Hold That Thought!

November 4, 2015 – 11:45 pm

“Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.”

— Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

Posted by Malcolm on at 11:45 pm, filed under Language. RSS feed for this post. Trackbacks are closed, but you can post a comment.

4 Comments

  1. Kevin Kim says

    Wir haben es hier nicht mit einer logischen Dialektik zu tun, welche von allem Inhalte der Erkenntnis abstrahiert, und lediglich den falschen Schein in der Form der VernunftschlÁ¼sse aufdeckt, sondern mit einer transzendentalen, welche, vÁ¶llig a priori, den Ursprung gewisser Erkenntnisse aus reiner Vernunft, und geschlossener Begriffe, deren Gegenstand empirisch gar nicht gegeben werden kann, die also gÁ¤nzlich auÁŸer dem VermÁ¶gen des reinen Verstandes liegen, enthalten soll.

    The site where I nicked that was displaying even longer sentences. But yes: the above sentence se termine avec un verbe.

    The longest sentence I’ve ever personally encountered, though, was in English: it was a chapter from Steve Martin’s Pure Drivel, in which the text went on for several pages before finally ending with a well-deserved period.

    Posted November 5, 2015 at 12:44 am | Permalink
  2. szopen says

    You should read more Iberoamerican prose. Sentences running for several pages are quite a norm there.

    Posted November 5, 2015 at 2:31 am | Permalink
  3. Kevin Kim says

    Ay, ay, ay.

    Posted November 5, 2015 at 3:00 am | Permalink
  4. antiquarian says

    …having swum through his own personal Sargasso Sea if he happened to include one of those six-syllable compound nouns in it.

    Posted November 6, 2015 at 7:51 pm | Permalink

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