My Japanese teacher always said that if you're having trouble figuring out what a sentence means, you have to read it backwards. Not sure why it works exactly, but more complex sentences become easier to parse when you read them starting with the verb in Japanese.
It's mainly because Japanese a) puts the object before the verb, b) uses postpositions instead of prepositions, and most importantly c) puts relative clauses to the left of the thing modified. All of these things are flipped relative to English
It's because the Japanese teacher already understood you to be an English speaker. Latin teachers do the same by telling low level students to first find the verb. For many students, that's itself an accomplishment
It is hard to get used to having to order what you want to say in reverse, but it does get easier after reading enough. Then once you get used to it there's more "fun" things waiting :3
We talked rarest, now for most popular. Come for the syntax, stay for the puns!? Thanks for waiting while I poured months into this 📅❤🩹 By the way I turned off ads that play during the middle ("mid-roll"). Less revenue but hopefully a better viewing experience?
My Japanese teacher is training to become an interpreter. She told us about the infamous “…と思いません” which translates to “I don’t think that…” but appears at the very end of the sentence. So it would be very awkward to misinterpret the sentence as “I think that…” but only to find out that you are mistaken at the end of the sentence.
English (mainly certain dialects of British English) actually has a loosely-similar phrase used to punctuate an ironic/sarcastic statement: "[statement], I don't think", e.g. "You're very clever, I don't think."
For a programmer, natural languages with a verb at the end look very much like reverse polish notation (basically a calculator where you type "3 4 +" instead of "3 + 4"), and like stack based languages (e.g. Forth): You line your values up, and then an operation acts on them. A big advantage of reverse polish notation is that you don't need parentheses to group the operations (e.g. "2 + (3*4))" becomes "2 3 4 * +", while "(2 + 3) * 4" becomes "2 3 + 4 *"), and similarly natural languages with a verb at the end make it much easier to understand what is part of relative clauses, without requiring extra delimiting words. It gives such languages a very compact and efficient vibe. I learned Japanese and had this experience first hand. Even as a SVO speaker I think this is a great feature of verb-last languages.
You can have it prefixed instead and it is even more natural. Functions are exactly that: verb(subject,object). Your examples would be add(2, mult(3,4)) = + 2 * 3 4, and mult(add(2,3),4) = * + 2 3 4
I'm also studying Japanese and I credit my long career in computer programming with Japanese SOV word order being so natural to me. Also, the marking of the noun phrases seems to correspond to parameter naming in a function, or placing data into an object...the whole idea of putting things into slots, call them registers even, and then having the action happen...that was just natural to me.
I have first encountered RPN Scripting when making game mod which took me surprise, it gives me tons of headache so maybe I don't think in SOV in mind then? Both my first and 2nd language (Chinese and English) is SVO, When I start study Japanese it's also kinda headache, but now I have no problem with it (but still headache with RPN....)
The point about relative clauses cuts two ways, because (at least in some languages) it can result in a traffic jam of verbs at the end of a sentence if the relative clauses are attached to the object. In Farsi, for example, you can say: "Man mard ra didam" ("I saw a man", literally "I man DIRECTOBJECT saw"), "Man mardi ke Farsi midanad ra didam" ("I saw a man who speaks Farsi", literally "I man who Farsi knows DIRECTOBJECT saw"), "Man mardi ke Farsi ke zaban-e Iran ast midanad ra didam" ("I saw a man who speaks Farsi which is the language of Iran", literally "I man who Farsi which language-of Iran is knows DIRECTOBJECT saw"). It's much easier to keep track of which verb goes with which noun phrase when the word order is SVO.
I always find it interesting how Latin was an SOV language, and its descendants became SVO _but_ kept the SOV word order with object pronouns, and even the use of the dative with the third-person.
@@abitmorerational Exactly! And in Portuguese, you can even put them in the middle of the verb in some cases, like: darei (I'll give) + lhe (to him) = dar-lhe-ei (I'll give [to] him) - it's called mesoclisis. At least in Brazilian Portuguese, my native language, we never use it when we're speaking, only in (very) formal texts.
I believe the theory was that as the cases disappeared, it became advantageous to put the verb between the subject and object to help keep them distinct. This wasn't necessary with pronouns because case survived there.
@@JoaoP.434, Using object pronouns makes the sentence sound less archaic and still works, although it can seem very formal. It feels more natural to English speakers, as in the sentence "I gave him a ticket", which could be translated into Portuguese while preserving the same VOS order as "dei-lhe minha passagem". I believe that the natural word order would be SVO, as in complex sentences you can connect clauses by treating one as the subject of the following clause. For example: "I like apples" follows an SVO structure. "I like apples because they are tasty" can be analyzed as ((SVO)VO), where the first sentence acts as the subject for the second clause. In theory, this process could continue indefinitely, allowing sentences to be stacked in this manner like: (((((SVO)VO)VO)VO)VO). In VSO languages, this process would be a little bit awkward: (V(V(V(V(VSO)O)O)O)O) But for conlanging I think VSO is the best order, followed by SVO.
There was piece of research I read that pointed out SVO languages don't need has many case markers since the nouns are split up by a verb. I would be really interested in seeing how they tried to remove area and heritage as influences
It's true though. For the SOV languages I know best are Latin and Japanese which both have a lot of markers for nouns. Interestingly though, most common languages descended from Latin, including Italian itself all shifted to SVO despite not really dropping many of the noun declensions.
@@coolbrotherf127 Not sure what you're talking about. Almost all of the Latin derived languages completely dropped noun declension except for pronouns. In spanish there is only rey \ reyes. No rex regem regum regis regibus and all that jazz. You don't have to memorize a table for every noun.
When told to disregard my own language and think of a word order from the ground up, VSO immediately came to mind. I think it's because it typically describes ideas in order of broad concept to specifics. Verb - the plot synopsis Subject - the main character Object - a plot device
This VSO happens in portuguese (litterary language, not usual register which is SVO ) and now that you mentioned it I can see the poetry of it and how it makes the text more interesting and sophisticated to read
I sort of did the same thing while coming up with my conlang and ended up with VSO too. I just thought of what youd ask if you stumble upon an event, the first question one would ask is presumbaly- “What happened?” then “Who did it?” so verb then subject then object
@@skirnir393 Does the "a" effectively function as an object marker? Strange, back when I took Spanish in school, it was taught as "a personal" and I thought it was only used when the object is people, but the internet says that's not the case.
@@kekeke8988 "A" is (in general) for people or things that have a name. Like "Yo amo a Anna" (I love Anna). An example for an object "Yo amo el queso" (I love cheese). By the way you can change the order to "El queso amo yo", but it sounds like literature.
While this is true, arranging a sentence in anything other than SVO will add added emphasis to either the object or the verb, which can alter meaning. Ex. Eu mananc carne (I eat meat -> natural neutral word order), Eu carne mananc (I meat eat -> added emphasis on "meat", meaning I eat meat in stead of anything else), Carne eu mananc (Meat I eat -> added emphasis to "I", meaning only I eat the meat, not anyone else), Carne mananc eu (meat eat I -> similar emphasis on the subject, though not quite as much as in "carne eu mananc"), Mananc eu carne (eat I meat -> again, emphasis on the subject, though, this order is more appropriate as a response to the question "who will eat meat?", Mananc carne eu (VOS - eat meat I -> this is the most unnatural word order that just sounds completely wrong. The meaning is there without any particular emphasis on anything, it just sounds wrong). The word order in Romanian is indeed quite free, but I feel like it also depends on the intonation. Some word orders only work together with the right intonation to mark the emphasis of the word one wants to stand out.
It seems to me that since objects don't feature in every sentence -- sometimes subjects just verb on their own -- subject-verb would be the intrinsic "word order of thought", with objects as an afterthought, therefore coming last.
The bit about ranking humans above inanimate objects and IOs above actions reminded me of Navajo, which is often categorized as SOV, but for many speakers there exists a more or less fixed system of noun ranking by descending agency, with humans (as well as lightning) at the top, then animals and then inanimate objects, with nouns within those three categories also ranked in terms of perceived strength, size, intelligence, etc. In this system the higher ranked noun always comes before the lower ranked one, regardless of the actual role it plays in the sentence, i.e. "human dog bite" will always be in that order, regardless of who does the biting (iirc a lot of the time information that can resolve ambiguity is encoded in the verb instead of either of the nouns).
@@belle_pomme It has no case system, the most you get in terms of noun morphology are plurals for a subset of animate nouns, possessive markers and a few adjective enclitics. The verbs are where it's at, with prefixes and suffixes encoding information about subjects and objects based on things like grammatical person and object shape, as well as things like transitivity and passivity. So a lot of the time there's very little ambiguity. Plus I guess I should have mentioned that word order does play a role when the nouns involved are sees as having the same level of agency.
@@DwellOnForever I guess, if you solely focus on the concepts of "subject", "object" and "verb" and where they fit in a legitimate sentence, although personally I see it more like German which on first glance seems to "allow" a variety of orders, but in reality this variance itself follows strict rules for when a particular order can be used. But then again you could take it further and debate whether or not any free word order language is truly free, in terms of whether or not the meaning of a given sentence stays exactly the same when you reorder the words, without affecting things like the relative emphasis on certain words.
@@vonPeterhof German has a ton of grammar which might imply a more free word order but in actuality it's pretty strictly SVO because it's just a very rule bound language. The only example of a verb not being after a subject that I can think of would be if a sentence contains two verbs in which case the second word has to go at the end no matter what.
Hearing NativLang unironically say *"cringe"* feels like one of those bizarrely amazing moments in a show/movie where two completely disconnected storylines collide. If this man says *"based"* in the next video I don't know if I'll be able to handle that in all honesty.
In my second language, Polish. Word order is flexible. You technically can make any order you like, although SVO is the standard that we keep to. But SOV is okay too. Syntax is grammatical, not a matter of word order. The choice is a matter of inflection. The inflected word comes first. If you like this, I hope you like the Nahuatl language. They compress subject and object into a single verb form.
Polish; Cat bird sees. (Literal word-for-word translation) Kot ptaka widzi. (Translation: A cat sees a bird.) Kota ptak widzi. (Translation: A bird sees a cat.)
"Syntax is grammatical, not a matter of word order." The word syntax is synonymous with word order. Both syntax and morphology are components of grammar
This is a very interesting topic. I've read that pidgins and creoles are almost always SVO, which seems to be evidence that SVO is the "default" or somehow preferred. SVO is the only word order than can use word order alone to determine grammatical roles (well, I guess OVS could too, but it has the obvious disadvantage of putting the object first). I've studied ancient Indo-European languages for years, so the pattern is always SOV with lots of cases --> SVO and losing all the cases. Is that a "universal" pattern or is it very Indo-European biased? Are there any languages that go from SVO to SOV or is language change almost always in the direction of SVO?
@@ryalloric1088 That's true. I'd be interested to see how creoles of non-SVO languages compare (unfortunately not familiar with any). Creoles and pidgins do seem to be analytic, with minimal inflections, which does make me think they're likely to be SVO, but I don't know for sure.
@@ryalloric1088 On the other hand, they also tend to avoid conjugation and declension as much as possible, including case marking and the like, to keep the individual words simple to learn and easy to understand. Without such marking, SVO is actually a fairly logical order to fall into, as the verbis a fairly clear and distinct marker indicating where the subject ends and the object begins. (actually, English settled into it's rigid SVO order at least in part due to a similar issue, where many of it's case markings (and verb forms indicating agreement with the subject) were lost due to interacting with the (norse?) spoken by the danes in the danelaw, where the markings caused problems, as the same things were marked in both langauges, but with different sounds. It's why we still have an distinct verb form for third person singular subjects: It was the only one that was indicated by the same sound in both langauges! (the specific sound used changed later, but it was the only one not filed off because it was the only one that didn't cause confusion). ... Actually, there may have been other factors in the loss of case marking, but that was definitely the origin of the odd subject-verb agreement in English, and the loss of those markings is why English is so rigid in it's word orders and favours SVO so strongly.
I speak Indonesian, an SVO language (at least the standard one), and in colloquial speech you can speak in VOS with no problem while SOV will make no sense These sentences makes no sense to me: 'Gua nasi baru makan' Literally "I rice new/just eat" (I just eat rice) 'Gua duit ke pengemis ngasih' Literally "I money to (the) beggar give" (I give money to the beggar) While these are perfectly fine: 'Baru makan nasi gua' Literally "New/just eat rice I" 'Ngasih duit ke pengemis gua' Literally "Give money to (the) beggar I" In standard form those would be "Saya baru (saja) makan nasi" and "Saya memberi uang ke pengemis (itu)" respectively. Also I used the Jakartan colloquial speech, other regions' may vary
@@ninja_boyapiamentu is a creole spoken in Curaçao and Bonaire (and its sibling Papiamento is spoken in Aruba) and is based on Spanish, with Portuguese influences and some Dutch (and more recently English) as well. I'm not fluent but as far as I know it's SVO as well. It's a bit odd cause the verbs aren't conjugated but have "time markers" in front and you can't use the verbs without the markers. So it's subject - time marker+verb - object. Bo ta traha na kas - You work at home. Mi a bai kas - I have gone home . Mi tabata sa - I knew (that). Mi lo yamabo - I will call you. The "big" exception is the verb "have" which doesn't need a time marker in present tense and has it's own marker in simple past tense (not past perfect). Mi tin su potmoni - I have his/her/their wallet. Mi tabatin 10 florin - I had 10 guilders. Like in any language, there are exceptions, and structures are more flexible when spoken less officially and more casually. But when you're learning the language this is the most basic order you're taught. (After posting this I just realized you asked for non-SVO and not "not based on English or French" but I'll just leave the comment up)
In Bulgarian we don't have cases but the word order can be flexible. We know what is logical when it comes to an animate and inanimate.When it comes to two animates the more common subject then object adds the meaning of who did what unless we specify it with a word like "her" or "him". For example "the cat the dog saw" is SOV but "the cat her the dog saw" is OSV
In Bulgarian, not only does it matter whether a noun is animate or animate, masculine feminine or neuter, it is also necessary to know exactly how you know something before you say it, because the verb will conjugate differently depending on whether it's something you know firsthand, heard from someone else, aren't sure if it happened, or if you're guessing.
Yeah, isn't German technically default SVO but there are a ton of common constructions that kick the active verb to the end of the sentence? Like how English has a simple present tense, but we use the more marked progressive present tense more often, since the simple present has taken up the habitual mood.
@@Great_Olaf5 it's the other way around, German is SOV and the verb is pulled to the front to get VSO and then you can pull anything over the verb and you have SVO / OVS etc.
In my native language, we use SOV system. That means we have to learn to speak or think like SVO speakers in general. We always use one method to describe the difference between SVO and SOV pattern. For SVO speakers, the action is important than what's being done. Similar to your example, the action of baking is important than the actual cake itself to SVO speakers. But for us, SOV speakers, the thing that has been done is more important than the action that made it possible. For us, the cake is more important than the process. This is our way of thinking.
I am confused by the "experiment" at 10:20 -- is this a thought experiment or has it been done? I cannot imagine why anyone would arrange the pictures in a way different from their language's word order. If you asked an English speaker to illustrate "the man bakes a cake", I'd be very surprised if they put the "cake" picture before the "bake" one.
I find it incredibly interesting how all of the Celtic languages are the only language families in Europe with a word-order that begins with the verb first (VSO). I wonder how that is possible?
