Interesting Fact - Sentences - For Hermine
We've had the shortest sentence, but what about the longest sentence? Well in literature seemingly it is 469,375 words long. It appears in Nigel Tomm's "The Blah Story".
(For many years people regarded the last section of James Joyce's Ulysses, Molly Bloom's soliloquy, which consists of two sentences to be the longest. The first sentence is 11,281 words long, and the second 12,931 words long. This held the record for the longest sentence until The Rotter's Club was published in 2001, which contains a 13,955-word sentence.
There have been other contenders over the years. The Guinness Book of World Records had an entry for what it claimed was the longest sentence in English, from William Faulkner's novel Absalom, Absalom! containing 1,287 words.
There is also a Polish novel “Gates of Paradise” written by Jerzy Andrzejewski, and published in 1960, with a 40,000 word sentence. And finally, there is a Czech novel that consists of one long sentence (128 pages long) “Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age” by Bohumil Hrabal.
They make a valid point in Wikipedia: ...there is no absolute limit on the length of a written English sentence; a sentence describing successive reading, for example, could be infinitely long, and one concatenating clauses with grammatical conjunctions such as 'and' could go on as long as material may be supplied. Also, a way to extend sentences indefinitely is by the addition of modifiers and modifier clauses, such as:-
The rat that the cat that the dog chased ran....
or of successive extensions of the form
Someone thinks/knows/believes that someone thinks/knows/believes that...
Language can support more variation than can reasonably be created or recorded. Therefore, at least one linguistics textbook (oh those linguists) concludes that there is no such thing as the longest English sentence.
I have not actually counted any of these. Life is too short for such things. But we do play a game called Create a Long Sentence in the forum. So who knows?)
(For many years people regarded the last section of James Joyce's Ulysses, Molly Bloom's soliloquy, which consists of two sentences to be the longest. The first sentence is 11,281 words long, and the second 12,931 words long. This held the record for the longest sentence until The Rotter's Club was published in 2001, which contains a 13,955-word sentence.
There have been other contenders over the years. The Guinness Book of World Records had an entry for what it claimed was the longest sentence in English, from William Faulkner's novel Absalom, Absalom! containing 1,287 words.
There is also a Polish novel “Gates of Paradise” written by Jerzy Andrzejewski, and published in 1960, with a 40,000 word sentence. And finally, there is a Czech novel that consists of one long sentence (128 pages long) “Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age” by Bohumil Hrabal.
They make a valid point in Wikipedia: ...there is no absolute limit on the length of a written English sentence; a sentence describing successive reading, for example, could be infinitely long, and one concatenating clauses with grammatical conjunctions such as 'and' could go on as long as material may be supplied. Also, a way to extend sentences indefinitely is by the addition of modifiers and modifier clauses, such as:-
The rat that the cat that the dog chased ran....
or of successive extensions of the form
Someone thinks/knows/believes that someone thinks/knows/believes that...
Language can support more variation than can reasonably be created or recorded. Therefore, at least one linguistics textbook (oh those linguists) concludes that there is no such thing as the longest English sentence.
I have not actually counted any of these. Life is too short for such things. But we do play a game called Create a Long Sentence in the forum. So who knows?)
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