Under the whips of two tyrants: time and memory

September 22, 2024 1:27 PM

Scientists have argued that recursion, a technique that allows chunks of language such as sentences to be embedded inside each other (with no hard limit on the number of nestings) is a universal human ability, perhaps even the one uniquely human ability that supports language. It’s what allows us to create—literally—an infinite variety of novel sentences out of a limited inventory of words. from The Rise and Fall of the English Sentence [Nautilus; ungated]
posted by chavenet (12 comments total)

I feel somewhat guilty for making this observation, but that's a lot of words to express the simple (if not immediately obvious) point that oral languages have less complex sentence structures than written languages for the simple fact that writing gives us more time to think about what is being said.
posted by Ickster at 3:57 PM on September 22 [5 favorites]

guilty for making this observation, but that's a lot of words to express...the simple fact

Try closing your eyes and repeating the post title in your head a few times.
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 4:40 PM on September 22 [1 favorite]

Ickster, there was a lot more in there than just that point. For instance,

the average sentence length in written English has shrunk since the 17th century from between 40-70 words to a more modest 20

Which is not to mention the compression in scientific texts described toward the end of the piece, or the blending of syntactic and semantic meaning in the Ket language.

The metaphor of "mental math" used to frame much of the piece was an interesting one. There's something to it; I'm able to hold in my working memory quite a bit more calculation than my students, not because I have more memory for it but because I can more efficiently store several steps as one coherent pattern that I've gotten very familiar with. And this is true not just for algebra and arithmetic but even for more complicated proof structures; things like epsilon-delta setups for example require basically no working memory at all at this point. I think in my previous reading on Iinguistics I have come upon the idea of "chunking" which might be what I'm describing, but I'll have to refreshy memory on it.
posted by dbx at 5:17 PM on September 22 [10 favorites]

Ickster I had the same initial reaction, but the position is moderated and then blown away towards the end of the article where the exception proves the rule, properly.
posted by 1adam12 at 8:45 PM on September 22 [1 favorite]

the average sentence length in written English has shrunk since the 17th century from between 40-70 words to a more modest 20

Mrs. Pedantzilla, a formidable wordsmith in her own right, observes, "Well we have rules for punctuation now."
posted by Pedantzilla at 9:31 PM on September 22 [12 favorites]

I think the point about scientists addressing a smaller community points to a similar social factor generally. Two or three centuries ago authors could use long complex sentences because they were not usually writing for everyone (not everyone was even literate) but for a highly-educated minority. They could also rely on a deference we don’t have anymore. Back then if you wrote a sentence an ordinary person in the street couldn't parse, they were ashamed: nowadays, you would be the one who was ashamed.
posted by Phanx at 11:40 PM on September 22 [5 favorites]

This point hit hard, as someone who is struggling to get the household teenager to read rather than watch:

Could syntactic complexity in literate languages diminish over time, if new technologies (podcasts, video lectures, and audiobooks) tether language more tightly to speech and its inherent limitations?

The internet for me is a thing to read. The internet for teenager is to watch. But does that mean that the teenager isn't developing skills in managing complex and reflective thoughts and ideas? And also, how am I going to be even more distanced from the culture as an oldster?
posted by jjderooy at 11:47 PM on September 22 [3 favorites]

I appreciate that the pull quote - and comments (this one too!) - include nested clauses.
posted by Acey at 2:36 AM on September 23 [1 favorite]

I have noticed that smart literate people, who (importantly) have spent a lot of time around other smart literate people, do often also speak in longer sentences - with the assumption that their audience can follow them on the journey toward their eventual point.
posted by subdee at 8:33 AM on September 23 [1 favorite]

That's all well and good, but the key question is: Were there embedded clauses in the complaint tablet to copper merchant Ea-nāṣir?
posted by the sobsister at 8:50 AM on September 23 [4 favorites]

tl;dr
posted by flabdablet at 10:03 AM on September 23 [4 favorites]

I wonder if the "compression" in science writing is actually more related to space requirements by editors and publishers than to insularity. I certainly compress things a lot when trying to get a text below a certain number of words, because I'd rather give up literary flourish than ideas, so "actions that the government initiated" will absolutely turn into "government actions" after a few rewrites. Papers from my older colleagues were quite verbose and their prose more elegant, but possibly space constraints used to be less demanding.
posted by elgilito at 12:13 AM on September 24 [1 favorite]