Ignore the two replies above me. There's a strange push to claim that semitic languages have influenced this and that european language but it's simply not true because the evidence would be blinding yet just isn't there. I've never heard of celtic being V1 but personally I'd guess that it has something to do with the pre-proto-celtic substrate language triggering verb movement much like the second-place clitic order in the germanic languages producing V2 word order.
I made up a fictional language as a teenager for a fantasy story I never finished. I just looked back at it and found the structure to basically be OSV. Maybe I subconsciously just wanted to make it different from my native SVO.
It should be noted that with free word order languages like Latin and Russian, they actually preferred to use SVO colloquially and only really used SOV for poetry!
Most sources we have on Latin, poetic or prosaic use SOV more often than SVO. Poets did probably use SOV more than the common man, and even prosaic correspondence we have from the classical period is mostly upper classes talking to upper classes, so is almost certainly biased, but I’d say SVO was at most *equally* popular to SOV in Latin, never MORE popular.
@@AngraMainiiu Probably because all except Romanian lost their explicit case marking? And SVO physically separates the Subject and object, facilitating that? A word order that was previously considered equally valid as SOV since word order was free? I’ve primarily studied Latin and Spanish, but not the transition in between.
I think I like SVO (aside from it being in my native language) mostly because if I was to rationalize it, I would draw a diagram of a thing happening to something and the action would ‘emanate’ from the subject before connecting with the object
Being Dutch, I'm used to a language that is somehow sowhere in between SOV and SVO: our word order is SOV in principle, but we place the conjugated verb on the second position in the sentence [V2] (no matter what comes first), which in practice (i.e. in common, simple sentences) our word order seems like SVO: I (S) broke (V) my leg (O) yesterday = Ik (S) brak (V[2]) mijn been (O) gisteren. You don't have to look far to see that it is only appearance, though: Yesterday, I broke my leg = Gisteren brak (V2) ik (S) mijn been (O) Nor to see the underlying SOV: Yesterday, I have broken my leg = Gisteren heb (V2) ik (S) mijn been (O) gebroken (V). Now that I think of it, I do believe my Dutch brain finds the object slightly more important than the verb...
I'm studying German and it's basically the same. Ich brach mein Bein gestern / Gestern brach ich mein Bein / Gestern habe ich mein Bein gebrochen (Though I think in German, the first example would be quite unusual, as there seems to be a strong preference for time stuff to be first, from what I understand)
Due to german and in a similar sense dutch being more grammaticly synthetic than the analytic grammar of today's English the word-order can be seen as preference for SVO and SOV depending on sentence type and performed action, however outside of the formal rules, the more complex a language builds meaning into it's words (conjugation, inflection, classes etc.) the freer the word order usually is. (Used SOV in the last sentence lol)
Actually SOV and SVO existed alongside each other as preferable word orders until the 1500's in Dutch, German and even North Germanic languages over time due to simplification and or V2 rigidification SVO became more desirable, which does not mean that SOV like you have shown isn't still used to construct a germanic sentence in certain maybe somewhat archaic sense or something along your line of thought
German (my first language) definitely still does it and I thought that the Frisian and even the Northgermanic languages still did it, but I'm not sure there. Allegedly even modern Hebrew/Ivrit adopted some V2 aspects through Yiddish. English is the most apparent outlier amongst Germanic languages, most likely because of Romance influence.
Despite my native language (Brazilian Portuguese) using the SVO word oder, SOV sentences are kinda common and they always seen to make more sense. Also, people are more open to play with word oder in informal speech and i love it
Since im learning Japanese im experiencing an sov language myself. But what makes the different sentence structure relatively easy to understand is the use of particles to indicate subject, object, and verb. Its like verbally indicating what is the subject and object of the sentence. Interestingly enough, in Japanese the location of the subject and object in the sentence isnt that important. Not as important as the verb being at the end of the sentence. I still have much to learn but from what have learned, Japanese can function as both an sov and osv language though I believe the first is more common.
I’ve also run across svo word order on occasion, as in something like 私は散歩した、公園の周りを。but if there’s any particular pattern to how svo is used, I haven’t picked up on it.
OSV used to be common in Japanese, due apparently to the lack of a subject particle. So they often marked the subject by putting it right before the verb. That seems to have died out when "ga" switched from being a genitive particle to a subject particle.
Actually, I still don't understand why SOV is the most popular and "universal". I'm a native speaker of Ukrainian and Russian and very fluent, near-native speaker of French. For me SVO is the most natural way of *thinking*. Yes, in Slavic languages, as noted by other commenters, you can have whatever order you want and that's used sometimes: - Кого спіймав кіт? - Мишу він спіймав! Translation (literal): - Whom caught cat? (Whom cat caught is also OK) - Mouse he caught! (OSV!) That means, he did catch a mouse, and not a bird or a fly. However, SVO is the most natural. I mean, you can construct a sentence without the O: "Baker baked"; "Capibara ate". That's enough to grasp at least the basis. On the other hand, what does the sentence "Baker a cake" mean? What did they do to the cake? Bought? Sold? Dropped? Burned? Or, for real, baked? Thank you so much for the video, Josh, it was a great pleasure to listen to you as always! But at least for me the question stays unanswered :).
The same can be said for SVO too. "Baker baked"... what? As much as baker could have done anything except for baking with the cake, baker may have baked something other than a cake. Which order is more "natural" really depends on which part of speech speaker wants to emphasize and audiences know in advance. If I don't already know that Tom is a baker, "Tom baked" doesn't make much sense to me, but "Tom a cake" would make me hungry, even though I'm yet to know if Tom baked or ate a cake (the most likely interpretations). At least that's how I, as a native Korean speaker with the primary word order of SOV, feels like.
@@lifthras11r This might be because transitivity is more flexible in a lot of SVO languages so you say 'baker baked' and my response was 'yes, this is what bakers do, they bake', because I was interpreting the phrase as intransitive. I don't know any Korean, but Hittite (sorry, only strict SOV language I know) is very strict about verb transitivity, and has important grammatical implications associated with the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs, whereas English can make any verb transitive or intransitive on a whim (ex, 'Me and my friends brought' is actually a fine sentence in English as long as there is a context that allows it)
SVO is a very European thing! Modern Indo-european languages are almost always SVO, and it's also an areal feature. Finnish has become mostly SVO too for living with IE people, even though Uralic languages are almost all SOV. It might be hard to grasp how common SOV is, because so many of the languages we encounter regularly are IE.
@@valkeakirahvi Most Indian and Iranian languages are areally SOV, and they're basically half the language family lol. Africa is also one big SVO zone.
I always thought to myself that the prevalence of SOV could be explained by a law of similarities: 1) It makes sense to group S & O together because they are both arguments and represent concrete things in a stereotypical sentence, which gives you a nice separation of arguments and verbs. 2) It also makes sense to group O & V together because, often, actions inherently involve objects. This gives you a nice separation of subject and predicate. 1+2) O is neat in the middle because both 1 and 2 get to be true. 3) The reason SOV is more common than VOS is that subjects are typically more salient than verbs because they are typically physical things. might just be me though.
@@Nosirrbro Yeah, to me, it just seems like it's more likely to happen than the others because there are two separate logics that can lead to this configuration and also co-exist.
German is a "flexible language". The reason why it's still clear what the sentence means is the "case system". For the example at 6:30: "Die Katze sieht DEN Raben" or "DEN Raben sieht die Katze" both means the same thing: The raven ist seen by the cat. If you want to express the opposite you have to use a different case: "Die Katze sieht DER Rabe" or "DER Rabe sieht die Katze" both mean: The cat is seen by the raven. Languages with a case system are a little bit more difficult. But give more flexibility. Which is great for instance for composing poetry.
Fun fact when you start thinking in terms of video game interface, adventure game have contextual action based on selecting object to infer a verb, kinda sov when the subject is implicit as the player. Sometimes you click the object THEN select the verb.
My problem with the thought experiment of disregarding known languages and expressing an event is that it depends entirely on what I would want to emphasize in that event, as well as how I'd choose to emphasize it. If the event being expressed is something like "X ate Y", the first way that came to my mind was to emphasize the eating, the event being the eating of Y by X. Thus, it became "ate... X... Y" (VSO), as I chose to emphasize by putting the more important elements earlier in the phrase. If the event is "X ate Y" where it's important that X finally ate something? It becomes "X ate Y" (SVO). If X hates Y and has never been seen eating it? Then it's "Y ate X" (OVS). All of those were in the mode of putting the emphasized components earlier in the phrase. I don't think there's a "universal" thought pattern dictating a word order. I wonder if historical linguistics has better explanations for the apparent preferences?
When you try OSV I automatically hear the object as a subject and expect more information at the end of the sentence. "A cake the baker baked (was sold for $20)."
My native language is English, but thinking of how I'd indicate wordlessly that I want to eat something, I'd point between myself and the food, then mime eating. SOV. First you establish the two players, then what happened. In that way, I can understand how it became so popular in languages.
I'd probably indicate me, the food, then eating... unless I was specifically trying to ask permission to eat that particular item, rather than just indicating hunger or a desire to eat, in which case I can easily see myself indicating the food, then eating, then me (with questioning expression).
I think doing it like this makes sense because the subject and the object constrains the possible range of actions. This is important because verbs being temporal in nature are somewhat abstract and can't simply be pointed to. If you for example first establish that you and an apple are involved in a sentence then if you start chomping with your mouth it's pretty obvious that you mean that you're eating the apple. However if you did it the other way then the chomp could be interpreted both as eating or as biting, which might not be the same thing, and so the receiver would have to spend some time wondering what you meant before figuring it out instead of it being obvious right when you finish gesturing. However the more precisely you're able to indicate an action the less important the object becomes, so in a language where everything has agreed upon definitions the object can become unimportant as the verb already implies it. Just by saying "he drove" we've already limited the possible objects to things you can drive, which in a modern culture is almost always a car. Like think about party games where you have to mime something, if you do it SVO people will almost always have multiple guesses for what the verb is before the object is revealed and that tends to slow things down. If you do it SOV then the verb is almost instantly implied.
I thought about this even as a native SVO speaker. If I were to illustrate the sentence "I eat cake" in three parts, I would probably draw a stick figure (subject) then draw a cake (object), and then draw the stick figure eating the cake (verb). In that way, SOV makes a lot of sense if you're illustrating concepts in your head. It's difficult to illustrate or conceptualize "eat" if you don't conceptualize "cake" first. Does that make sense?
When he asked us to imagine the creation of a language, I tried to play along. I attempted to communicate something without my voice and I really wanted to do it without thinking. I ended up pointing to myself (S) then a guitar (O) and then I pretended to play it (V). So maybe it is indeed the default order.
In that case it's also because both the subject and object are concrete physical things you can literally point to, thus they are easy to communicate, but a verb being by definition temporal is a much more abstract concept that is more difficult to communicate. However if you've indicated the subject and object there are only so many actions that are possible thus it is much easier to understand what the action is. The subject and object constrain the possible range of actions based on our inherent understanding of how the world works.
I think maybe left out a pretty glaring example that defies this language-family determinism hypothesis (or maybe this is what you're saving for another time), because the Romance languages descend from an SOV language, but all of them have SVO order today. Moreover, if this colonialism hypothesis were true, then all Romance languages would have to have SOV word order. This hypothesis you suggest that word order may tend toward SVO over time seems to make the most sense, at least to this viewer.
When I try to think about it objectively, I keep coming back to SVO. The chronological order of most things is "agent" decides to do thing, so it does thing, and other thing is affected by this action. Subject Verb Object. I find it interesting that most languages didn't choose the most "linear" word order.
9/10 linguists agree that whatever features their native language has are probably universal to human cognition! In reality if something is universal then every language would have it... like vowels.
Silbo Gomero doesn't have vowels. But any language that isn't intentionally made not to have them or have constraints that makes them impossible do have vowels
@@kasperfabchbrandt537 Whistled 'languages' like Canarian Spanish in Silbo Gomero, Pirahã, and various others, are only whistled forms of a language that can and usually _is_ expressing orally. It is not that much unlike writing: people who whistle are able to encode their usual, spoken languages, in a medium other than usual speech. It also should be noted that it is more a technique than anything like language, people able to whistle a language are often able to whistle other languages just as well (like, a Silbo Gomero whistler could whistle a word in English rather than Spanish, although the vowels will become wonkier). A whole whistling community can even switch languages and preserve their whistling practice
some years ago I read about the SOV way of thinking and an example was sign languages (mute or not), when people were asked to say a basic sentence they "say" SOV even thought they spoke an SVO language.
Yeah, I never thought in SOV personally. I'm french, I think in french (or in english when I watched too much english content XD), so I honestly can't understand what you're trying to say when you say describe an action is SOV, like even if I use images, I would place them in SVo order ^^'
In all the Slavic languages, familiar to me, the word order, used in a particular sentence, is not only flexible, but is describing a mood and sometimes a context, so it's actually rarely a free choice.
Just when I was thinking you were dead 😫 Edit: in some languages like Chechen and Ingush, it gets even weirder. Occasionally, your sentence is SOVV, as in grammatically you have to use two different verbs to be grammatically correct. E.g. “He is small” is “Iza ƶima vu” with “xila” (conjugated as d.u) being the verb. However, for sentences like “I like him”, it is “So iza v.ezu v.u” where d.eza is the main verb and xila (d.u) is the secondary verb. In the first sentence, xila matches the object’s noun class, while in the second it matches the subject’s. Edit 2: After another 9 months of learning this hell language u can’t tear myself away from, I’ve discovered that the previous edit is missing something. When you’re directly saying something, like “I am small” or “I am a soldier”, you use OVS. :|
@@valkeakirahvi xila has several meanings, with one being “to have” where it’s conjugated differently, where instead of d.u it’s xüylu. Xila also means “to be” where it’s d.u When there’s a consonant then a dot (like d.u) it means that the consonant changes depending on the noun class.
Armenian is said to have SOV structure, but in short sentences it is flexible as an ant. There are 14! valid arrangements of the phrase "I love you" in Armenian. I believe it's the record permutations in any language. Each of them has it's own "color", but most are very similar in tonality. SOV (Subject Object Verb) 1. Ես քեզ սիրում եմ (Ես - I, քեզ - you, սիրում - love, եմ - am) 2. Ես քեզ եմ սիրում (The stress is on "you", this structure emphasizes that I love you not other person) 3. Ես եմ քեզ սիրում (The stress is on "I", I am who loves you) SVO 4. Ես սիրում եմ քեզ (the most common, just mundane "I love you") 5. Ես եմ սիրում քեզ (the stress is on "I", the structure is uncommon and lyrical) OSV 6. Քեզ ես սիրում եմ (the stress is on "you", it's like uncovering that "I love you" as the verb hides the intention till the last moment) 7. Քեզ ես եմ սիրում (it's, like saying "I am the one who loves you not the other person") OVS 8. Քեզ սիրում եմ ես (Has a casual feel to it) 9. Քեզ եմ սիրում ես (Has a casual feel to it, uncommon, playful) VSO 10. Սիրում եմ ես քեզ (Lyrical, declarative, this structure is found in Armenian poetry) VOS 11. Սիրում եմ քեզ ես (Lyrical, uncommon) OV 12. Քեզ սիրում եմ (casual, the preposition is dropped as the axillary verb "եմ" already shows the subject) 13. Քեզ եմ սիրում (the stress is on "you", it's like saying "you (are the one) I love") VO 14. Սիրում եմ քեզ (declarative)
That's strange. From my grammar of Eastern Armenian, the default order in Armenian is SVO in common parlance, as you note. I think people just call it SOV out of an excess of formalism.
