.wan-wnji-shamaawaad "by which (animate plural subjects) will feed (animate objects)". Nor is this an "isolated" language: it belongs to the Algonquian family, whose territory was the entire northeastern US + eastern Canada.
Or, here's a sentence from the Rigveda: "The man with food who hardens his heart against the poor man who comes to him suffering and searching for nourishment-- though in the past he had made use of him-- he surely finds no one with sympathy." Note, the Rigveda was composed orally, and has been passed down orally for almost three thousand years.
Writing allows a language to create more complications, sure. But it's not the only way to complicate language. Plus, if a Ket researcher recorded people's day-to-day English speech, she might well conclude that English speech is pretty simple.
posted by zompist at 9:08 PM on November 19, 2017 [8 favorites]
For lovers of the sentence may I recommend the Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai's 75 page, single sentence short story, The Last Wolf (Az utolsó farkas). I read it this weekend and found it completely entrancing. It was originally written in Hungarian and translated into English, at least, by the wonderful George Szirtes. It say a lot for any language that such a thing is even possible at all, let alone be considered a work or art.
posted by vac2003 at 10:38 PM on November 19, 2017 [2 favorites]
posted by vac2003 at 10:38 PM on November 19, 2017 [2 favorites]
There's a lot of fascinating stuff in this article. Most contemporary English speakers have probably wondered at the seeming decline in the complexity of the written word through the modern era. This article has a big theory to explain a lot of those trends and where this may lead. But there are a lot of big claims that I can't assess.
The premises seem to be:
One thing I like about this argument: it does seem like that the decline in complexity of written English corresponds with the introduction of audio mass media. But I'm sure this can't be the first place that's been observed, so I imagine there could be other theories out there that account for this.
posted by Edgewise at 12:39 AM on November 20, 2017 [3 favorites]
The premises seem to be:
- Esoteric languages are meant to be insular, exoteric languages are intended to serve as lingua franca.
- Verbal language tends to be more intrinsically esoteric than exoteric, while written language tends to be the opposite.
- Complex irregular conjugations are the sign of verbal/esoteric languages and complex nested sentence structures are the sign of written/exoteric languages.
- These two types of complexity tend to be mutually exclusive due to this dynamic.
- Recent tendencies in mass communication are driving English back towards the verbal/esoteric axis, including:
- An increase in technical literature
- An increasing prevalence of recorded speech over writing
One thing I like about this argument: it does seem like that the decline in complexity of written English corresponds with the introduction of audio mass media. But I'm sure this can't be the first place that's been observed, so I imagine there could be other theories out there that account for this.
posted by Edgewise at 12:39 AM on November 20, 2017 [3 favorites]
Interesting article. But it's up to me how long my sentences are. And I'm not convinced it isn't purely arbitrary, based entirely on punctuation concepts.
posted by aspersioncast at 9:12 AM on November 20, 2017
posted by aspersioncast at 9:12 AM on November 20, 2017
Am I misunderstanding, or is it fair to say that some languages contain recursion within words, and some create the recursion within sentences?
posted by latkes at 9:20 AM on November 20, 2017
posted by latkes at 9:20 AM on November 20, 2017
Complex irregular conjugations are the sign of verbal/esoteric languages and complex nested sentence structures are the sign of written/exoteric languages.
These two types of complexity tend to be mutually exclusive due to this dynamic.
Not conjugation--morphology. But it's not clear to me why she considers complex irregular word-formations more inherently challenging than complex irregular verb-conjugations. Attic Greek, presumably in her classification an example of a written language that deploys hypotaxis with freedom, doesn't have an excessive amount of compound words, but most people find the verb-system very tough going, with plenty to "just know" (does this verb take a first or second aorist? Does it use a normal augment or does it have a weird exception? etc.).
There seems to be a lurking assumption here that synthetic languages, especially nonagglutinative ones, are inherently more opaque to outsiders than analytic languages. I'm just not sure that's true. (And I do mean "not sure"--my knowledge of formal linguistics is fairly limited.)
posted by praemunire at 9:58 AM on November 20, 2017 [1 favorite]
These two types of complexity tend to be mutually exclusive due to this dynamic.
