The great shift of English prose

Also on the same topic: “The rise and fall of the English sentence” by Julie Sedivy in Nautilus[1,2,3].

[1] https://nautil.us/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-english-sentence-...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15720892 (2017, 84 points, 39 comments)

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42695580 (2025, 100 points, 52 comments)

I love the English language. It's so simple yet versatile, and has gone through a fascinating series of changes. The "great vovel shift" was one I encountered while searching for rhymes that only make sense when read off paper, but not when pronounced:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_rhyme

What is the sense of analyzing sentences removed from semantics and pragmatics? I am sure there is some utility to it in linguistics but we see this outside of linguistics a great deal. Short sentences are very useful to writers like Hemingway who dumps everything they can into the subtext but this also means we don't get much information from the semantics, it is all in the pragmatics. So what does the syntax really tell us about what is being said? Very little when it comes to short sentences as far as I can tell, becomes more interesting with long sentences but there it is a guide helping you through the semantics.

>So sentences are copied, constructed, or created; they are uttered, mentioned, or used; each says, means, implies, reveals, connects; each titillates, invites, conceals, suggests; and each is eventually either consumed or conserved; nevertheless, the lines in Stevens or the sentences of Joyce and James, pressed by one another into being as though the words before and the words after were those reverent hands both Rilke and Rodin have celebrated, clay calling to clay like mating birds, concept responding to concept the way passionate flesh congests, every note a nipple on the breast, at once a triumphant pinnacle and perfect conclusion, like pelted water, I think I said, yet at the same time only another anonymous cell, and selfless in its service to the shaping skin as lost forgotten matter is in all walls; these lines, these sentences, are not quite uttered, not quite mentioned, peculiarly employed, strangely listed, oddly used, as though a shadow were the leaves, limbs, trunk of a new tree, and the shade itself were thrust like a dark torch into the grassy air in the same slow and forceful way as its own roots, entering the earth, roughen the darkness there till all its freshly shattered facets shine against themselves as teeth do in the clenched jaw; for Rabelias was wrong, blue is the color of the mind in borrow of the body; it is the color consciousness becomes when caressed; it is the dark inside of sentences, sentences which follow their own turnings inward out of sight like the whorls of a shell, and which we follow warily, as Alice after that rabbit, nervous and white, till suddenly—there! climbing down clauses and passing through 'and' as it opens,—there—there—we're here!...in time for tea and tantrums; such are the sentences we should like to love—the ones which love us and themselves as well—incestuous sentences—sentences which make an imaginary speaker speak the imagination loudly to the reading eye; that have a kind of orality transmogrified: not the tongue touching the genital tip, but the idea of the tongue, the thought of the tongue, word-wet to part-wet, public mouth to private, seed to speech, and speech...ah! after exclamations, groans, with order gone, disorder on the way, we subside through sentences like these, the risk of senselessness like this, to float like leaves on the restful surface of that world of words to come, and there, in peace, patiently to dream of the sensuous, imagined, and mindful Sublime.

William Gass - On Being Blue.

"Man dog walk. Boy biscuit eat. Girl throw ball." are held up as examples of incorrect english, which is largely fair.

However, none of those examples are actually ambiguous. I'm pretty sure that those examples translated word for word into any language would also be understandable.

"Lots of English writing has got simpler through use of the plain style, sticking to a logical shared syntax, especially the syntax of speech. But all the other ways of writing are still there, often showing up when we don’t expect them."

My first grade teacher told me never start a sentence with but or and.

In this case, the second sentence could equally have been written as just another clause