As a native English speaker, one of the things I enjoyed most while learning how to speak in German (in college) was learning how the language often used SOV
The German Sign Language is very heavy in SOV unlike the spoken/written German. We sign the first part that is larger and more or less immobile (i.e. house) then second part that is smaller and mobile (i.e. car). We use the verb at end to tie both positions and relationships: "The book is on the table" would be signed as "Table - book - lay".
I speak French and Dutch as native languages and it's SVO (for the most part). I never saw the logic in SOV because to me, the two most important/basic parts of a sentence are the subject and the verb. The O is optional and considered additional information. For example; "I walked" makes sense. I admit that it's not much but it gets a clear message across, the fact that I walked. People can ask questions if they want to know more about it but fundamentally it works. However "I in the park" doesn't make sense. When? What? How? Why? There's not even a basic message that is comprehensible as a stand alone statement therefore the communication isn't effective. That's why I've always found SV/VS more logical as the basis for the structure of a sentence. I know/understand some languages that use SOV and I like them very much because they usually have other grammatical rules that make sense as a whole and are super interesting but yeah... SOV will always confuse me.
whether im using an SOV or SVO language simply changes where im thinking about the core of a sentence. of course in an SVO language it makes natural sense to think of the ends of a sentence as more ‘droppable’, but the end of a sentence being the least important is in no means a universal way of thinking. of course in an SOV language I would never say “I steak [?]”, nor does the idea of just taking the first two components ever really cross my mind, because of course the last component of the sentence is the core. the location of what is being dropped (and therefore word order) just seems superfluous in general, and I don’t personally find SVO more natural even though I’m far more fluent in an SVO language than anything else. the object being the most droppable component isn’t even a basic fact of thought, if anything the subject being the most droppable component seems to be more common among languages (since it’s easy to figure out from context) . it’s really just the kind of thing baked into the languages you speak, not actually a way of thinking that is inherently any easier or harder.
I'm a bit confused why you use both the subject / object / verb terms and the terms agent/ patient / action. Why didn't you stick with just one of these seemingly interchangeable sets for the whole video?
I was always fascinated by linguistics, but I must say ever since I started learning Japanese in January, having things to directly contrast rather than some nebulous other certainly gave a new perspective. Like when you mentioned the Subject being implied a lot of times and how one of the basic statements taught very very early on アメリカ人です and 水を飲みます generally imply first person (at least in a vacuum like most basic "translate this one sentence" exercises are)
its quite common in japanese to replace the subject with the topic, which in most cases its 'me' when none were given. when it exists a topic you will have to specify the subject(or the topic) if you want to mean another one.
Irish is VSO, and so seeing its word order in the face of a lot of talk aboht them is... interesting, because it sort of blatently breaks half the "rules" people make up. Yhe biggest one is the idea that the object and verb should go together: not only do they not, but the verb in Irish is the very first word while the object is the verg last. So "Thug mé dó é" means "Gave me to him it".
Wait, this brings up an interesting question. Do SOV languages develop any humor around the fact the verb coming last can lead to drawn out ambiguity? How common is it?
Yes, this happens a lot in Japanese video games. For added humor, there will be NPCs that take have misleading dialogue at first glance. The original Japanese will be structured something like "you I hate you said thought (I)" meaning "I thought you said 'I hate you,'" but will he translated like "'I hate you!' ... I thought you said that." Note I don't know Japanese so the sentence might not be fully accurate.
I've never thought about what my word order is in my head. Thinking about it after seeing this video, I still can't figure it out. My thoughts aren't divided up and order, every 'sentence' is a singular indivisible unit. As for what orders I prefer, I always found any verb-final order irrevocably annoying. On the other hand, I tend to lean more towards VSO. Most of the information in a sentence is contained in the verb, so why not put it first? I mean, in European languages at least, prepositions often have completely different meanings depending on the verb in question (Spanish 'a' comes to mind). Some VSO languages like Tagolog even takes this to the extreme by collapsing all 'prepositions' into just a handful (and yes, I know there's dispute over what Tagalog's 'tags' actually are), with the meaning being marked on the verb. Each of them can have at least half a dozen meanings depending on what markers the verb has. I even tried for the longest time to make an VSO language, but I just couldn't get it to function no matter what I did and I could find no answer to all the practical problems I was having. When it comes to discourse, to me SVO is actually the most practical. Obviously, that's probably due to my upbringing being a native speaker of English. However, there is a practical logic to it. Let's thing about something not all that related; the order people relay events where one caused the other. In English, the standard is technically use X because Y. However, in practice most people default to 'because Y, X'. Humans in general simply prefer to relate events in sequential order, and since causes normally precede what they cause, they normally come first even though they're not required to. To me, SVO mirrors this. Subjects are normally the cause of the event its sentence describes. In fact, in many languages its nominative/ergative marker is in fact descended from some type of causative. Objects on the other hand normally relay the result. Let's think about the sentence 'Baker baked a cake'. What happened? Baking. Who/what caused this? The baker. What was the result? A cake, or more specifically, a cake came into being. Of course, it could be argued that the verb indiciates result more. Let's change the verb: 'The baker ate a cake'. Now what is the result? The result is that the cake now no longer exists. That's quite different, and in fact the exact opposite, from the first sentence. Let's think about another: 'The baker dropped the cake'. What is the result now? The result is the cake is now on the floor. As we see, it can be argued that results of events are more indicated by the verb than the direct object. As for the word order I prefer, while I tend to lean most towards a verb initial order, honestly in practice I prefer languages with a free word order. Given that I have no dominant order in my head, could that mean this is actually the default order of my thoughts? This also lines up with my preference for VSO order, because those tend to also have a relatively loose word order. In fact, its believed that's how they evolve. Simply put, if a language likes to put noun phrases at the beginning of a sentence to draw focus to it in some way, it may very well switch to a VSO order to avoid topicalizing any of the arguments. So maybe VSO is the default order for my thoughts? I do tend to prefer SV sentences funny enough, and in the past I didn't understand the whole 'verb-object decoupling thing'. I used to think 'why would that be a thing? I much prefer to couple the verb and subject'. It was only trying to make a VSO conlang that I realized the true reason for this. In particular, among many things, I couldn't figure out how to make a copular sentence (as in 'A is B'). I mean, what case do you mark B with? You can't have a unique case just for the 'object' of the copula! It took me a decade to find my answer; in reality all known VSO languages just switch to a VOS order for copular sentences. Honestly, I guess VOS makes more sense than VSO. Consider what I said earlier about how the order of SVO languages is in reality cause-event-result. If we can say things like X because Y, then why can't we move the subject/cause of a singular sentence to the end to mirror this? Basically SVO is equivalent to 'because Y, X', while VOS is 'X because Y'. Sorry for the ramble, I've just always struggled to wrap my head around alternate word orders. I don't know why; I've never had much of a problem with free word order languages like German and Esperanto. I strongly prefer to place the verb near the beginning, and subjects before objects. Thus, I tend to lean somewhat towards SVO and VSO. I detest SOV, or any order that puts the object before the subject. Of course, as I said VSO languages are often known for having a relatively loose word order, so maybe VSO and 'no dominant order' aren't that far apart from each other? On my last note, I did make an SOV language in a form. Well, calling it that is rather a stretch. It actually a form of primitese that only has intransitive verbs. Basically, every clause is just a subject and a verb, no object (though in practice, the 'subject' of most verbs is technically a patient). More complex sentences are made by concatenating these S-V clauses together. So a sentence like 'the baker baked a cake in the oven' would be 'baker finish cake bake oven use'. Keep in mind, this is meant to be a form of primitese, imaging a language that just developed grammar. I chose the verb-final order because many linguists believe it may have been the first word order, and I figured the coverb thing could act as an easy stepping stone to post-positions. Strangely, I do find this quite easy to use, and its the only conlang I've actually written texts in! Of course, its hard to call it true SOV. You don't have to wait long to get to a verb, in fact all clauses are fundamentally just S-V. Again, maybe I still prefer the verb to be near the beginning. Anything else is just impractical to me, regardless of what order it is.
That depends on the fallacious counting. For instance, Arabic was counted as verb-subject-object, when in fact that word order is for the dead Classical Arabic that no one speaks natively whereas all modern Arabic languages are strictly subject-verb-object. Ancient Egyptian in its later form has evolved into being strictly analytical and subject-verb-object. Ancient Greek evolved similarly.
Perhaps I could simply be biased by my mother tongue (Italian) or the languages I have studied (English and French), but to me the most natural word order seems to actually be SVO, just because of the relationship between causes and effects: I feel like the focus in the sentence would spontaneously shift from the agent as the starting point, throught the abstraction of the action expressed by the transitive verb which "moves" away from the subject and towards the object, to the patient as the ending point, so that a chronological order would be respected, leaving the agent in the past and placing the patient in the future, with the predicate in the middle indicating the progression from the former to the latter. Instead, it looks like there exists a preference for conceptualizing the nouns together and separately from the verb, maybe to organize the sentence more grammatically
I found your comment quite intersting! And yet in Italian we SOV all the time when it comes to pronouns: "Io ti vedo", "Mangi la frutta? Si, la mangio" etc. Do you find these constructions less natural as a fellow native speakers than their counterparts? (And for the non-italian speakers, this SOV order in the presence of enclitic pronouns is forced: it's a syntax error to say "Si, mangio la" )
@@fluffyteddybear6645 The examples you cited, just like any other occurence of such a construction in Italian, always and only involve "weak" personal pronouns: in every Romance language I know of there exist two sets of personal pronouns, which can either be strong and stressed (Italian me, te, se, lui, lei, noi, voi, loro) or weak and unstressed (Italian mi, ti, si, lo, la, ci, vi, li/le), with the latter series behaving like personal pronouns in Latin, which despite having a grammatical case system, more often than not followed SOV.
My parents and relatives used to endlessly tell me "In German, the verb on the end of the sentence is put." Tell that to a young kid a few times and she might decide to mentally experiment with rearranging a few simple sentences into that order, and realize while they sound strange, they are still mostly understandable, though they leave you with a sensation of hanging or anticipation: "Yes, yes. We have the Dog and the Cat, but what did the dog *do* ?" After thinking about it a while, you might conclude "Yes, it can be made to work. But _why_ ?" That question the parents and relatives would not answer.
I just watched my first video of yours, a video from 7 years ago about you learning Kanji. Hearing your voice in this video had me feeling like I took a time machine to the future xD
The bit about Tobati at the end made me wonder: how likely is it for languages of one order to change into languages of another order? I could imagine, and this an arbitrary hypothetical and not a concrete example, that perhaps a language is more likely to evolve into OSV from SOV (because it only involved one swap, between subject and object) than from other word orders. This could be a relevant factor in the genetic/genealogical explanation, in that it generalizes the notion of inheritability (you don't just inherit word order from parents, but predispositions towards word order). If one wanted to generalize this further, if it were valuable and possible to do so accurately, you could have a function which takes as inputs how likely each word order is to appear in a language and outputs how those are expected to change. Perhaps there are stable and unstable fixed points which could help to categories different languages. That's all very abstract though and would need to be combined with historical and cultural context to actually integrate such a model into a genuine understanding of how specific languages develop.
As a native speaker of a language of which basic word order is SOV, Korean, I can surely say, I don't feel "any discomfort" when I hear something and something first and waiting for a verb to come. What is happening in my mind is to guess or expect what comes next (as a verb) based on what I have heard (something and something). So no discomfort (or garden-pass or something) like what SVO speakers might have :) What I've gotten as impressions on SVO languages is, unlike my native language, it seems to me that a verb chooses its objects not only syntactically but also semantically in SVO languages. In SOV languages, however, the relation between the subject and the object defines or chooses what can come as a verb (semantically and syntactically). This is more than just "animacy." Let me give you an example. In Korean, case markings can be dropped especially in spoken situations. Let's say someone, A, finds a person lying on the ground in front of a car and there are two people around him. A asks those two what happened? The answer can be (without any case marking): this car, man, hit, meaning that "this car hit the man." Based on the circumstances we can observe (a person lying on the ground), the relation between the first (this car) and second noun (man) predicts or defines what comes next as a verb. Not alone the inanimate entity "car" can be the subject there without any issue. :)
In a circumstance where the subject can be assumed, the object can be easily identified without any case marking at all, as well. Let's say I have a cat. And he likes birds so much that he wants to chase them whenever he sees one. One day, my mother asks me what he is doing now, having watched he is jumping in front of the television. I can simply answer like this: bird, saw (without any case marking), meaning he saw birds. This, again, shows what really matters in SOV languages is the relation between the subject (no matter whether it's dropped or not) and the object. The case markings do not have to be necessary in order to figure out which is the subject and which is the object.
@@연봄-v8h Honestly I think that japanese and korean are really cool languages and when I am learning them in my free time I think about language structure a little differently than when I am speaking in english and so figuring out the sentences and predicting what comes next actually became the default when trying to deal with those languages but when hearing and using english my brain basically switches context and thinks about intent of the writing/verbage from the english language perspective.
That's 'garden path', not garden pass, it comes from an idiom where you 'lead someone up the garden path'. I have no idea quite how that ideom came to be, but it broadly means to mislead someone. In linguistics, it means to construct a sentence such that the listener or reader has to completely reanalyse the sentence with every word or clause, because each new piece of information invalidates the default reading of the sentence up to that point. It's a thing you can do in English with a bit of work, and doing it accidentally is generally considered to amount to being a very poor writer or speaker (Newspaper headlines are particularly prone to Very Unfortuante misunderstandings when this is done unintentionally... and clever jokes when done deliberately). It should be noted that the classic English question-and-answer joke that so confuses Japanese people is in part taking advantage of this sort of trick (a question is asked, an answer given. In no sensible context does the answer given as a punchline actually impart a meaningful answer to the question as initially presented, except that by way of the use of some sort of word play (usually a pun) the punchline itself retroactively changes the meaning of the Question such that it is none the less a valid answer). A 'garden path' leaves you essentially getting hit by that sort of nonsense multiple times in the course of trying to follow the meaning of a single sentence.
2:12 actually pretty common when speaking about the past in German. Example sentence: "Du hast ihn gerettet?" ("You have him saved?"; basically SOV) The actual verb doesn't get said until the end of the sentence, but the auxiliary verb that puts the sentence into the perfect tense does get said right after the subject. Gets even weirder with some other stuff. Like, if you want to say "I didn't say that", you may (depending on context and situation) end up saying "das habe ich nicht gesagt" ("that have I not said"; basically OSV).
Most languages I speak (Romance and Germanic), allow for at least some flexibility, so most orders sound fine to me in their own context. However, I tend to think in SVO since it's the most common order in my native tongues and in English.
My native language is Turkish🇹🇷 and it has the word order of SOV. Let me explain the "cat and raven" example. In Turkish, you don't just write the words as they usually are. We have different suffixes for different situations of a word. For example, "ekmek" means "bread". If we try to say "I am eating the bread." in Turkish it is: "Ben ekmeği yiyorum." The word "ekmek" becomes "ekmeği" because the agent in the sentence is acting "towards the patient". So we understand what is the object and what is the subject. But it is easier to think SOV like a recipe: 1. : You need someone to cook. 2. : You need ingredients to cook. 3. : You can cook now. 😂
are we sure that language corresponds with the "order" of a thought, or even that thoughts always have an "order"? my languages are english (SVO) and turkish (canonically SOV but i would argue free and emphasis-driven), and i am really not convinced by this "universal" idea, which is belied somewhat even by thinking of "events," a word that first suggests to me (as others have said here) a verb. maybe this is exactly backwards: the verb is placed at the end in SOV because it is "first" thing, and the end of a sentence is emphasised in the rhythms of many languages.
