12-23-2014, 05:24 PM | #1 | |
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Why does old writing has so long sentences?
I notice this sentence in a 1890 book:
Quote:
Why were each sentence so impressively long back then? Was there a punctation shortage? And why has this changed today? |
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12-23-2014, 06:47 PM | #2 |
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Short attention span? I don't know, I like the sentence.
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12-23-2014, 08:40 PM | #3 |
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I've read a number of "modern" books with long paragraphs.
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12-23-2014, 10:19 PM | #4 |
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I think part of it is the limitations of technology at the time a given book was written. For example Lew Wallace's "Ben-Hur" has long blocks of description right from the start. That's because readers back when it was written hadn't seen the 'lay of the land' via pictures or TV documentary like we can now days. They had a choice of long descriptions, sketches, or actually going to the place where the story was set. That's why Matthew Brady is still remembered as well since he was the 1st person to actually take pictures of what a real battlefield looked like and he changed the average person's knowledge of what war actually was. Prior to that all that was available was words on a page.
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12-23-2014, 11:41 PM | #5 |
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Styles and tastes change over the years?
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12-23-2014, 11:52 PM | #6 |
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12-24-2014, 04:27 AM | #7 | |||
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Quote:
Anyways, I had always wondered why so many older novels always started out with extensive description of the landscape. I just didn't get it before. Here's another beautifully crafted sentence, this one the opening line from The Turn of the Screw: Quote:
The longer a single sentence goes on without punctation, the more information is jammed into a single 'argument'. This might explain the lengthy sentences used in legalese, where the words exact relation is importaint. Maybe the shortening of the sentences and the disappearence of the ; are related? I'm still unsure about the reason for those lenghty sentences, but it's probably the Germans fault. Here is a quote from Mark Twains 'The Awful German Language': Quote:
http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/awfgrmlg.html Last edited by Kasper Hviid; 12-24-2014 at 04:33 AM. |
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12-24-2014, 04:55 AM | #8 |
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The sentence quoted by the OP doesn't strike me as being abnormally long, I must say.
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12-24-2014, 04:56 AM | #9 |
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There is also the fact that there wasn't much in the form of personal entertainment back then either. You couldn't go to the movies or watch the latest DVD or streamed video because those things didn't exist yet. A long book filled the hrs that a person had when they weren't working and of course books weren't cheap to buy back then so you wanted the most you could get out of them for your money.
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12-24-2014, 05:03 AM | #10 |
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There was, however (in the UK, at least) an excellent public library system in the 1890s.
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12-24-2014, 05:09 AM | #11 |
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Touche. I don't know what the library system was like here in the Midwest US back then. I imagine it was also a bit of a status symbol though to be able to say you had your own copy of author x's book and that you had finished it. Much like we today pride ourselves on having a particular type of car or a certain size of flat screen TV. People don't change much.
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12-24-2014, 05:13 AM | #12 | |
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Quote:
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12-24-2014, 05:46 AM | #13 |
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I would imagine that a paper column contains roughly the same number of words independent of the number of points dividing them into sentences.
Last edited by Billi; 12-24-2014 at 05:49 AM. |
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