Not conjugation--morphology. But it's not clear to me why she considers complex irregular word-formations more inherently challenging than complex irregular verb-conjugations. Attic Greek, presumably in her classification an example of a written language that deploys hypotaxis with freedom, doesn't have an excessive amount of compound words, but most people find the verb-system very tough going, with plenty to "just know" (does this verb take a first or second aorist? Does it use a normal augment or does it have a weird exception? etc.).
There seems to be a lurking assumption here that synthetic languages, especially nonagglutinative ones, are inherently more opaque to outsiders than analytic languages. I'm just not sure that's true. (And I do mean "not sure"--my knowledge of formal linguistics is fairly limited.)
posted by praemunire at 9:58 AM on November 20, 2017 [1 favorite]
Then, screw this!
15 years of experience interviewing programmers has convinced me that the best programmers all have an easy aptitude for dealing with multiple levels of abstraction simultaneously. In programming, that means specifically that they have no problem with recursion (which involves holding in your head multiple levels of the call stack at the same time)...
I can't stand the idea that programming requires some sort of special innate genius.* We can all recurse.
*Only discoverable through whiteboard problems.
posted by the_blizz at 12:14 PM on November 20, 2017 [1 favorite]
15 years of experience interviewing programmers has convinced me that the best programmers all have an easy aptitude for dealing with multiple levels of abstraction simultaneously. In programming, that means specifically that they have no problem with recursion (which involves holding in your head multiple levels of the call stack at the same time)...
I can't stand the idea that programming requires some sort of special innate genius.* We can all recurse.
*Only discoverable through whiteboard problems.
posted by the_blizz at 12:14 PM on November 20, 2017 [1 favorite]
Decline an English language noun.
Conjugate an irregular English verb for each of 12 tenses, singular and plural persons. Repeat for hochdeutsch.
Differentiate idiolect and sociolect vocabulary with examples that signify one cognate.
Name four loan words from French or Spanish or Latin Vulgar used in English vernacular.
Name one contemporary neologism formulated in koine Greek. Define it.
Compose a complex emoji sentence.
Diagram a complex English language sentence.
Perform an Englishvernacular nominalization with or without derivational morphology.
Repeat for Hebrew.
posted by marycatherine at 3:19 PM on November 20, 2017 [2 favorites]
Conjugate an irregular English verb for each of 12 tenses, singular and plural persons. Repeat for hochdeutsch.
Differentiate idiolect and sociolect vocabulary with examples that signify one cognate.
Name four loan words from French or Spanish or Latin Vulgar used in English vernacular.
Name one contemporary neologism formulated in koine Greek. Define it.
Compose a complex emoji sentence.
Diagram a complex English language sentence.
Perform an Englishvernacular nominalization with or without derivational morphology.
Repeat for Hebrew.
posted by marycatherine at 3:19 PM on November 20, 2017 [2 favorites]
Oh! I've had this dream before!
posted by Spathe Cadet at 3:23 PM on November 20, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by Spathe Cadet at 3:23 PM on November 20, 2017 [1 favorite]
I've been trying to learn Nishnaabemowin for more than half of my life. Accessible educational resources were limited for most of that time so I blamed my failure on that. Now I just blame it on the complexities of the language.
posted by elsietheeel at 8:21 AM on November 21, 2017
posted by elsietheeel at 8:21 AM on November 21, 2017
I see there is a good discussion of this article over at languagehat.com.
posted by Rumple at 9:55 AM on November 21, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by Rumple at 9:55 AM on November 21, 2017 [1 favorite]
Decline an English language noun.
No thanks.
posted by inire at 2:55 PM on November 21, 2017 [3 favorites]
No thanks.
posted by inire at 2:55 PM on November 21, 2017 [3 favorites]
I know nothing about linguistics, although I really wanted to study linguistics when I was younger, but I wanted to chime in to say a couple of things and maybe gather an understanding that may not be totally relevant.