All these categories are a bit arbitrary. English happens to have a relatively strict word order, and English-speaking theoretical linguists (most prominenntly Chomsky) exaggerate the importance of word order in grammar. Go a few centuries back, and you'd find Latinate scholars claiming English has no grammar at all (because the case markings, so central to Latin grammar, are all but missing in English). By their biases shall ye know them. Languages don't necessarily fit neatly into word order categories. One of the languages I speak, Russian, is a good example. It has been described both as flexible word order and as SVO. In reality it has a weak preference for SVO as a default word order, with lots of exceptions, but it has consistent case marking, so any word order works, if speakers want to use it, say for emphasis.
One of the most fascinating word order features in language (for me) is the historical/syntactical/etc. reasons that lead to concurrent use of different orders for different purposes. For example, in the vast majority of cases, English is SVO: "I see the dog" vs. "I see it" are both SVO. French, on the other hand, goes SOV for object pronouns: "Je vois le chien" vs. "Je le vois." Why a language doesn't just standardize on one pattern is one reason linguistics is such an amazing topic!
But how can we explain that French, Spanish and Italian have SOV when the object is a (personal) pronoun but SVO when the object is a noun? Like for example "je l'aime" ("I love it") vs "j'aime la vie" ("I love life") in French.
Many people in this comments section have been comparing this to mathematical notation, and looking at it as SVO, but I think it's more useful to look at it as OVS. For example, 3/4 is three *divided by* four, with 4 as the agent and 3 as the patient; the 4 divides the 3. I think it's interesting how we use this opposite order in math without really thinking about it. I think it has to do with how we group it: in linguistics the verb phrase includes the verb and the object, emphasizing the subject, whereas for me at least I would group the operator together with the 4, emphasizing the 3. I guess another way to think about it is that it's an inherently passive construction. I wonder if anyone has more insight on this.
Reading your comment made me think that In Spanish 3/4 is read as "divided among 4", not "by 4" (tres dividido entre cuatro). It is a subjectless sentence.
But a statement like '3 divides 4' (which is false) would be 3|4. I think that a 'mathematical word order' would be VSO as that's what predicate logic uses
As a speaker of Dutch -- Flemish -- I never realised how many different word orders we can use and how they all mean different things. Blows my mind actually that Dutch has so many options, which then are also strictly tied to meanings. The basic sentence structure is like English: SVO. But add a time denoter or a question word and it becomes either VSO or SOV depending on whether the action is complete or not. You can also make OVS sentences using tonality in speech and comma's in writing to emphasise the Object in a regular sentence.
Looking at Mandarin, i was struck at how they paid so much attention to known information vs new information. They introduce the shared knowledge first, then the verb, then the new information. So i'm still preferring verb in the middle
So, fun fact, even tho Italian is manly an SVO language (even tho there are sentences in SOV) when we gesticulate the sentence structure tends to be more SOV (Context: in Italian many hand gestures are actual words and have actual meaning so you can create sentences with it) For example if i were to say "I don't care about him" Spokenly id say "non me frega niente di lui " [lit. not I care nothing of him ] SVO Were as with gestures id first point at me, then point at him and then slide away my hand from my neck (this means "not care" or "me ne sbatto il c####"). Which translates to [I, him, not care] SOV. And another one would be "Will you eat that?" "Te lo mangi quello?" [Lit. You it eat that] And with gestures id first point at the person, then at the food, and then close my hand kinda like this 🤌 and move it back and forward to my mouth (this means "to eat") So basically this means [you,that,eat?] At least that's my perception, let's see if other italians agree on this in the comments
My theory is: when language was first developed, there were only nouns, communication often come along with body language which could act as a verb. As society became more and more complex, more kinds of actions were developed, and body language can no longer easily express all those actions. Verbs were then invented and added to the last of the existing SO structure, because, in most cases at that time, SO + body language was still enough, verbs were only included when needed. SOV as the "language of thought"? Maybe at a more simple time or for a more simple mind like a child. Remember that languages themselves could also influence the way of thinking. And given the fact that many languages did have a transition from SOV to SVO, I would say SVO is the real language of thought, at least for adults in modern society.
Yeah. When I try to picture a simple sentence without words, I picture the subject and then simultaneously the action and subject. It's like my brain almost views the object as an extension or elaboration of the verb. I was worrying that meant my brain is Wrong and Bad because I don't really think in SOV.
I often see these videos as very clarifying, but this one didn't feel very convincing. The universality of SOV is inferred from its hegemony in early languages? The video felt a bit long to just say that. I wonder if that's because there isn't a consensus on why this order could be preferred by early speakers? One thing that came to my mind is that verbs are abstract, while subject and object (often) are not. Therefore, in a nascent language, it could be easier to explain what was the action by first indicating the context, the entities involved. Anyway, love the content! ❤
I've noticed that in language learning, there are far more nouns you have to learn than verbs. My point is that perhaps verbs tend to come last because they're usually the least important for relating an idea, as reflected in their smaller proportion of a language's vocabulary.
That.. I can't agree with. The verb is terribly important. Are you going to buy a bike, ride a bike, destroy a bike, borrow a bike, sell a bike? You won't know until you hear the verb. Which made me realize why my SOV-speaking SO gets furious when I start replying "too early", even when speaking an SVO language - the native SOV speakers are used to waiting until the verb is spoken before they reply.
OSV and OVS aren't at all as rare as claimed. They exist as perfectly valid alternatives (grammatically speaking) inside many languages, used for certain types of expressions or part of paragraphs. As for SOV.. I'm married to an SOV speaker, and what I noticed right away is that SOV speakers in general wait, and must wait, until the speaker has finished the sentence before they can start replying. In other words, SOV speakers are far less inclined to habitually interrupt what others are saying (unless they actually _want_ to interrupt), whereas SVO speakers (like myself, and English speakers as well) tend to start speaking/replying before the other party has finished (because what follows after the verb is mostly known already, the important parts tend to be early in our sentences - after you've got the verb the rest doesn't really need to be said). My SO simply can't get used to "our" way of speaking, i.e. start talking before the other party has finished. Even after learning my native SOV language. And it's terribly hard for me to learn that listen-wait-until-the-end-and-THEN-reply way of speech, because it's so unnatural for me (and everyone else around here). But it's probably actually a good thing to learn to speak one at the time, even if it takes longer.
SVO takes the pragmatic approach. "If the speaker died during their sentence, could I still know what they meant?" Mostly, yes you could. SOV, you really don't know what they mean until the very end with few exceptions. "The baker baked..." well, after our speaker died, we look around and see a cake. The baker baked a cake. But had they said "The baker cake..." well now we're in trouble. We see a cake... but what did the baker do? Just bake it? Did they poison it? Sell it? Drop it? Burn it?
This immediately brings to mind an analogy to arithmetic expressions. A verb-in-the-middle sentence parallels a conventional arithmetic expression (e.g. 2*3 + 4*5 ), which is relatively easy to process in graphical form but more difficult to process serially, whereas a verb-at-the-end sentence parallels a stack arithmetic (i.e. Reverse Polish Notation) expression (e.g. 2 3 * 4 5 * + ), which is the easiest for serial processing but quite difficult to process graphically. Since spoken language is serial, it makes sense that verb-at-the-end is most common, and I would expect verb-in-the-middle to be preferred in languages that make especially heavy use of writing.
As a programmer this is one of the things that bothers me when coming up with names for functions. Since I mostly use C, I tend towards an OVS ordering, but when I write C++ I prefer SV with no need to describe O as it's implicit. However, there are times when I need two O's or two S's and that can really complicate the naming conventions. For instance, say I have an arbitrary precision integer type that I simply named Integer, capital 'i', and I have a string type named String, and let's say that I wish to concatenate two subjects of each type of object. Obviously requiring either type to have a dependency on the other is a no go, but how then does one word it, StringAppendInteger or IntegerAppendString, and what order should they go in when calling the functions. This is obviously a simplistic example, but other more complex ones exist.
As soon as you said to substitute pictures for words, the SOV order made perfect sense. It still makes my English head explode to try to verbally do that. It doesn't make my German head explode, though. Since it wasn't my first language it was easy to accept the SOV order. (Well, after my mind resisted a bit, then got used to it).
I would appreciate some more clarification on the whole universal language thing. Specially since, despite speaking two SVO languages, when I did the suggested exercise the order I pointed at things was naturally OVS.
Subject or object can be put at the beginning of a sentence or even the verb depending on what we are insisting on in Hungarian. If it is the verb then it is just conjugated and there is no subject usually, like "(I) ate the pie". But basically any order is possible, so you adapt it to the situation which you are talking about (are you searching for the object or the subject).
This reminded me of something in film making called the Kuleshov Effect. It's a way of putting together a scene to get the audience to react in a certain way. The structure fundamentally follows the agent-patient-action order. I find it interesting that if we think about the language of how scenes in movies are put together it usually follows the agent-patient-action order, or I should say the agent-patient-re-action order.
I am intrigued by the blue dot in Sweden as we actually are an SVO language just like our neighbors in Denmark and Norway. Do we have some dialect that I am unaware of close to the Norwegian border with an SOV word order?
@valkeakirahvi Of course, that could be it. I don't have any knowledge at all of the structure of the Sámi languages but it seems likely. The dot was so far south that the Sámi really didn't come to mind, but it is probably around the most southern places where one will find Sámi communities.
Good video as always. Arabic can be VSO or SVO. These are the main two word orders. Now the verb "to be" is not necessary in all SVO sentences. For example, "The sky is blue" becomes "The sky blue" in which case we call it a "noun sentence" because it begins with a noun (the subject). Other arrangements are also possible because Arabic adds markings to almost all words so you know their role in the sentence. These markings are dropped in everyday language and are only used for religious or literary purposes to the best of my knowledge. I am not aware of any local dialects in the Arab World where the markings are retained. Regardless, even if you add the markings to an unusually ordered sentence like OVS, it still doesn't sound natural.
In Portuguese almost any order works well; it's more or less common hearing one way than other depeding on context. - Passaram duas pessoas por aqui. (VSO) - Duas pessoas procuram por ti. (SVO) - De casa saíram duas pessoas. (OVS) - De casa duas pessoas saíram. (OSV) - Ele a ama. (SOV)
Just discovered this channel and loving it! Would love to see you investigate some languages of the Dravidian family also, and possibly see some connections with other languages/families.
About the disappearance of SOV structures in favor of SVO, can it not be attributed to the general loss of morphological complexity such as case marking in most languages in the world (the language contact leads to morphological simplification hypothesis, see icelandic or sardinian) and thus the arising need to differentiate subject and object better in sentences ?
When people start to study a new language for the first time, they always seem to be worried about writing systems and word order. But after a while, they realize the real work is the other 95% of the problem.
This one ain't it dawg. SOV languages are just technically more widespread but SVO has more speakers. There's a huge problem with classification - with what's a unique language and what just dialects. Italian for example is classified as one language even tho that's the result of standardization, and in reality there were (and still partially are) dozens of romance languages in italy, but in these statistics all the italian romance languages are considered as dialects of the single italian language, lowering the total number of SVO languages by a considerable amount. Both SOV and SVO are common and I don't understand the need to analyze SOV so much and pull at straws about how good and logical it is, as if it was by far the most popular word order, when in reality it's about even with SVO.
My Japanese teacher always said that if you're having trouble figuring out what a sentence means, you have to read it backwards. Not sure why it works exactly, but more complex sentences become easier to parse when you read them starting with the verb in Japanese.
Read the subject, and then read it backwards, and it's the same word order as English.
It's mainly because Japanese a) puts the object before the verb, b) uses postpositions instead of prepositions, and most importantly c) puts relative clauses to the left of the thing modified. All of these things are flipped relative to English
It's because the Japanese teacher already understood you to be an English speaker. Latin teachers do the same by telling low level students to first find the verb. For many students, that's itself an accomplishment
It is hard to get used to having to order what you want to say in reverse, but it does get easier after reading enough. Then once you get used to it there's more "fun" things waiting :3
start using japanese suffixes with English words to train your brain to think in a flexible word order
it'll make it easy to understand
We talked rarest, now for most popular. Come for the syntax, stay for the puns!?
Thanks for waiting while I poured months into this 📅❤🩹
By the way I turned off ads that play during the middle ("mid-roll"). Less revenue but hopefully a better viewing experience?
I appreciate the hard work you do for your videos😊
causa pasa discord
We must recognize the target of our own actions before considering or id eating what to do with them. It makes sense, right?
A downvote for the puns, my friend, but the gentle humour is always hugely appreciated.
You work hard on these, I wouldn't mind watching a ton of ads. Y
My Japanese teacher is training to become an interpreter. She told us about the infamous “…と思いません” which translates to “I don’t think that…” but appears at the very end of the sentence. So it would be very awkward to misinterpret the sentence as “I think that…” but only to find out that you are mistaken at the end of the sentence.
English (mainly certain dialects of British English) actually has a loosely-similar phrase used to punctuate an ironic/sarcastic statement: "[statement], I don't think", e.g. "You're very clever, I don't think."
Luckily you can put the negative inside the 'quote' instead of outside, i.e. ～ないと思います
@@astridplus But then the quoted thing would be negated not the "to think". So you can really rely on that.
And that と思いません thing is why usually there are some degree of delay if the language you need to interpret are head-final.
@@yetanother9127 a more natural equivalent pharse is "or so I think"
For a programmer, natural languages with a verb at the end look very much like reverse polish notation (basically a calculator where you type "3 4 +" instead of "3 + 4"), and like stack based languages (e.g. Forth): You line your values up, and then an operation acts on them. A big advantage of reverse polish notation is that you don't need parentheses to group the operations (e.g. "2 + (3*4))" becomes "2 3 4 * +", while "(2 + 3) * 4" becomes "2 3 + 4 *"), and similarly natural languages with a verb at the end make it much easier to understand what is part of relative clauses, without requiring extra delimiting words. It gives such languages a very compact and efficient vibe. I learned Japanese and had this experience first hand. Even as a SVO speaker I think this is a great feature of verb-last languages.
I took logic classes and seeing "Polish notation" gave me Vietnam flashbacks
You can have it prefixed instead and it is even more natural. Functions are exactly that: verb(subject,object). Your examples would be add(2, mult(3,4)) = + 2 * 3 4, and mult(add(2,3),4) = * + 2 3 4
I'm also studying Japanese and I credit my long career in computer programming with Japanese SOV word order being so natural to me. Also, the marking of the noun phrases seems to correspond to parameter naming in a function, or placing data into an object...the whole idea of putting things into slots, call them registers even, and then having the action happen...that was just natural to me.
I have first encountered RPN Scripting when making game mod which took me surprise, it gives me tons of headache so maybe I don't think in SOV in mind then? Both my first and 2nd language (Chinese and English) is SVO, When I start study Japanese it's also kinda headache, but now I have no problem with it (but still headache with RPN....)
The point about relative clauses cuts two ways, because (at least in some languages) it can result in a traffic jam of verbs at the end of a sentence if the relative clauses are attached to the object. In Farsi, for example, you can say: "Man mard ra didam" ("I saw a man", literally "I man DIRECTOBJECT saw"), "Man mardi ke Farsi midanad ra didam" ("I saw a man who speaks Farsi", literally "I man who Farsi knows DIRECTOBJECT saw"), "Man mardi ke Farsi ke zaban-e Iran ast midanad ra didam" ("I saw a man who speaks Farsi which is the language of Iran", literally "I man who Farsi which language-of Iran is knows DIRECTOBJECT saw"). It's much easier to keep track of which verb goes with which noun phrase when the word order is SVO.
