American scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found common features between legal language and spells. The study was published in the scientific journal magazine Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Legal or religious language is very difficult to understand, but the texts of all official documents, including state laws, are compiled with its help.
To understand the reason for this complexity, the team analyzed nearly 3.5 million words of contract text and compared it to other types of written material, including movie scripts, newspaper articles and scientific papers.
The analysis showed that official documents often contain long definitions inserted in the middle of sentences. Combined with specific terminology, this structure makes the text much more difficult to understand.
“Legal language has somehow evolved a tendency to nest some structures within others, a phenomenon that is not unique to human languages,” the researchers wrote.
To explain this oddity, scientists put forward a hypothesis called the “magic spell hypothesis.” It is known that witchcraft spells are designed in a peculiar style and are distinguished by the use of a large number of archaic words and certain expressions.
Researchers have suggested that the inappropriate structure of legal texts stems from the same need to convey information, their content has a special power and authority.
The team conducted an experiment by asking a group of illegal volunteers to draft laws banning various crimes, including drunk driving, theft, and arson. The participants were then asked to explain their created norms in terms that citizens of another country could understand.
When writing the laws, all subjects used embedded structures in the center of the sentences, but when retelling them, participants used much simpler language.
Scientists noted that future discoveries will make it easier to understand legal texts.
Earlier historians I learnedAn event that led to widespread persecution of women for witchcraft in 17th-century England.
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Source: Gazeta
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