Sentence

A sentence (from the Latin sententia "opinion, sense, decision") is a concise, aptly formulated, authoritative and applicable motto in many concrete cases , which summarizes a previously described situation or knowledge in one sentence and raises it to general meaning. Sentences are mostly removed from an original literary context of prose , thought poetry or drama .

Sentences are often very memorable. This is due, among other things, to their syntactic coherence and short precision. Many so-called winged words are sentences.

In contrast to the aphorism , a sentence is generally understandable.

The sentence "is a general sentence applied to a specific case, mostly of little extension and easy to remember".

history

The first sentences were used in ancient rhetoric, for example in Tacitus , Seneca and Juvenal .

The set of sentences of Petrus Lombardus - an extensive, more than a thousand chapters comprehensive collection of texts and opinions of the Christian church fathers - was an influential textbook of medieval theology (high scholasticism ) and was used by numerous theologians of the Middle Ages, such as Bonaventure and Thomas Aquinas , commented.

It was mainly Friedrich Schiller who used the stylistic device of the sentence (in the ancient sense) in the Weimar Classic . Numerous sentences can also be found in the works of Shakespeare.

In addition to the idiom , the sentence plays a major role in Chinese language culture, where knowledge and use of sentences that are often thousands of years old are part of higher education, such as those from the Five Classics .

The sentence is a so-called apophthegma .

Examples

" The ax in the house saves the carpenter ." (Schiller, Wilhelm Tell )
"Life is serious, art is serene." (Schiller, Wallenstein )
"No pain no gain."

literature

Alice Stašková, Simon Zeisberg (ed.): Sentences in literature. Perspectives on the 18th Century. Wallstein, Göttingen 2014, ISBN 978-3-8353-1504-4 .
Hofinger, Fritz: Euripides and his sentences. Erlangen, Univ., Phil. Fac., Inaug.-Diss., 1895 and at the same time the program of the K. Humanist Gymnasium Schweinfurt: for the school year 1895/96. The program (1st part) is digitized at urn: nbn: de: hbz: 061: 1-373280
Ludwig Marx: The sentence in the dramas of Shakespeare. Dissertation to obtain a doctorate at the Philosophical Faculty of the Grand Ducal Hessian Ludwig University of Gießen, 1915
Weise, Wilhelm: The sentence from Hartmann von Aue. Marburg, Univ., Diss., 1909
Wolf, Eugen: Sentences and reflection in Sophocles, a contribution to his poetic technique. Tübingen, Univ., Diss., 1910

Web links

Wiktionary: Sentences - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

^ Ludwig Marx: The sentence in the dramas of Shakespeare. Dissertation to obtain a doctorate at the Philosophical Faculty of the Grand Ducal Hessian Ludwig University of Gießen, 1915, introduction
^ Ludwig Marx: The sentence in the dramas of Shakespeare. Dissertation to obtain a doctorate at the Philosophical Faculty of the Grand Ducal Hessian Ludwig University of Gießen, 1915

[1] Ludwig Marx: The sentence in the dramas of Shakespeare. Dissertation to obtain a doctorate at the Philosophical Faculty of the Grand Ducal Hessian Ludwig University of Gießen, 1915, introduction

[2] Ludwig Marx: The sentence in the dramas of Shakespeare. Dissertation to obtain a doctorate at the Philosophical Faculty of the Grand Ducal Hessian Ludwig University of Gießen, 1915