I always find it interesting how Latin was an SOV language, and its descendants became SVO _but_ kept the SOV word order with object pronouns, and even the use of the dative with the third-person.
@@abitmorerational Exactly! And in Portuguese, you can even put them in the middle of the verb in some cases, like: darei (I'll give) + lhe (to him) = dar-lhe-ei (I'll give [to] him) - it's called mesoclisis. At least in Brazilian Portuguese, my native language, we never use it when we're speaking, only in (very) formal texts.
@@JoaoP.434
In 🇵🇹 it’s used verbally too
I believe the theory was that as the cases disappeared, it became advantageous to put the verb between the subject and object to help keep them distinct. This wasn't necessary with pronouns because case survived there.
@@JoaoP.434,
Using object pronouns makes the sentence sound less archaic and still works, although it can seem very formal. It feels more natural to English speakers, as in the sentence "I gave him a ticket", which could be translated into Portuguese while preserving the same VOS order as "dei-lhe minha passagem".
I believe that the natural word order would be SVO, as in complex sentences you can connect clauses by treating one as the subject of the following clause. For example:
"I like apples" follows an SVO structure.
"I like apples because they are tasty" can be analyzed as ((SVO)VO), where the first sentence acts as the subject for the second clause.
In theory, this process could continue indefinitely, allowing sentences to be stacked in this manner like: (((((SVO)VO)VO)VO)VO). In VSO languages, this process would be a little bit awkward: (V(V(V(V(VSO)O)O)O)O)
But for conlanging I think VSO is the best order, followed by SVO.
@@JoaoP.434I'm also Brazilian
There was piece of research I read that pointed out SVO languages don't need has many case markers since the nouns are split up by a verb. I would be really interested in seeing how they tried to remove area and heritage as influences
It's true though. For the SOV languages I know best are Latin and Japanese which both have a lot of markers for nouns. Interestingly though, most common languages descended from Latin, including Italian itself all shifted to SVO despite not really dropping many of the noun declensions.
@@coolbrotherf127
Not sure what you're talking about. Almost all of the Latin derived languages completely dropped noun declension except for pronouns.
In spanish there is only rey \ reyes. No rex regem regum regis regibus and all that jazz. You don't have to memorize a table for every noun.
@@kekeke8988 yeah but they dropped those after going most SVO
@@JoelFeila No, they relied on stricter syntax due to the loss of case inflections
@@annarboriter yeah the fixed syntax also happened, but there was also a push to svo when the case markers got lost.
When told to disregard my own language and think of a word order from the ground up, VSO immediately came to mind. I think it's because it typically describes ideas in order of broad concept to specifics.
Verb - the plot synopsis
Subject - the main character
Object - a plot device
This VSO happens in portuguese (litterary language, not usual register which is SVO ) and now that you mentioned it I can see the poetry of it and how it makes the text more interesting and sophisticated to read
Polish notation in software is VSO: =( +(2, 2), 4)
I sort of did the same thing while coming up with my conlang and ended up with VSO too. I just thought of what youd ask if you stumble upon an event,
the first question one would ask is presumbaly- “What happened?” then “Who did it?”
so verb then subject then object
Can't believe everyone else thought the same
I use VSO too
Functions in programming languages are like vso.
Im early cant think of anything else to say but i appreciate your channel so much
Romanian can arrange words in pretty much any order. Case markers, prepositions and verb endings will eliminate confusions. But, yes, it's mainly SVO.
Like spanish, although if you change the order of the word it might sound like you are telling a poem
Same for almost all Slavic languages, I believe (save for Bulgarian and Macedonian)
@@skirnir393
Does the "a" effectively function as an object marker?
Strange, back when I took Spanish in school, it was taught as "a personal" and I thought it was only used when the object is people, but the internet says that's not the case.
@@kekeke8988 "A" is (in general) for people or things that have a name. Like "Yo amo a Anna" (I love Anna). An example for an object "Yo amo el queso" (I love cheese). By the way you can change the order to "El queso amo yo", but it sounds like literature.
While this is true, arranging a sentence in anything other than SVO will add added emphasis to either the object or the verb, which can alter meaning. Ex. Eu mananc carne (I eat meat -> natural neutral word order), Eu carne mananc (I meat eat -> added emphasis on "meat", meaning I eat meat in stead of anything else), Carne eu mananc (Meat I eat -> added emphasis to "I", meaning only I eat the meat, not anyone else), Carne mananc eu (meat eat I -> similar emphasis on the subject, though not quite as much as in "carne eu mananc"), Mananc eu carne (eat I meat -> again, emphasis on the subject, though, this order is more appropriate as a response to the question "who will eat meat?", Mananc carne eu (VOS - eat meat I -> this is the most unnatural word order that just sounds completely wrong. The meaning is there without any particular emphasis on anything, it just sounds wrong). The word order in Romanian is indeed quite free, but I feel like it also depends on the intonation. Some word orders only work together with the right intonation to mark the emphasis of the word one wants to stand out.
It seems to me that since objects don't feature in every sentence -- sometimes subjects just verb on their own -- subject-verb would be the intrinsic "word order of thought", with objects as an afterthought, therefore coming last.
There are plenty of sentences with no agent. Any discussion of the weather, for instance.
The subject verbed a typical verb-able thing. Depends on how specific your verbs are though.
The bit about ranking humans above inanimate objects and IOs above actions reminded me of Navajo, which is often categorized as SOV, but for many speakers there exists a more or less fixed system of noun ranking by descending agency, with humans (as well as lightning) at the top, then animals and then inanimate objects, with nouns within those three categories also ranked in terms of perceived strength, size, intelligence, etc. In this system the higher ranked noun always comes before the lower ranked one, regardless of the actual role it plays in the sentence, i.e. "human dog bite" will always be in that order, regardless of who does the biting (iirc a lot of the time information that can resolve ambiguity is encoded in the verb instead of either of the nouns).
the analysis is certainly restricted, though I feel as if Navajo would better fit under free order here.
Does it have case systems to avoid ambiguity? How would you know who does what to whom?
@@belle_pomme It has no case system, the most you get in terms of noun morphology are plurals for a subset of animate nouns, possessive markers and a few adjective enclitics. The verbs are where it's at, with prefixes and suffixes encoding information about subjects and objects based on things like grammatical person and object shape, as well as things like transitivity and passivity. So a lot of the time there's very little ambiguity. Plus I guess I should have mentioned that word order does play a role when the nouns involved are sees as having the same level of agency.
@@DwellOnForever I guess, if you solely focus on the concepts of "subject", "object" and "verb" and where they fit in a legitimate sentence, although personally I see it more like German which on first glance seems to "allow" a variety of orders, but in reality this variance itself follows strict rules for when a particular order can be used. But then again you could take it further and debate whether or not any free word order language is truly free, in terms of whether or not the meaning of a given sentence stays exactly the same when you reorder the words, without affecting things like the relative emphasis on certain words.
@@vonPeterhof German has a ton of grammar which might imply a more free word order but in actuality it's pretty strictly SVO because it's just a very rule bound language. The only example of a verb not being after a subject that I can think of would be if a sentence contains two verbs in which case the second word has to go at the end no matter what.
Hearing NativLang unironically say *"cringe"* feels like one of those bizarrely amazing moments in a show/movie where two completely disconnected storylines collide. If this man says *"based"* in the next video I don't know if I'll be able to handle that in all honesty.
It'd be funny if he does that now just for the sake of it lol
it's the same energy as running into your math teacher at walmart or something, like just two completely incompatiable paradigms of being
Wowsers🤓🤓
@@SuperFromND lmao literally
In my second language, Polish. Word order is flexible. You technically can make any order you like, although SVO is the standard that we keep to. But SOV is okay too. Syntax is grammatical, not a matter of word order. The choice is a matter of inflection. The inflected word comes first.
If you like this, I hope you like the Nahuatl language. They compress subject and object into a single verb form.
Like Latin, right?
Polish;
Cat bird sees. (Literal word-for-word translation)
Kot ptaka widzi. (Translation: A cat sees a bird.)
Kota ptak widzi. (Translation: A bird sees a cat.)
SVO: Ptak widzi kota.
SOV: Ptak kota widzi.
VSO: Widzi ptak kota.
VOS: Widzi kota ptak.
OVS: Kota widzi ptak.
OSV: Kota ptak widzi.
"Syntax is grammatical, not a matter of word order." The word syntax is synonymous with word order. Both syntax and morphology are components of grammar
Nahuatl is the best
This is a very interesting topic. I've read that pidgins and creoles are almost always SVO, which seems to be evidence that SVO is the "default" or somehow preferred. SVO is the only word order than can use word order alone to determine grammatical roles (well, I guess OVS could too, but it has the obvious disadvantage of putting the object first). I've studied ancient Indo-European languages for years, so the pattern is always SOV with lots of cases --> SVO and losing all the cases. Is that a "universal" pattern or is it very Indo-European biased? Are there any languages that go from SVO to SOV or is language change almost always in the direction of SVO?
One thing to consider though is that almost all the creoles are of languages like French and English that are SVO.
@@ryalloric1088 That's true. I'd be interested to see how creoles of non-SVO languages compare (unfortunately not familiar with any). Creoles and pidgins do seem to be analytic, with minimal inflections, which does make me think they're likely to be SVO, but I don't know for sure.
@@ryalloric1088 On the other hand, they also tend to avoid conjugation and declension as much as possible, including case marking and the like, to keep the individual words simple to learn and easy to understand.
Without such marking, SVO is actually a fairly logical order to fall into, as the verbis a fairly clear and distinct marker indicating where the subject ends and the object begins.
(actually, English settled into it's rigid SVO order at least in part due to a similar issue, where many of it's case markings (and verb forms indicating agreement with the subject) were lost due to interacting with the (norse?) spoken by the danes in the danelaw, where the markings caused problems, as the same things were marked in both langauges, but with different sounds. It's why we still have an distinct verb form for third person singular subjects: It was the only one that was indicated by the same sound in both langauges! (the specific sound used changed later, but it was the only one not filed off because it was the only one that didn't cause confusion).
... Actually, there may have been other factors in the loss of case marking, but that was definitely the origin of the odd subject-verb agreement in English, and the loss of those markings is why English is so rigid in it's word orders and favours SVO so strongly.
I speak Indonesian, an SVO language (at least the standard one), and in colloquial speech you can speak in VOS with no problem while SOV will make no sense
These sentences makes no sense to me:
'Gua nasi baru makan'
Literally "I rice new/just eat" (I just eat rice)
'Gua duit ke pengemis ngasih'
Literally "I money to (the) beggar give" (I give money to the beggar)
While these are perfectly fine:
'Baru makan nasi gua'
Literally "New/just eat rice I"
'Ngasih duit ke pengemis gua'
Literally "Give money to (the) beggar I"
In standard form those would be "Saya baru (saja) makan nasi" and "Saya memberi uang ke pengemis (itu)" respectively. Also I used the Jakartan colloquial speech, other regions' may vary
@@ninja_boyapiamentu is a creole spoken in Curaçao and Bonaire (and its sibling Papiamento is spoken in Aruba) and is based on Spanish, with Portuguese influences and some Dutch (and more recently English) as well. I'm not fluent but as far as I know it's SVO as well. It's a bit odd cause the verbs aren't conjugated but have "time markers" in front and you can't use the verbs without the markers. So it's subject - time marker+verb - object. Bo ta traha na kas - You work at home. Mi a bai kas - I have gone home . Mi tabata sa - I knew (that). Mi lo yamabo - I will call you. The "big" exception is the verb "have" which doesn't need a time marker in present tense and has it's own marker in simple past tense (not past perfect). Mi tin su potmoni - I have his/her/their wallet. Mi tabatin 10 florin - I had 10 guilders.
Like in any language, there are exceptions, and structures are more flexible when spoken less officially and more casually. But when you're learning the language this is the most basic order you're taught.
(After posting this I just realized you asked for non-SVO and not "not based on English or French" but I'll just leave the comment up)
In Bulgarian we don't have cases but the word order can be flexible. We know what is logical when it comes to an animate and inanimate.When it comes to two animates the more common subject then object adds the meaning of who did what unless we specify it with a word like "her" or "him". For example "the cat the dog saw" is SOV but "the cat her the dog saw" is OSV
It does seem that Bulgarian is to Slavic as English is to Germanic languages
Same in Sinhala. Spoken Sinhala is very flexible with word worder as Suvject and Object can be marked with tags.
In Bulgarian, not only does it matter whether a noun is animate or animate, masculine feminine or neuter, it is also necessary to know exactly how you know something before you say it, because the verb will conjugate differently depending on whether it's something you know firsthand, heard from someone else, aren't sure if it happened, or if you're guessing.
Or try a language like German or Dutch where depending on the sentence, you could either have SVO or SOV
Yeah, isn't German technically default SVO but there are a ton of common constructions that kick the active verb to the end of the sentence? Like how English has a simple present tense, but we use the more marked progressive present tense more often, since the simple present has taken up the habitual mood.
German has VSO too:
Kommt ein Pferd in eine Bar. Fragt der Barkeeper: "Warum so ein langes Gesicht?"
@@Great_Olaf5 it's the other way around, German is SOV and the verb is pulled to the front to get VSO and then you can pull anything over the verb and you have SVO / OVS etc.
@@Great_Olaf5 Yeah, a basic German sentence would have the order 'I sing songs', but you could also say 'I have songs singed' for the past tense
@@buurmeisje* I have songs sung
In my native language, we use SOV system. That means we have to learn to speak or think like SVO speakers in general. We always use one method to describe the difference between SVO and SOV pattern. For SVO speakers, the action is important than what's being done. Similar to your example, the action of baking is important than the actual cake itself to SVO speakers. But for us, SOV speakers, the thing that has been done is more important than the action that made it possible. For us, the cake is more important than the process. This is our way of thinking.
I am confused by the "experiment" at 10:20 -- is this a thought experiment or has it been done? I cannot imagine why anyone would arrange the pictures in a way different from their language's word order. If you asked an English speaker to illustrate "the man bakes a cake", I'd be very surprised if they put the "cake" picture before the "bake" one.
Yeah tbh
I find it incredibly interesting how all of the Celtic languages are the only language families in Europe with a word-order that begins with the verb first (VSO). I wonder how that is possible?
Read about the Semitic influence on Celtic. It isn’t still widely accepted, but many features of those languages resemble the Semitic ones.
They allegedly been seasoned lightly with Semitic we just don't know which one.
Ignore the two replies above me. There's a strange push to claim that semitic languages have influenced this and that european language but it's simply not true because the evidence would be blinding yet just isn't there. I've never heard of celtic being V1 but personally I'd guess that it has something to do with the pre-proto-celtic substrate language triggering verb movement much like the second-place clitic order in the germanic languages producing V2 word order.
I made up a fictional language as a teenager for a fantasy story I never finished. I just looked back at it and found the structure to basically be OSV. Maybe I subconsciously just wanted to make it different from my native SVO.
That's the trick that makes Yoda sound alien.
It should be noted that with free word order languages like Latin and Russian, they actually preferred to use SVO colloquially and only really used SOV for poetry!
