On 4/23/12, R A Brown <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I recall many years ago when I was researching
> for my M.Litt degree, coming across a sentence in a German
> book that went on and on and on.  There was - and I don't
> exaggerate - a full half-page of text before I met the
> full-stop (period).  I was completely lost and the only way
> I could make sense of the thing was to take the long period
> apart and construct what, in effect, was a rough & ready
> parse tree.

I ran across a few page-long sentences in the work of early conlanger
Sir Thomas Urquhart; I'm not sure offhand if there are any extremely
long and complex sentences in his Logopantecteision, available for
free online.  The ones I specially remember are in Ekskybalauron,
which overlaps with a lot of the conlangy content of Logopantecteision
but differs in the autobiographical and historical anecdotes.  This is
the longest of the ones I quoted in my review of Ekskybalauron a few
years ago; there are much longer ones where that came from:

>>
Then is it, when having couched an Alphabet materiative of all the
words the mouth of man, with its whole implements, is able to
pronounce, and bringing all these words within the systeme of a
Language, which, by reason of its logopandochie, may deserved be
intituled, The Universal Tongue, that nothing will better merit the
labour of a Grammatical Arithmetician, then, after due enumeration,
hinc inde, to appariate the words of the Universall Language with the
things of the Universe.
<<

St. Paul's letters have some monster sentences in them, which tend to
be broken up into several shorter sentences in English translation.
Sometime in the next few days I'll try to find some examples, and
maybe try to translate one of them into gzb as single long sentences.

I remember finding some fairly long sentences in the short stories of
Lord Dunsany, back when I was transcribing them as etexts.

Steven Brust writing as Paarfi of Roundwood tends to use long, complex
sentences in the narration, and less often in the dialogue; Sylvia
Sotomayor posted a fairly tangled  sentence from _The Phoenix Guards_
here a couple of years ago as a translation challenge, and I
translated it into gjâ-zym-byn.

ObConlang: have you any monster sentences in your conlang corpus,
either translations or original writing?  Are monster sentences
admired or excoriated by the literary stylists of your conculture?

-- 
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/