I also see the shrinking sentence length celebrated among my scientific colleagues who abhor the dreaded "run-on sentence". Maybe it is because I have no formal literacy or linguistic training but I mourn this loss; older, classical novels used to have a tremendous flavor in their sentence structure by prioritizing the longform. Some English translations of Russian literature can run into the absurd (sentences at hal…
The great shift of English prose
31–40 of 53 posts
Re: The great shift of English prose
#32"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
>> "Lots of English writing has got simpler through ..." > My first grade teacher told me never start a sentence with but or and. One of my elementary school teachers also taught me to use past participles, which means the quote from the article should have been written thusly: Lots of English writing has gotten simpler through ... It is amusing that an article dedicated to enumerating the degeneration of English pro…
Re: The great shift of English prose
#33I also see the shrinking sentence length celebrated among my scientific colleagues who abhor the dreaded "run-on sentence". Maybe it is because I have no formal literacy or linguistic training but I mourn this loss; older, classical novels used to have a tremendous flavor in their sentence structure by prioritizing the longform. Some English translations of Russian literature can run into the absurd (sentences at hal…
C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin’s translation of Marcel Proust’s «In Search of Lost Time (Remembrance of Things Past)» contains nearly half-page long sentences.
Many modern readers complain about the substantial difficulty in following such sentences, although I personally find them delightful.
Re: The great shift of English prose
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> "Lots of English writing has got simpler through ..." > My first grade teacher told me never start a sentence with but or and. One of my elementary school teachers also taught me to use past participles, which means the quote from the article should have been written thusly: Lots of English writing has gotten simpler through ... It is amusing that an article dedicated to enumerating the degeneration of English pro…
Did your elementary school teacher make it clear whether you should pronounce the middle two t's in gotten as a glottal or a held stop? What do you think of that advice today? How might it vary depending on where in the anglophone world you live, and your age?
Yes
> What do you think of that advice today?
It is a small part of my English enunciation.
> How might it vary depending on where in the anglophone world you live, and your age?
Significantly.
But I did not author a critique regarding English prose and the nature of prevalent sentence structures therein.
Re: The great shift of English prose
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> "Lots of English writing has got simpler through ..." > My first grade teacher told me never start a sentence with but or and. One of my elementary school teachers also taught me to use past participles, which means the quote from the article should have been written thusly: Lots of English writing has gotten simpler through ... It is amusing that an article dedicated to enumerating the degeneration of English pro…
"Got" is the usual past participle in British English. Even if you don't speak British English yourself, it does count as a valid form of the language - even if of course a barbaric, corrupted one, degenerate, practically a pidgin.
Had the author declared what English dialect they were using and/or critiquing, and were it British English as well, then this is a salient point indeed.
Re: The great shift of English prose
#36I did enjoy reading this, but "right branching" / "left branching" aside, this is still more soft cultural commentary than hard linguistics. Even on that level, what seemed glaringly missing was more prose/poetry distinction --- did writing change overall? is prose a new category? or did the boundary between prose and poetry shift? (e.g. maybe before rhyme distinguished poetry, and rhythm was every, and then later rhythm distinguished poetry and rhyme was optional. I'm just guessing.) "Speechified" is a funny term when poetry traditionally was meant to spoken. (Maybe a good left-coded cultural reference to balance all the right-coded ones would be the e're-helpful reminder that spoken, non-melodic poetry thus remains very much part of our vernacular culture.)
Also, if you want to make a JKV vs Coverdale distinction, please don't also skip between psalms and regular story-telling passages. Those are in a very different style regardless of translator! Better to show different translations of the same passage to prove the point, but of course that would not work so well.
For example, yes for most of the couple psalms I glanced at, Coverdale is definitely better poetry than King James, but for the most famous Psalm 23 https://biblehub.com/coverdale/psalms/23.htm https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm%2023&vers..., KJV blows Coverdale out of the water.
My kingdom for a linguist credentialed enough to write in, say, Quanta Magazine, with an art/literature passion on the side, to write on this topic with more precision and proof.
Re: The great shift of English prose
#37Instead we get an example from the Bible (Psalms 100:4), displaying characteristic parallelism but still with perfectly modern sentence structure: "Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise: be thankful unto him, and bless his name."
And then we get a new section heading, "Modern English emerges with bibles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries," quoting an identically constructed sentence from the same Bible (Acts 4:8–9): "Ye rulers of the people, and elders of Israel, [consider] the good deed done to the impotent man, by what means he is made whole," etc.
If there's any distinction to be made there, surely it's that the former quotation is from Hebrew and the latter from Greek — but then isn't it rather a little surprising that the exact same rhetorical device, this specific type of parallelism, should be used, than that there should be anything different about the structure of these two verses? But then — guess what — there's nothing different about their structure at all!
So what's the deal with that whole section (or pair of sections), and what actually is the author's thesis? What is the "great shift" mentioned in the headline?
If the thesis is that there was some big shift in sentence structure circa 1600, I'd say it's just demonstrably wrong. Look for example at Chaucer, circa 1400: https://chaucer.fas.harvard.edu/pages/tale-melibee-0 Nothing unusual about those sentences, is there?
Re: The great shift of English prose
#38I also see the shrinking sentence length celebrated among my scientific colleagues who abhor the dreaded "run-on sentence". Maybe it is because I have no formal literacy or linguistic training but I mourn this loss; older, classical novels used to have a tremendous flavor in their sentence structure by prioritizing the longform. Some English translations of Russian literature can run into the absurd (sentences at hal…
Russian is much more conducive to long sentences because it's highly inflected. Adjectives have to agree with the nouns, and verbs can carry the grammatical gender and person markers. This all helps to keep the context clearer, the reader doesn't have to strain their brain to connect the clauses. So long-winded descriptions fit really well into the flow of the text. It just feels more artificial and self-indulgent in…
There is no grammatical ceiling on sentence length in Sinitic languages, Chinese languages (all of them) can form long sentences, and they all do possess a great many connecting words. Computational work on Chinese explicitly talks about «long Chinese sentences» and how to parse them[0].
However, many Chinese varieties and writing styles often rely more on parataxis[1] than English does, so relations between clauses are more often (but not always) conveyed by meaning, word order, aspect, punctuation, and discourse context, rather than by obligatory overt conjunctions. That is a tendency, not an inability.
Re: The great shift of English prose
#39Re: The great shift of English prose
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
The first 2 are following latin grammar (subject-object-verb). The third one is technically incorrect because of subject-verb number disagreement -- but ignoring that is common in some vernaculars
I think we can agree that they are awful examples! The problem is, that when you try to reduce an example of "bad" english to the bare bones (for clarity), you often end up with quite legitimate language. Even in Latin the occasional transgression is sort of allowed: "Alea iacta est" - that is of course "idium". I studied Latin via "Civis Romanus", "mental" and "idiot" (Mentor and Idium). An englander would of course…