Same in Polish and all the other Slavic languages I believe
Most sources we have on Latin, poetic or prosaic use SOV more often than SVO. Poets did probably use SOV more than the common man, and even prosaic correspondence we have from the classical period is mostly upper classes talking to upper classes, so is almost certainly biased, but I’d say SVO was at most *equally* popular to SOV in Latin, never MORE popular.
@@IONATVS Why did every single Vulgar Latin dialect steer towards SVO then?
@@AngraMainiiu Probably because all except Romanian lost their explicit case marking? And SVO physically separates the Subject and object, facilitating that? A word order that was previously considered equally valid as SOV since word order was free? I’ve primarily studied Latin and Spanish, but not the transition in between.
@@IONATVS That's probably it. The more analytical a language is, the more likely it's SVO like English and Chinese.
I think I like SVO (aside from it being in my native language) mostly because if I was to rationalize it, I would draw a diagram of a thing happening to something and the action would ‘emanate’ from the subject before connecting with the object
Being Dutch, I'm used to a language that is somehow sowhere in between SOV and SVO: our word order is SOV in principle, but we place the conjugated verb on the second position in the sentence [V2] (no matter what comes first), which in practice (i.e. in common, simple sentences) our word order seems like SVO:
I (S) broke (V) my leg (O) yesterday = Ik (S) brak (V[2]) mijn been (O) gisteren.
You don't have to look far to see that it is only appearance, though: Yesterday, I broke my leg = Gisteren brak (V2) ik (S) mijn been (O)
Nor to see the underlying SOV:
Yesterday, I have broken my leg = Gisteren heb (V2) ik (S) mijn been (O) gebroken (V).
Now that I think of it, I do believe my Dutch brain finds the object slightly more important than the verb...
I'm studying German and it's basically the same. Ich brach mein Bein gestern / Gestern brach ich mein Bein / Gestern habe ich mein Bein gebrochen
(Though I think in German, the first example would be quite unusual, as there seems to be a strong preference for time stuff to be first, from what I understand)
I think the fact that this word order is referred to as inversion reinforces the assertion that it is not the standard syntax
Due to german and in a similar sense dutch being more grammaticly synthetic than the analytic grammar of today's English the word-order can be seen as preference for SVO and SOV depending on sentence type and performed action, however outside of the formal rules, the more complex a language builds meaning into it's words (conjugation, inflection, classes etc.) the freer the word order usually is. (Used SOV in the last sentence lol)
Actually SOV and SVO existed alongside each other as preferable word orders until the 1500's in Dutch, German and even North Germanic languages over time due to simplification and or V2 rigidification SVO became more desirable, which does not mean that SOV like you have shown isn't still used to construct a germanic sentence in certain maybe somewhat archaic sense or something along your line of thought
German (my first language) definitely still does it and I thought that the Frisian and even the Northgermanic languages still did it, but I'm not sure there.
Allegedly even modern Hebrew/Ivrit adopted some V2 aspects through Yiddish.
English is the most apparent outlier amongst Germanic languages, most likely because of Romance influence.
Despite my native language (Brazilian Portuguese) using the SVO word oder, SOV sentences are kinda common and they always seen to make more sense. Also, people are more open to play with word oder in informal speech and i love it
The Brazilian national anthem features a VSO sentence in the first two lines (with inverted adjective-noun order to boot).
@higorribeiro8318
🤣🤣🤣
Since im learning Japanese im experiencing an sov language myself. But what makes the different sentence structure relatively easy to understand is the use of particles to indicate subject, object, and verb. Its like verbally indicating what is the subject and object of the sentence. Interestingly enough, in Japanese the location of the subject and object in the sentence isnt that important. Not as important as the verb being at the end of the sentence. I still have much to learn but from what have learned, Japanese can function as both an sov and osv language though I believe the first is more common.
I’ve also run across svo word order on occasion, as in something like 私は散歩した、公園の周りを。but if there’s any particular pattern to how svo is used, I haven’t picked up on it.
OSV used to be common in Japanese, due apparently to the lack of a subject particle. So they often marked the subject by putting it right before the verb. That seems to have died out when "ga" switched from being a genitive particle to a subject particle.
This a heck of an unintentional birthday gift. Excellent video! Definitely looking forward to the next w.
Actually, I still don't understand why SOV is the most popular and "universal".
I'm a native speaker of Ukrainian and Russian and very fluent, near-native speaker of French. For me SVO is the most natural way of *thinking*. Yes, in Slavic languages, as noted by other commenters, you can have whatever order you want and that's used sometimes:
- Кого спіймав кіт?
- Мишу він спіймав!
Translation (literal):
- Whom caught cat? (Whom cat caught is also OK)
- Mouse he caught! (OSV!)
That means, he did catch a mouse, and not a bird or a fly.
However, SVO is the most natural. I mean, you can construct a sentence without the O: "Baker baked"; "Capibara ate". That's enough to grasp at least the basis. On the other hand, what does the sentence "Baker a cake" mean? What did they do to the cake? Bought? Sold? Dropped? Burned? Or, for real, baked?
Thank you so much for the video, Josh, it was a great pleasure to listen to you as always! But at least for me the question stays unanswered :).
Same in Swedish. It just feels like the most logical thing.
The same can be said for SVO too. "Baker baked"... what? As much as baker could have done anything except for baking with the cake, baker may have baked something other than a cake. Which order is more "natural" really depends on which part of speech speaker wants to emphasize and audiences know in advance. If I don't already know that Tom is a baker, "Tom baked" doesn't make much sense to me, but "Tom a cake" would make me hungry, even though I'm yet to know if Tom baked or ate a cake (the most likely interpretations). At least that's how I, as a native Korean speaker with the primary word order of SOV, feels like.
@@lifthras11r This might be because transitivity is more flexible in a lot of SVO languages so you say 'baker baked' and my response was 'yes, this is what bakers do, they bake', because I was interpreting the phrase as intransitive. I don't know any Korean, but Hittite (sorry, only strict SOV language I know) is very strict about verb transitivity, and has important grammatical implications associated with the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs, whereas English can make any verb transitive or intransitive on a whim (ex, 'Me and my friends brought' is actually a fine sentence in English as long as there is a context that allows it)
SVO is a very European thing! Modern Indo-european languages are almost always SVO, and it's also an areal feature. Finnish has become mostly SVO too for living with IE people, even though Uralic languages are almost all SOV. It might be hard to grasp how common SOV is, because so many of the languages we encounter regularly are IE.
@@valkeakirahvi Most Indian and Iranian languages are areally SOV, and they're basically half the language family lol. Africa is also one big SVO zone.
I always thought to myself that the prevalence of SOV could be explained by a law of similarities:
1) It makes sense to group S & O together because they are both arguments and represent concrete things in a stereotypical sentence, which gives you a nice separation of arguments and verbs.
2) It also makes sense to group O & V together because, often, actions inherently involve objects. This gives you a nice separation of subject and predicate.
1+2) O is neat in the middle because both 1 and 2 get to be true.
3) The reason SOV is more common than VOS is that subjects are typically more salient than verbs because they are typically physical things.
might just be me though.
that was always my exact suspicion, but i don’t exactly have any evidence obviously lol. it’s basically just, more “organized” seeming maybe?
@@Nosirrbro Yeah, to me, it just seems like it's more likely to happen than the others because there are two separate logics that can lead to this configuration and also co-exist.
German is a "flexible language".
The reason why it's still clear what the sentence means is the "case system".
For the example at 6:30:
"Die Katze sieht DEN Raben" or "DEN Raben sieht die Katze" both means the same thing: The raven ist seen by the cat.
If you want to express the opposite you have to use a different case:
"Die Katze sieht DER Rabe" or "DER Rabe sieht die Katze" both mean: The cat is seen by the raven.
Languages with a case system are a little bit more difficult. But give more flexibility. Which is great for instance for composing poetry.
Fun fact when you start thinking in terms of video game interface, adventure game have contextual action based on selecting object to infer a verb, kinda sov when the subject is implicit as the player. Sometimes you click the object THEN select the verb.
Yayyyyy new NativLang video
My problem with the thought experiment of disregarding known languages and expressing an event is that it depends entirely on what I would want to emphasize in that event, as well as how I'd choose to emphasize it.
If the event being expressed is something like "X ate Y", the first way that came to my mind was to emphasize the eating, the event being the eating of Y by X. Thus, it became "ate... X... Y" (VSO), as I chose to emphasize by putting the more important elements earlier in the phrase.
If the event is "X ate Y" where it's important that X finally ate something? It becomes "X ate Y" (SVO).
If X hates Y and has never been seen eating it? Then it's "Y ate X" (OVS).
All of those were in the mode of putting the emphasized components earlier in the phrase.
I don't think there's a "universal" thought pattern dictating a word order. I wonder if historical linguistics has better explanations for the apparent preferences?
When you try OSV I automatically hear the object as a subject and expect more information at the end of the sentence. "A cake the baker baked (was sold for $20)."
This is still SOV. The subject is “the cake the baker baked”, the verb is “sold (for)” and object is “$20”
My native language is English, but thinking of how I'd indicate wordlessly that I want to eat something, I'd point between myself and the food, then mime eating. SOV. First you establish the two players, then what happened. In that way, I can understand how it became so popular in languages.
I'm not sure whether I'd mime eating before pointing to the food or vice-versa, but I'd definitely either point to myself first or not at all
I'd probably indicate me, the food, then eating... unless I was specifically trying to ask permission to eat that particular item, rather than just indicating hunger or a desire to eat, in which case I can easily see myself indicating the food, then eating, then me (with questioning expression).
I'd mime eating then point to the food. So your argument is moot
I think doing it like this makes sense because the subject and the object constrains the possible range of actions. This is important because verbs being temporal in nature are somewhat abstract and can't simply be pointed to. If you for example first establish that you and an apple are involved in a sentence then if you start chomping with your mouth it's pretty obvious that you mean that you're eating the apple. However if you did it the other way then the chomp could be interpreted both as eating or as biting, which might not be the same thing, and so the receiver would have to spend some time wondering what you meant before figuring it out instead of it being obvious right when you finish gesturing. However the more precisely you're able to indicate an action the less important the object becomes, so in a language where everything has agreed upon definitions the object can become unimportant as the verb already implies it. Just by saying "he drove" we've already limited the possible objects to things you can drive, which in a modern culture is almost always a car.
Like think about party games where you have to mime something, if you do it SVO people will almost always have multiple guesses for what the verb is before the object is revealed and that tends to slow things down. If you do it SOV then the verb is almost instantly implied.
I thought about this even as a native SVO speaker. If I were to illustrate the sentence "I eat cake" in three parts, I would probably draw a stick figure (subject) then draw a cake (object), and then draw the stick figure eating the cake (verb). In that way, SOV makes a lot of sense if you're illustrating concepts in your head. It's difficult to illustrate or conceptualize "eat" if you don't conceptualize "cake" first. Does that make sense?
When he asked us to imagine the creation of a language, I tried to play along. I attempted to communicate something without my voice and I really wanted to do it without thinking. I ended up pointing to myself (S) then a guitar (O) and then I pretended to play it (V). So maybe it is indeed the default order.
Me too. I thought of myself, then an apple and last eating it.
In that case it's also because both the subject and object are concrete physical things you can literally point to, thus they are easy to communicate, but a verb being by definition temporal is a much more abstract concept that is more difficult to communicate. However if you've indicated the subject and object there are only so many actions that are possible thus it is much easier to understand what the action is. The subject and object constrain the possible range of actions based on our inherent understanding of how the world works.
5:03 OVS and OSV sound very literary
I think maybe left out a pretty glaring example that defies this language-family determinism hypothesis (or maybe this is what you're saving for another time), because the Romance languages descend from an SOV language, but all of them have SVO order today. Moreover, if this colonialism hypothesis were true, then all Romance languages would have to have SOV word order. This hypothesis you suggest that word order may tend toward SVO over time seems to make the most sense, at least to this viewer.
Always good with more Nativlang vid out
When I try to think about it objectively, I keep coming back to SVO. The chronological order of most things is "agent" decides to do thing, so it does thing, and other thing is affected by this action. Subject Verb Object. I find it interesting that most languages didn't choose the most "linear" word order.
9/10 linguists agree that whatever features their native language has are probably universal to human cognition!
In reality if something is universal then every language would have it... like vowels.
Not to be nitpicky but vowels aren't universal; what about sign languages? It's another example of the same thing you've said.
@@breathuralic768 Yeah plus there's probably an obscure jokelang made in 2013 which features absolutely no vowels but is still spoken.
Silbo Gomero doesn't have vowels. But any language that isn't intentionally made not to have them or have constraints that makes them impossible do have vowels
@@kasperfabchbrandt537 Whistled 'languages' like Canarian Spanish in Silbo Gomero, Pirahã, and various others, are only whistled forms of a language that can and usually _is_ expressing orally. It is not that much unlike writing: people who whistle are able to encode their usual, spoken languages, in a medium other than usual speech.
It also should be noted that it is more a technique than anything like language, people able to whistle a language are often able to whistle other languages just as well (like, a Silbo Gomero whistler could whistle a word in English rather than Spanish, although the vowels will become wonkier). A whole whistling community can even switch languages and preserve their whistling practice
@@breathuralic768 Perhaps you are not aware of the root of the word, language
some years ago I read about the SOV way of thinking and an example was sign languages (mute or not), when people were asked to say a basic sentence they "say" SOV even thought they spoke an SVO language.
Yeah, I never thought in SOV personally. I'm french, I think in french (or in english when I watched too much english content XD), so I honestly can't understand what you're trying to say when you say describe an action is SOV, like even if I use images, I would place them in SVo order ^^'
In all the Slavic languages, familiar to me, the word order, used in a particular sentence, is not only flexible, but is describing a mood and sometimes a context, so it's actually rarely a free choice.
As a slavic language speaker, I would like to add, that word order also describes Focus and Topic
Just when I was thinking you were dead 😫
Edit: in some languages like Chechen and Ingush, it gets even weirder. Occasionally, your sentence is SOVV, as in grammatically you have to use two different verbs to be grammatically correct.
E.g. “He is small” is “Iza ƶima vu” with “xila” (conjugated as d.u) being the verb. However, for sentences like “I like him”, it is “So iza v.ezu v.u” where d.eza is the main verb and xila (d.u) is the secondary verb.
In the first sentence, xila matches the object’s noun class, while in the second it matches the subject’s.
Edit 2:
After another 9 months of learning this hell language u can’t tear myself away from, I’ve discovered that the previous edit is missing something. When you’re directly saying something, like “I am small” or “I am a soldier”, you use OVS. :|
Interesting, but I'm not sure if I understand it. Can you give us a word-to-word translation, or a gloss even?
@@valkeakirahvi xila has several meanings, with one being “to have” where it’s conjugated differently, where instead of d.u it’s xüylu.
Xila also means “to be” where it’s d.u
When there’s a consonant then a dot (like d.u) it means that the consonant changes depending on the noun class.
Armenian is said to have SOV structure, but in short sentences it is flexible as an ant.
There are 14! valid arrangements of the phrase "I love you" in Armenian.
I believe it's the record permutations in any language. Each of them has it's own "color", but most are very similar in tonality.
