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Longest Physics Lecture in History?
gfrege writes "Perhaps you remember some long physics lectures from your days at school. But as part of a general strike of students at the Humboldt-Universitaet zu Berlin concerning cuts in funding for the city's universities, some physicists are in the middle of what could be the longest physics lecture in history. It started at noon on Monday, and is planned to run to noon on Thursday. Check out the topics, and if you're in Berlin, come on down. The Babelfish translations of the lecture titles make for some fun reading, too, if you can't make it there yourself."
I believe what you're referring to must be Schachtelsatze, or "nested sentences", which indeed is a (quite obsolete) rhetorical style in german.
It's not used much, and if it is, it's generally in literature. Probably 95% of its useage is simply to show off, I'd assume.
It works basically more or less like this: you start a sentence, and at some word, where you'd like to add additional information about it, you start a subclause. In that one, you can do the same again. Effectively, you're embedding sentences within sentences. Since in German, the verb often comes at the end, once you're through, you must clean up by adding all the verbs at the end. So it's a bit like pushing and popping indeed.
An artificial, exaggerated example was taken from here:
german:
Schon immer mal wollte ich einen Satz, der zwar grammatikalisch richtig gebildet, jedoch durch die Anfugung von Nebensatzen, die durch ein Komma, welches das Verb bzw. das Hilfsverb, das dieserart jeweils erst nach dem Schachtelsatz, der eigentlich den Zusammenhang, der ebenfalls im Nebensatz, der kurz vor dem Verb, welches das Satzende, das das Verb bzw. das Hilfsverb, das durch das bereits genannte Komma, das ja die Nebensatze, die eingeschachtelt worden sind, abschachtelt, ineinander verschachtelt wurde, endlich bringt, wieder entschachtelt, verschachtelt worden ist, erklart wird, erklaren sollte, genannt wird, somit einschachtelt, getrennt werden, verschachtelt wird, ist, formulieren.
english, (almost) german word order:
I always wanted a sentence, which however gramatically corrently formed, but through the addition of subclauses, that are with a comma, which the verb or the auxiliary verb, which in this way each time only after the nested clause, that actually the context, that also in the subclause, that shortly before the verb, which the end of sentence, which the verb or the auxiliary verb, which through the previously mentioned comma, which now the the subclauses, which have been nested, nests in, has been nested in each other, finally mentions, de-nests again, has been nested in, is explained, should explain, is mentioned, therefore nests in, are separated, is nested in, is, to formulate.
english, understandable (sort-of):
I always wanted to formulate a sentence, that is formed gramatically correct, but that is nested in through the addition of subclauses. These subclauses are separated by a comma, which nests in the verb or auxiliary verb, which then gets only mentioned after the nested clause. The nested clause should explain the context, which also is explained in the subclause that has been nested in shortly before the verb, which de-nests (the sentence) again before the end of the sentence. The subclause thus relates to the verb or auxiliary verb.
The verb nests sentences through the use of a comma, which marks the nesting of the subclauses that were nested in.
Hope that helps or at least doesn't confuse more than before...