Tell us an interesting random fact you stumbled across (Part 2)

By “speaking every word backwards” do you mean “pronouncing it as spelled backwards” or reproducing the phonemes backwards? Those would give pretty different results in most cases.

Isn’t that the genre that “Born to be Wild” started?

That’s a very good question I didn’t take into account. The thing is, the woman who can talk backwards I mentioned is German, and does it in German, where this doesn’t make much of a difference, because German mostly is pronounced as written. I don’t know if she speaks English and can also do the backwards talk in that language, I’m gonna ask her next time I see her.

Words, yes. Sentences? only if short.

Yeah, that’s what I meant, my sister’s friend certainly couldn’t do it with a paragraph long sentence, either.

Yes, that’s the trouble with German.
< :duck: :duck: & exits>

What about a paragraph-long word?

Hah :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:, that reminds me: I read about a (currently deceased?) German author (or philosopher, they are great at it) the other day who was reported to write the most convoluted and longest sentences in the German language (and thus in any language ever). Do you have a clue who that was? (I’m talking about sentences spanning three pages and more…)

(that was a response to @Pardel-Lux )

Only Hemingway could do that, and maybe the paragraph was only “I”.

Oh, there are many that satisfy that condition! One that hate is Heidegger, so I won’t link to him, and never to his Sein und Zeit, which is awful. Adorno and Freund were equally impenetrable, but nicer persons.
But I am gladly linking to Chistian Morgenstern’s Galgenlieder’s introduction, it is only two pages long. Versuch einer Einleitung zur dritten beziehungsweise ersten Auflage. Perhaps the most convoluted sentences ever written, in paticular the last one. But they make sense and are correct, sort of, I have checked. Enjoy.

Oh, I have read some Heidegger (only in quotes, I’m not so masochistic to read one of his whole books), and he’s impenetrable. Didn’t he once propose that all philosophy should be done in German because that’s the only language that covers all nuances? Yeah, sure, Martin, it wasn’t German you wrote, but gibberish.

  • Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann (2019): A 400,000+ word novel focusing on an Ohio mother’s thoughts, largely written in one sentence.
  • Herscht 07769 by László Krasznahorkai (2020): A 400+ page narrative consisting of a single sentence.
  • Leeches by David Albahari (2011): A 300-page existential novel written as one continuous paragraph.

Doc Smith is credited with creating the “attractor beam” in the 1930s, later shortened to just “tractor beam” or “tractor ray,” but the Buck Rogers comic strip took the term and used it repeatedly into the 1950s.

The word “reporter” could be argued to mean the same either way.

Retroper? Somebody who edit-wars at TV Tropes?

But each E is pronounced differently…

George Perec wrote a 300-page novel (in French) without using the letter “e”.

He also wrote long palindromic texts such as this (in French, with a (almost) palindromic URL): graner.name/nicolas/salocin/eman.renarg/:ptth

Thirty years before Perec’s novel, Ernest Vincent Wright wrote Gadsby, a 50,000 word English novel that does not contain the letter “e” (not to be confused with The Great Gatsby).

After George Harrison died they planted a memorial tree in Griffith Park for him. Many years later the tree died….from a beetle infestation.

Perec’s La Disparition has been translated into English four times using the same restriction, as well as into quite a few other languages using comparable restrictions.

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