SOV (Subject Object Verb)
1. Ես քեզ սիրում եմ (Ես - I, քեզ - you, սիրում - love, եմ - am)
2. Ես քեզ եմ սիրում (The stress is on "you", this structure emphasizes that I love you not other person)
3. Ես եմ քեզ սիրում (The stress is on "I", I am who loves you)
SVO
4. Ես սիրում եմ քեզ (the most common, just mundane "I love you")
5. Ես եմ սիրում քեզ (the stress is on "I", the structure is uncommon and lyrical)
OSV
6. Քեզ ես սիրում եմ (the stress is on "you", it's like uncovering that "I love you" as the verb hides the intention till the last moment)
7. Քեզ ես եմ սիրում (it's, like saying "I am the one who loves you not the other person")
OVS
8. Քեզ սիրում եմ ես (Has a casual feel to it)
9. Քեզ եմ սիրում ես (Has a casual feel to it, uncommon, playful)
VSO
10. Սիրում եմ ես քեզ (Lyrical, declarative, this structure is found in Armenian poetry)
VOS
11. Սիրում եմ քեզ ես (Lyrical, uncommon)
OV
12. Քեզ սիրում եմ (casual, the preposition is dropped as the axillary verb "եմ" already shows the subject)
13. Քեզ եմ սիրում (the stress is on "you", it's like saying "you (are the one) I love")
VO
14. Սիրում եմ քեզ (declarative)
That's strange. From my grammar of Eastern Armenian, the default order in Armenian is SVO in common parlance, as you note. I think people just call it SOV out of an excess of formalism.
Weird usage of factorial right there I thought there were 14! Different sentences
NativLang is back with a video!!! Yesyesyes thank you! *-*
My native is Russian so all 6 forms are familiar for me. I think SOV is less used that SVO in Russian, it's used frequently in poetry.
As a native English speaker, one of the things I enjoyed most while learning how to speak in German (in college) was learning how the language often used SOV
I love all the animated linguistics! I was just watching your channel today and saw you made a new upload!
The German Sign Language is very heavy in SOV unlike the spoken/written German. We sign the first part that is larger and more or less immobile (i.e. house) then second part that is smaller and mobile (i.e. car). We use the verb at end to tie both positions and relationships: "The book is on the table" would be signed as "Table - book - lay".
One of my favourite channels out there
I speak French and Dutch as native languages and it's SVO (for the most part). I never saw the logic in SOV because to me, the two most important/basic parts of a sentence are the subject and the verb. The O is optional and considered additional information. For example; "I walked" makes sense. I admit that it's not much but it gets a clear message across, the fact that I walked. People can ask questions if they want to know more about it but fundamentally it works.
However "I in the park" doesn't make sense. When? What? How? Why? There's not even a basic message that is comprehensible as a stand alone statement therefore the communication isn't effective. That's why I've always found SV/VS more logical as the basis for the structure of a sentence. I know/understand some languages that use SOV and I like them very much because they usually have other grammatical rules that make sense as a whole and are super interesting but yeah... SOV will always confuse me.
In French they say "Je t'aime". This is an SOV construction, so it exists in French.
whether im using an SOV or SVO language simply changes where im thinking about the core of a sentence. of course in an SVO language it makes natural sense to think of the ends of a sentence as more ‘droppable’, but the end of a sentence being the least important is in no means a universal way of thinking. of course in an SOV language I would never say “I steak [?]”, nor does the idea of just taking the first two components ever really cross my mind, because of course the last component of the sentence is the core. the location of what is being dropped (and therefore word order) just seems superfluous in general, and I don’t personally find SVO more natural even though I’m far more fluent in an SVO language than anything else.
the object being the most droppable component isn’t even a basic fact of thought, if anything the subject being the most droppable component seems to be more common among languages (since it’s easy to figure out from context) . it’s really just the kind of thing baked into the languages you speak, not actually a way of thinking that is inherently any easier or harder.
"in the park" is not really an O, but "I in the park" is just a zero copula, i.e. it's the same as "I'm in the park"
@@F_A_F123 Exactly. A more precise analogy would be "I hippopotamuses": like? hunt? eat? ignore? worship? flee? etc. etc.
I'm a bit confused why you use both the subject / object / verb terms and the terms agent/ patient / action.
Why didn't you stick with just one of these seemingly interchangeable sets for the whole video?
meaning-reversal shows up in idioms for me. "the icecream licks back", "they're hanging the executioner" and "ah, not the jam preserving grandma!"
... I have never heard a single one of those sentences before.
@@Great_Olaf5 Hungarian is weird XD
I was always fascinated by linguistics, but I must say ever since I started learning Japanese in January, having things to directly contrast rather than some nebulous other certainly gave a new perspective. Like when you mentioned the Subject being implied a lot of times and how one of the basic statements taught very very early on アメリカ人です and 水を飲みます generally imply first person (at least in a vacuum like most basic "translate this one sentence" exercises are)
its quite common in japanese to replace the subject with the topic, which in most cases its 'me' when none were given. when it exists a topic you will have to specify the subject(or the topic) if you want to mean another one.
Irish is VSO, and so seeing its word order in the face of a lot of talk aboht them is... interesting, because it sort of blatently breaks half the "rules" people make up. Yhe biggest one is the idea that the object and verb should go together: not only do they not, but the verb in Irish is the very first word while the object is the verg last. So "Thug mé dó é" means "Gave me to him it".
Wait, this brings up an interesting question. Do SOV languages develop any humor around the fact the verb coming last can lead to drawn out ambiguity? How common is it?
Yes, this happens a lot in Japanese video games. For added humor, there will be NPCs that take have misleading dialogue at first glance. The original Japanese will be structured something like "you I hate you said thought (I)" meaning "I thought you said 'I hate you,'" but will he translated like "'I hate you!' ... I thought you said that."
Note I don't know Japanese so the sentence might not be fully accurate.
I've never thought about what my word order is in my head. Thinking about it after seeing this video, I still can't figure it out. My thoughts aren't divided up and order, every 'sentence' is a singular indivisible unit.
As for what orders I prefer, I always found any verb-final order irrevocably annoying. On the other hand, I tend to lean more towards VSO. Most of the information in a sentence is contained in the verb, so why not put it first? I mean, in European languages at least, prepositions often have completely different meanings depending on the verb in question (Spanish 'a' comes to mind). Some VSO languages like Tagolog even takes this to the extreme by collapsing all 'prepositions' into just a handful (and yes, I know there's dispute over what Tagalog's 'tags' actually are), with the meaning being marked on the verb. Each of them can have at least half a dozen meanings depending on what markers the verb has. I even tried for the longest time to make an VSO language, but I just couldn't get it to function no matter what I did and I could find no answer to all the practical problems I was having.
When it comes to discourse, to me SVO is actually the most practical. Obviously, that's probably due to my upbringing being a native speaker of English. However, there is a practical logic to it. Let's thing about something not all that related; the order people relay events where one caused the other. In English, the standard is technically use X because Y. However, in practice most people default to 'because Y, X'. Humans in general simply prefer to relate events in sequential order, and since causes normally precede what they cause, they normally come first even though they're not required to.
To me, SVO mirrors this. Subjects are normally the cause of the event its sentence describes. In fact, in many languages its nominative/ergative marker is in fact descended from some type of causative. Objects on the other hand normally relay the result. Let's think about the sentence 'Baker baked a cake'. What happened? Baking. Who/what caused this? The baker. What was the result? A cake, or more specifically, a cake came into being. Of course, it could be argued that the verb indiciates result more. Let's change the verb: 'The baker ate a cake'. Now what is the result? The result is that the cake now no longer exists. That's quite different, and in fact the exact opposite, from the first sentence. Let's think about another: 'The baker dropped the cake'. What is the result now? The result is the cake is now on the floor. As we see, it can be argued that results of events are more indicated by the verb than the direct object.
As for the word order I prefer, while I tend to lean most towards a verb initial order, honestly in practice I prefer languages with a free word order. Given that I have no dominant order in my head, could that mean this is actually the default order of my thoughts? This also lines up with my preference for VSO order, because those tend to also have a relatively loose word order. In fact, its believed that's how they evolve. Simply put, if a language likes to put noun phrases at the beginning of a sentence to draw focus to it in some way, it may very well switch to a VSO order to avoid topicalizing any of the arguments. So maybe VSO is the default order for my thoughts? I do tend to prefer SV sentences funny enough, and in the past I didn't understand the whole 'verb-object decoupling thing'. I used to think 'why would that be a thing? I much prefer to couple the verb and subject'. It was only trying to make a VSO conlang that I realized the true reason for this. In particular, among many things, I couldn't figure out how to make a copular sentence (as in 'A is B'). I mean, what case do you mark B with? You can't have a unique case just for the 'object' of the copula! It took me a decade to find my answer; in reality all known VSO languages just switch to a VOS order for copular sentences.
Honestly, I guess VOS makes more sense than VSO. Consider what I said earlier about how the order of SVO languages is in reality cause-event-result. If we can say things like X because Y, then why can't we move the subject/cause of a singular sentence to the end to mirror this? Basically SVO is equivalent to 'because Y, X', while VOS is 'X because Y'.
Sorry for the ramble, I've just always struggled to wrap my head around alternate word orders. I don't know why; I've never had much of a problem with free word order languages like German and Esperanto. I strongly prefer to place the verb near the beginning, and subjects before objects. Thus, I tend to lean somewhat towards SVO and VSO. I detest SOV, or any order that puts the object before the subject. Of course, as I said VSO languages are often known for having a relatively loose word order, so maybe VSO and 'no dominant order' aren't that far apart from each other?
On my last note, I did make an SOV language in a form. Well, calling it that is rather a stretch. It actually a form of primitese that only has intransitive verbs. Basically, every clause is just a subject and a verb, no object (though in practice, the 'subject' of most verbs is technically a patient). More complex sentences are made by concatenating these S-V clauses together. So a sentence like 'the baker baked a cake in the oven' would be 'baker finish cake bake oven use'. Keep in mind, this is meant to be a form of primitese, imaging a language that just developed grammar. I chose the verb-final order because many linguists believe it may have been the first word order, and I figured the coverb thing could act as an easy stepping stone to post-positions. Strangely, I do find this quite easy to use, and its the only conlang I've actually written texts in! Of course, its hard to call it true SOV. You don't have to wait long to get to a verb, in fact all clauses are fundamentally just S-V. Again, maybe I still prefer the verb to be near the beginning. Anything else is just impractical to me, regardless of what order it is.
That depends on the fallacious counting. For instance, Arabic was counted as verb-subject-object, when in fact that word order is for the dead Classical Arabic that no one speaks natively whereas all modern Arabic languages are strictly subject-verb-object. Ancient Egyptian in its later form has evolved into being strictly analytical and subject-verb-object. Ancient Greek evolved similarly.
Perhaps I could simply be biased by my mother tongue (Italian) or the languages I have studied (English and French), but to me the most natural word order seems to actually be SVO, just because of the relationship between causes and effects: I feel like the focus in the sentence would spontaneously shift from the agent as the starting point, throught the abstraction of the action expressed by the transitive verb which "moves" away from the subject and towards the object, to the patient as the ending point, so that a chronological order would be respected, leaving the agent in the past and placing the patient in the future, with the predicate in the middle indicating the progression from the former to the latter. Instead, it looks like there exists a preference for conceptualizing the nouns together and separately from the verb, maybe to organize the sentence more grammatically
Sounds ridiculous to me as German speaker.
I found your comment quite intersting! And yet in Italian we SOV all the time when it comes to pronouns: "Io ti vedo", "Mangi la frutta? Si, la mangio" etc. Do you find these constructions less natural as a fellow native speakers than their counterparts? (And for the non-italian speakers, this SOV order in the presence of enclitic pronouns is forced: it's a syntax error to say "Si, mangio la" )
@@fluffyteddybear6645 The examples you cited, just like any other occurence of such a construction in Italian, always and only involve "weak" personal pronouns: in every Romance language I know of there exist two sets of personal pronouns, which can either be strong and stressed (Italian me, te, se, lui, lei, noi, voi, loro) or weak and unstressed (Italian mi, ti, si, lo, la, ci, vi, li/le), with the latter series behaving like personal pronouns in Latin, which despite having a grammatical case system, more often than not followed SOV.
Swedish is an SVO language. If you ask a question the words usually come in VSO order.
Kor äter gräs (cows eat grass)
Äter kor gräs? (eat cows grass?)
My parents and relatives used to endlessly tell me "In German, the verb on the end of the sentence is put." Tell that to a young kid a few times and she might decide to mentally experiment with rearranging a few simple sentences into that order, and realize while they sound strange, they are still mostly understandable, though they leave you with a sensation of hanging or anticipation: "Yes, yes. We have the Dog and the Cat, but what did the dog *do* ?" After thinking about it a while, you might conclude "Yes, it can be made to work. But _why_ ?" That question the parents and relatives would not answer.
I just watched my first video of yours, a video from 7 years ago about you learning Kanji. Hearing your voice in this video had me feeling like I took a time machine to the future xD
The bit about Tobati at the end made me wonder: how likely is it for languages of one order to change into languages of another order? I could imagine, and this an arbitrary hypothetical and not a concrete example, that perhaps a language is more likely to evolve into OSV from SOV (because it only involved one swap, between subject and object) than from other word orders. This could be a relevant factor in the genetic/genealogical explanation, in that it generalizes the notion of inheritability (you don't just inherit word order from parents, but predispositions towards word order).
If one wanted to generalize this further, if it were valuable and possible to do so accurately, you could have a function which takes as inputs how likely each word order is to appear in a language and outputs how those are expected to change. Perhaps there are stable and unstable fixed points which could help to categories different languages. That's all very abstract though and would need to be combined with historical and cultural context to actually integrate such a model into a genuine understanding of how specific languages develop.
Super stoked for the SVO video now.
As a native speaker of a language of which basic word order is SOV, Korean, I can surely say, I don't feel "any discomfort" when I hear something and something first and waiting for a verb to come. What is happening in my mind is to guess or expect what comes next (as a verb) based on what I have heard (something and something). So no discomfort (or garden-pass or something) like what SVO speakers might have :)
What I've gotten as impressions on SVO languages is, unlike my native language, it seems to me that a verb chooses its objects not only syntactically but also semantically in SVO languages. In SOV languages, however, the relation between the subject and the object defines or chooses what can come as a verb (semantically and syntactically). This is more than just "animacy."
Let me give you an example. In Korean, case markings can be dropped especially in spoken situations. Let's say someone, A, finds a person lying on the ground in front of a car and there are two people around him. A asks those two what happened? The answer can be (without any case marking): this car, man, hit, meaning that "this car hit the man." Based on the circumstances we can observe (a person lying on the ground), the relation between the first (this car) and second noun (man) predicts or defines what comes next as a verb. Not alone the inanimate entity "car" can be the subject there without any issue. :)
In a circumstance where the subject can be assumed, the object can be easily identified without any case marking at all, as well.
Let's say I have a cat. And he likes birds so much that he wants to chase them whenever he sees one. One day, my mother asks me what he is doing now, having watched he is jumping in front of the television. I can simply answer like this: bird, saw (without any case marking), meaning he saw birds.
This, again, shows what really matters in SOV languages is the relation between the subject (no matter whether it's dropped or not) and the object. The case markings do not have to be necessary in order to figure out which is the subject and which is the object.
@@연봄-v8h Honestly I think that japanese and korean are really cool languages and when I am learning them in my free time I think about language structure a little differently than when I am speaking in english and so figuring out the sentences and predicting what comes next actually became the default when trying to deal with those languages but when hearing and using english my brain basically switches context and thinks about intent of the writing/verbage from the english language perspective.
That's 'garden path', not garden pass, it comes from an idiom where you 'lead someone up the garden path'. I have no idea quite how that ideom came to be, but it broadly means to mislead someone.
