The Miracle Of And

In a feature article in TheSpectator with this title published a little while ago, ProfessorPeterJones? writes about a change that overcame English prose in the first half of the sixteenth century. It struck me as having a parallel in the field of programming languages.

(My copy of the original article is lost. I've asked the Spectator's librarian for a reference. --KeithBraithwaite)

Consider the version of the Christmas story in the gospel attributed to St. Matthew:

JohnWycliffe translates it thus, following St. Jerome's Latin Vulgate as closely as the English of his day (the late Middle Ages) will allow:

Forsooth they, seeing the star, joyed with a
full great joy. And they, entering the house,
found the child with Mary his mother; and
they falling down worshipped him. And their
treasures opened, they offered to him gifts,
gold incense and myrrh.

By contrast, the Tudor WilliamTyndale? writes (based on the original Greek):

When they saw the star, they were marvellously glad:
and whent into the house and found the child with Mary his mother and,
kneeled down and worshipped him, and opened their treasures and
offered unto him gifts, gold and frankincense and myrrh.

Jones makes the observation that in the two hundred years separating these two translations English syntax has taken essentially its modern form. Specifically, the subordinated verbs (the participles shown in bold in the first quote) have become phrases with finite main verbs (show in italic in the second quote). The opening "When" is subordinated, but does not appear as a participle.

I don't like Jones's argument (as I understand if without having RTFA) because what we're dealing with are translations rather than original compositions and literary works rather than the "real language". The question isn't so much "when did English discover subordination?" as "when did English translators give up trying to cram participle-heavy classical-language forms into a lightly-inflected syntax without good support for them?" I do like your observations about functional vs. imperative style though. (See the discussion in ClassicalGreek)

Some hundred years later than Tyndale, the Authorised ("King James") Version, written in what was, then, a deliberately archaic style, intended to give it authority, reverts to the subordinating form: using "and when", but still prefering finite verbs to participles.

I submit that the "classical" form resembles a functional programming language, subordination of verbs corresponding to function composition; while the English form resembles an imperative language, the connective "and" corresponding to a sequence of statements.

So, in sort-of LambdaCalculus (which I've learned only enough of to make myself look foolish), with amended material in "[]", Wycliffe looks like this, if you squint a bit: 

 (((\f.\g.\h.h g f) 
(\a.([...]seeing the star, joyed with a full great joy[...]) a)
(\b.(entering the house found the child with Mary his mother[...]) b)
(\w.(falling down worshipped him) w)) 'they)


 (((\f.\g.g f)
  (\a.([...]treasures opened[...]) a) 
  (\w.(offered to him gifts, gold incense and myrrh) w)) 'they)
while, in sort-of C, Tyndale looks like this: 
  {
[...] they were marvellously glad;
[they] whent into the house and found the child with Mary his mother;
[they] kneeled down and worshipped him;
[they] opened their treasures;
[they] offered unto him gifts, gold and frankincense and myrrh;
  }
I've heard it said that the hallmark of the very highest ClassicalGreek literature is being able to write sentences with many subordinated clauses, but no main verb; something like a closure.

Put in another format the verses in St Matthew Chapter 2, verses 1 - 12 might look like this: 

 [At a time]
 {
[When Jesus was born in Bethlehem, Judea
{
[Herod was King in Jerusalem]{}
[The Wisemen came from the east]
{
[saying]
{
    [Where is he born King of the Jews]{}
    [His star we saw in the east]{}
    [We have come here to worship him[{}
}
}
[The King]
{
[heard the saying]
{
[and was troubled]{}
[and all Jerusalem with him[{}
[and he gathered together]
{
[Publicly]
 {
[All the chief priests]{}
[The scribes of the people]{}
[Asking them]
{
 Where Christ should be born
 }
     [Heard them say]
     {
 In Bethelehem, Judea said the prophets:
 "And thou Bethlehem, Judea art not the least among the princes of Judah"
 "For out of thee shall come a Governor, that shall rule my People Israel"
}
[Privately]
{
[The Wisemen]
{
[Asking them]
{
What time the star appeared
}
[Sending them]
{
to Bethlehem,Judea
}
[Asking them]
{
to search for the young child
[and upon finding him]
{
to bring him word so He might also worship him
}
}
}
}
}
}
{The Wisemen]
{
[when they heard the King]
{
they departed
}
[when they saw the star]
{
[which they had seen in the east]
{
[going before them]{}
[until it came and stood over where the young child was]{}
}
[they rejoiced]
{
with exceeding joy
}
}
[when they were come into the house]
{
[They saw the young child and Mary his mother]{}
[They fell down and worshipped him]{}
}
[when they had opened their treasures]
[They presented him gifts]
{
gold
frankinscense
myrrh
}
}
[when they were warned of God in a dream]
{
[That they sould not return to Herod]
{
They departed to their own country another way
}
}
}
}
 }
 -- DonaldNoyes

Now, the reason often given by the British "public" (actually: private, fee-paying) schools for drumming Latin and ClassicalGreek into young children, was, is, that learning the "classical" languages teaches one how language "really" works, and promotes clear thinking.

See Professor Jones' An Intelligent Person's Guide to Classics ISBN 0715628666 for a different, and much better, set of reasons for teaching classical history and culture.

There's also Professor William Harris's materials The Intelligent Person's Guide To Latin Which at first sight offers a similar, although narrower and deeper view to Prof. Jones' book. See http://www.middlebury.edu/~harris/Classics/LatinGrammar.html

Following the Harris link above, I was struck by the comment ...

Verbs are the heart of Latin stylistics. Latin uses verbs in a variety of ways, while English of the present time, especially in America and specifically in science and textbook writing, expresses itself largely in noun-concepts. One might well suspect that the only live verbs in English are those which join nouns to their modifiers, and this produces often a stiff and unyielding text-book style.

Not so Latin, which understands the flow and motility of verbal ideas, and with a relatively full arsenal of verbal modifications, faces the world verbally...... actively, as it turns out.

One has only to read most any computer program aloud to discover how it has been strangled by the construction of "nouns". This is true of assembly language with its register conventions and addressing modes through to object-oriented code with long strings of navagational methods, including the obnoxious "self noun value" form. Try these escapes:

If you don't believe this is a problem, just take some random Java method, explain what it does as you might in a comment, then underline every token in the implementation that corresponds to verbs in your explanation. I doubt you will underline more than one in ten tokens. Imagine a language where you didn't have to write the other nine. -- WardCunningham

Ironically, the strangulated, obfuscated prose for which the British civil service is renowned shows a clear "classical" pedigree.

Thoughts?

--KeithBraithwaite

Huh. I clicked on this link thinking about ThePowerOfAnd? (TheFusionOfDesignAndTechnology?). Yannow, Cadillac. Kind of disappointing, in a way. Why? Because it isn't what you expected? Or through some inherent flaw?

This doesn't seem terribly whimsical. YMMV

So boolean short-circuiting does not seem very important a programming language concept to you?

See also: JrrTolkien. What connection are you suggesting? That a philological education is good for you.

As someone with a degree in Latin and English Language, the linguistic argument sounds accurate to me.

Here I thought it was going to be that ArthurEddington? quote <rummage> "We often think that when we have completed our study of one we know all about two because 'two' is 'one and one'. We forget that we have still to make a study of and." </rummage>

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