I was definitely one of those precocious "smart kids" who excelled at reading from a young age, and was reading decently "complex" books at relatively early ages (regardless of whether I had a college-level understanding of them, I had some sort of understanding, or else I wouldn't have read them). For whatever reason, my mother passed on Nietzsche and Marx to me around 5th grade, I am not entirely sure why, and I continued reading bigger and bigger things from there on out. At some point during my teen years, and to the detriment of my adulthood since, I slowly quit reading "complex" books, and the majority of my reading came from the computer. Tabbed browsing and the ubiquity of information online definitely impacted my attention span, and it's not uncommon for me to have multiple tabs open at once filled with articles to read (I also blame metafilter for this). I simply cannot sit down and read a book anymore, and I think I've unconsciously been absorbing the linguistic changes of online discourse and journalism. To bring this back around, an example in the article mentioned this:
posted by gucci mane at 8:49 AM on November 22, 2017 [2 favorites]
I was definitely one of those precocious "smart kids" who excelled at reading from a young age, and was reading decently "complex" books at relatively early ages (regardless of whether I had a college-level understanding of them, I had some sort of understanding, or else I wouldn't have read them). For whatever reason, my mother passed on Nietzsche and Marx to me around 5th grade, I am not entirely sure why, and I continued reading bigger and bigger things from there on out. At some point during my teen years, and to the detriment of my adulthood since, I slowly quit reading "complex" books, and the majority of my reading came from the computer. Tabbed browsing and the ubiquity of information online definitely impacted my attention span, and it's not uncommon for me to have multiple tabs open at once filled with articles to read (I also blame metafilter for this). I simply cannot sit down and read a book anymore, and I think I've unconsciously been absorbing the linguistic changes of online discourse and journalism. To bring this back around, an example in the article mentioned this:
During the second half of the 20th century, three- and four-noun combinations proliferated, and now we have noun pile extravaganzas such as state hate crime victim numbers. A 19th-century writer might have written instead: the numbers of victims who have experienced crimes that were motivated by hatred directed at their ethnic or racial identity, and who have reported these crimes to the state.That example, "state hate crime victim numbers", is something that I have such a hard time wrapping my head around, and I've totally noticed it more and more throughout the years, and as I've gotten older it's totally screwed up my ability to read and understand articles. There are times where I have to stop for a solid 5 minutes and slowly re-read phrasings like that to myself to make sure I am understanding them correctly. What's the deal with those? It makes me feel like my reading comprehension is regressing, and the 19th century version of it flows so much better and conveys information to me much more fluidly. It seems like this is potentially going to get worse in the age of tweets and the need to shove information into our brains quickly, but it feels entirely debilitating to me. Does anybody else feel the same? I'm young, I'm 28, and things like that are making me feel like my mind is getting worse.
posted by gucci mane at 8:49 AM on November 22, 2017 [2 favorites]
Edgewise: Most contemporary English speakers have probably wondered at the seeming decline in the complexity of the written word through the modern era.
None put it better than Cole Porter (coupling it with relaxing attitudes towards vulgarity):
posted by Kattullus at 4:38 PM on November 25, 2017 [1 favorite]
None put it better than Cole Porter (coupling it with relaxing attitudes towards vulgarity):
Good authors tooSpeaking of... I wonder how much can be attributed to fashion. Long sentences with many clauses became deeply unfashionable in the early half of 20th Century. It would interesting to see if it would be possible to trace that in written prose.
Who once knew
Better words
Now only use
Four-letter words
Writing prose
Anything goes
posted by Kattullus at 4:38 PM on November 25, 2017 [1 favorite]
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Unconsciously, semi-consciously, or wholly deliberate, the discipline of pragmatics was a good place for me to have begun observing (or convincing myself I have at all substantially) how so much "discourse" out there goes pitchforky, or not, real fast.
This FPP is a moderator's home turf and given how rare moderated spaces and their practical schemes can be demonstrated is a helluva MF bias and that's not a bad thing at all.
posted by lazycomputerkids at 5:01 PM on November 19, 2017