In linguistics, it means to construct a sentence such that the listener or reader has to completely reanalyse the sentence with every word or clause, because each new piece of information invalidates the default reading of the sentence up to that point.
It's a thing you can do in English with a bit of work, and doing it accidentally is generally considered to amount to being a very poor writer or speaker (Newspaper headlines are particularly prone to Very Unfortuante misunderstandings when this is done unintentionally... and clever jokes when done deliberately).
It should be noted that the classic English question-and-answer joke that so confuses Japanese people is in part taking advantage of this sort of trick (a question is asked, an answer given. In no sensible context does the answer given as a punchline actually impart a meaningful answer to the question as initially presented, except that by way of the use of some sort of word play (usually a pun) the punchline itself retroactively changes the meaning of the Question such that it is none the less a valid answer).
A 'garden path' leaves you essentially getting hit by that sort of nonsense multiple times in the course of trying to follow the meaning of a single sentence.
2:12 actually pretty common when speaking about the past in German. Example sentence:
"Du hast ihn gerettet?" ("You have him saved?"; basically SOV)
The actual verb doesn't get said until the end of the sentence, but the auxiliary verb that puts the sentence into the perfect tense does get said right after the subject.
Gets even weirder with some other stuff. Like, if you want to say "I didn't say that", you may (depending on context and situation) end up saying "das habe ich nicht gesagt" ("that have I not said"; basically OSV).
Most languages I speak (Romance and Germanic), allow for at least some flexibility, so most orders sound fine to me in their own context. However, I tend to think in SVO since it's the most common order in my native tongues and in English.
16:26 Mathematically speaking - how was the factoring out of G + A achieved?
My native language is Turkish🇹🇷 and it has the word order of SOV. Let me explain the "cat and raven" example. In Turkish, you don't just write the words as they usually are.
We have different suffixes for different situations of a word.
For example, "ekmek" means "bread". If we try to say "I am eating the bread." in Turkish it is:
"Ben ekmeği yiyorum."
The word "ekmek" becomes "ekmeği" because the agent in the sentence is acting "towards the patient". So we understand what is the object and what is the subject. But it is easier to think SOV like a recipe:
1. : You need someone to cook.
2. : You need ingredients to cook.
3. : You can cook now. 😂
are we sure that language corresponds with the "order" of a thought, or even that thoughts always have an "order"?
my languages are english (SVO) and turkish (canonically SOV but i would argue free and emphasis-driven), and i am really not convinced by this "universal" idea, which is belied somewhat even by thinking of "events," a word that first suggests to me (as others have said here) a verb.
maybe this is exactly backwards: the verb is placed at the end in SOV because it is "first" thing, and the end of a sentence is emphasised in the rhythms of many languages.
All these categories are a bit arbitrary. English happens to have a relatively strict word order, and English-speaking theoretical linguists (most prominenntly Chomsky) exaggerate the importance of word order in grammar. Go a few centuries back, and you'd find Latinate scholars claiming English has no grammar at all (because the case markings, so central to Latin grammar, are all but missing in English). By their biases shall ye know them.
Languages don't necessarily fit neatly into word order categories. One of the languages I speak, Russian, is a good example. It has been described both as flexible word order and as SVO. In reality it has a weak preference for SVO as a default word order, with lots of exceptions, but it has consistent case marking, so any word order works, if speakers want to use it, say for emphasis.
I love how at 5:18 the words on the paper is just saying "word" in different languages (I used google translate to verify).
One of the most fascinating word order features in language (for me) is the historical/syntactical/etc. reasons that lead to concurrent use of different orders for different purposes. For example, in the vast majority of cases, English is SVO: "I see the dog" vs. "I see it" are both SVO. French, on the other hand, goes SOV for object pronouns: "Je vois le chien" vs. "Je le vois." Why a language doesn't just standardize on one pattern is one reason linguistics is such an amazing topic!
But how can we explain that French, Spanish and Italian have SOV when the object is a (personal) pronoun but SVO when the object is a noun?
Like for example "je l'aime" ("I love it") vs "j'aime la vie" ("I love life") in French.
As I understand, they just classify them as SVO, and because theres already a certain amount of flex expected, the label does well enough.
Many people in this comments section have been comparing this to mathematical notation, and looking at it as SVO, but I think it's more useful to look at it as OVS. For example, 3/4 is three *divided by* four, with 4 as the agent and 3 as the patient; the 4 divides the 3. I think it's interesting how we use this opposite order in math without really thinking about it. I think it has to do with how we group it: in linguistics the verb phrase includes the verb and the object, emphasizing the subject, whereas for me at least I would group the operator together with the 4, emphasizing the 3. I guess another way to think about it is that it's an inherently passive construction. I wonder if anyone has more insight on this.
Reading your comment made me think that In Spanish 3/4 is read as "divided among 4", not "by 4" (tres dividido entre cuatro). It is a subjectless sentence.
But a statement like '3 divides 4' (which is false) would be 3|4. I think that a 'mathematical word order' would be VSO as that's what predicate logic uses
@@Anonymous-df8it Interesting. That still puts the divisor as the agent, though, since 3|6 means that 6/3 is a whole number. Thanks!
As a speaker of Dutch -- Flemish -- I never realised how many different word orders we can use and how they all mean different things. Blows my mind actually that Dutch has so many options, which then are also strictly tied to meanings.
The basic sentence structure is like English: SVO. But add a time denoter or a question word and it becomes either VSO or SOV depending on whether the action is complete or not. You can also make OVS sentences using tonality in speech and comma's in writing to emphasise the Object in a regular sentence.
Looking at Mandarin, i was struck at how they paid so much attention to known information vs new information. They introduce the shared knowledge first, then the verb, then the new information. So i'm still preferring verb in the middle
Mandarin has plenty of structures that push the verb to the end. Topic comment and ba+gei structures specifically and they are becoming more common
So, fun fact, even tho Italian is manly an SVO language (even tho there are sentences in SOV) when we gesticulate the sentence structure tends to be more SOV
(Context: in Italian many hand gestures are actual words and have actual meaning so you can create sentences with it)
For example if i were to say
"I don't care about him"
Spokenly id say
"non me frega niente di lui " [lit. not I care nothing of him ] SVO
Were as with gestures id first point at me, then point at him and then slide away my hand from my neck (this means "not care" or "me ne sbatto il c####"). Which translates to [I, him, not care] SOV.
And another one would be
"Will you eat that?"
"Te lo mangi quello?" [Lit. You it eat that]
And with gestures id first point at the person, then at the food, and then close my hand kinda like this 🤌 and move it back and forward to my mouth (this means "to eat")
So basically this means [you,that,eat?]
At least that's my perception, let's see if other italians agree on this in the comments
Very interesting
My theory is: when language was first developed, there were only nouns, communication often come along with body language which could act as a verb. As society became more and more complex, more kinds of actions were developed, and body language can no longer easily express all those actions. Verbs were then invented and added to the last of the existing SO structure, because, in most cases at that time, SO + body language was still enough, verbs were only included when needed. SOV as the "language of thought"? Maybe at a more simple time or for a more simple mind like a child. Remember that languages themselves could also influence the way of thinking. And given the fact that many languages did have a transition from SOV to SVO, I would say SVO is the real language of thought, at least for adults in modern society.
Yeah. When I try to picture a simple sentence without words, I picture the subject and then simultaneously the action and subject. It's like my brain almost views the object as an extension or elaboration of the verb. I was worrying that meant my brain is Wrong and Bad because I don't really think in SOV.
I often see these videos as very clarifying, but this one didn't feel very convincing. The universality of SOV is inferred from its hegemony in early languages? The video felt a bit long to just say that.
I wonder if that's because there isn't a consensus on why this order could be preferred by early speakers?
One thing that came to my mind is that verbs are abstract, while subject and object (often) are not. Therefore, in a nascent language, it could be easier to explain what was the action by first indicating the context, the entities involved.
Anyway, love the content! ❤
I've noticed that in language learning, there are far more nouns you have to learn than verbs. My point is that perhaps verbs tend to come last because they're usually the least important for relating an idea, as reflected in their smaller proportion of a language's vocabulary.
That.. I can't agree with. The verb is terribly important. Are you going to buy a bike, ride a bike, destroy a bike, borrow a bike, sell a bike? You won't know until you hear the verb. Which made me realize why my SOV-speaking SO gets furious when I start replying "too early", even when speaking an SVO language - the native SOV speakers are used to waiting until the verb is spoken before they reply.
If SOV is the word order of thought, how come pidgins and areal trade language (optimized for ease of adult acquisition) are generally SVO?
OSV and OVS aren't at all as rare as claimed. They exist as perfectly valid alternatives (grammatically speaking) inside many languages, used for certain types of expressions or part of paragraphs.
As for SOV.. I'm married to an SOV speaker, and what I noticed right away is that SOV speakers in general wait, and must wait, until the speaker has finished the sentence before they can start replying. In other words, SOV speakers are far less inclined to habitually interrupt what others are saying (unless they actually _want_ to interrupt), whereas SVO speakers (like myself, and English speakers as well) tend to start speaking/replying before the other party has finished (because what follows after the verb is mostly known already, the important parts tend to be early in our sentences - after you've got the verb the rest doesn't really need to be said).
My SO simply can't get used to "our" way of speaking, i.e. start talking before the other party has finished. Even after learning my native SOV language. And it's terribly hard for me to learn that listen-wait-until-the-end-and-THEN-reply way of speech, because it's so unnatural for me (and everyone else around here).
But it's probably actually a good thing to learn to speak one at the time, even if it takes longer.
SVO takes the pragmatic approach. "If the speaker died during their sentence, could I still know what they meant?" Mostly, yes you could. SOV, you really don't know what they mean until the very end with few exceptions.
"The baker baked..." well, after our speaker died, we look around and see a cake. The baker baked a cake. But had they said "The baker cake..." well now we're in trouble. We see a cake... but what did the baker do? Just bake it? Did they poison it? Sell it? Drop it? Burn it?
This immediately brings to mind an analogy to arithmetic expressions. A verb-in-the-middle sentence parallels a conventional arithmetic expression (e.g. 2*3 + 4*5 ), which is relatively easy to process in graphical form but more difficult to process serially, whereas a verb-at-the-end sentence parallels a stack arithmetic (i.e. Reverse Polish Notation) expression (e.g. 2 3 * 4 5 * + ), which is the easiest for serial processing but quite difficult to process graphically. Since spoken language is serial, it makes sense that verb-at-the-end is most common, and I would expect verb-in-the-middle to be preferred in languages that make especially heavy use of writing.
As a programmer this is one of the things that bothers me when coming up with names for functions. Since I mostly use C, I tend towards an OVS ordering, but when I write C++ I prefer SV with no need to describe O as it's implicit. However, there are times when I need two O's or two S's and that can really complicate the naming conventions. For instance, say I have an arbitrary precision integer type that I simply named Integer, capital 'i', and I have a string type named String, and let's say that I wish to concatenate two subjects of each type of object. Obviously requiring either type to have a dependency on the other is a no go, but how then does one word it, StringAppendInteger or IntegerAppendString, and what order should they go in when calling the functions. This is obviously a simplistic example, but other more complex ones exist.
As soon as you said to substitute pictures for words, the SOV order made perfect sense. It still makes my English head explode to try to verbally do that. It doesn't make my German head explode, though. Since it wasn't my first language it was easy to accept the SOV order. (Well, after my mind resisted a bit, then got used to it).
I would appreciate some more clarification on the whole universal language thing.
Specially since, despite speaking two SVO languages, when I did the suggested exercise the order I pointed at things was naturally OVS.
I ended up staying at SVO. I'm glad I'm not the only one who didn't land at SOV, because it means I'm not defective.
Subject or object can be put at the beginning of a sentence or even the verb depending on what we are insisting on in Hungarian. If it is the verb then it is just conjugated and there is no subject usually, like "(I) ate the pie". But basically any order is possible, so you adapt it to the situation which you are talking about (are you searching for the object or the subject).
Nativlang just said cringe I’m crying
This reminded me of something in film making called the Kuleshov Effect. It's a way of putting together a scene to get the audience to react in a certain way. The structure fundamentally follows the agent-patient-action order. I find it interesting that if we think about the language of how scenes in movies are put together it usually follows the agent-patient-action order, or I should say the agent-patient-re-action order.
I am intrigued by the blue dot in Sweden as we actually are an SVO language just like our neighbors in Denmark and Norway. Do we have some dialect that I am unaware of close to the Norwegian border with an SOV word order?
Possibly Sámi? (Dunno where the dot is, so I don't know if it matches geographically)
@valkeakirahvi Of course, that could be it. I don't have any knowledge at all of the structure of the Sámi languages but it seems likely. The dot was so far south that the Sámi really didn't come to mind, but it is probably around the most southern places where one will find Sámi communities.
@@skalmelid I'm not personally familiar with South Sámi, but wikipedia lists it as SOV so that's probably it. North Sámi is usually SVO like Finnish.
Good video as always. Arabic can be VSO or SVO. These are the main two word orders. Now the verb "to be" is not necessary in all SVO sentences. For example, "The sky is blue" becomes "The sky blue" in which case we call it a "noun sentence" because it begins with a noun (the subject). Other arrangements are also possible because Arabic adds markings to almost all words so you know their role in the sentence. These markings are dropped in everyday language and are only used for religious or literary purposes to the best of my knowledge. I am not aware of any local dialects in the Arab World where the markings are retained. Regardless, even if you add the markings to an unusually ordered sentence like OVS, it still doesn't sound natural.
In Portuguese almost any order works well; it's more or less common hearing one way than other depeding on context.
- Passaram duas pessoas por aqui. (VSO)
- Duas pessoas procuram por ti. (SVO)
- De casa saíram duas pessoas. (OVS)
- De casa duas pessoas saíram. (OSV)
- Ele a ama. (SOV)
Including "S\O/", splitting the verb in the middle with mesoclisis.
@@sohopedeco verdade! Tipo "dizer-lhe-ia", "pô-lo-ia", "dar-lhes-ão" etc etc
A língua portuguesa é de suma beleza.
That's pretty much usual to any langauge, but there's always the default one. I'm sure Portuguese is just the same.
Just discovered this channel and loving it! Would love to see you investigate some languages of the Dravidian family also, and possibly see some connections with other languages/families.
Teaching English in Czechia, you hear a lot of stuff like "Dinner cooked my wife."
About the disappearance of SOV structures in favor of SVO, can it not be attributed to the general loss of morphological complexity such as case marking in most languages in the world (the language contact leads to morphological simplification hypothesis, see icelandic or sardinian) and thus the arising need to differentiate subject and object better in sentences ?
My mother tongue is SOV and English is SVO. I'm surprised that it was not an issue when learning English as a child 😅
When people start to study a new language for the first time, they always seem to be worried about writing systems and word order. But after a while, they realize the real work is the other 95% of the problem.
That's because kids are still open to learning new languages very easily
Great to see another NativLang video.
This one ain't it dawg. SOV languages are just technically more widespread but SVO has more speakers. There's a huge problem with classification - with what's a unique language and what just dialects.
Italian for example is classified as one language even tho that's the result of standardization, and in reality there were (and still partially are) dozens of romance languages in italy, but in these statistics all the italian romance languages are considered as dialects of the single italian language, lowering the total number of SVO languages by a considerable amount.
Both SOV and SVO are common and I don't understand the need to analyze SOV so much and pull at straws about how good and logical it is, as if it was by far the most popular word order, when in reality it's about even with SVO.