American Sign Language has a OSV order, and it really makes a lot of sense for a signed language. Though sometimes multiple things are conveyed at the same time since a sign language is a 3D language like a cube, whereas a spoken language is more like a line.
"So, which of these word orders does your language use?" Me, a Slav: "Yes." Also, why is none talking about the fact that the numbers at 0:41 do not add up to 100%, but 97,5% at most? Makes me think what else is there that you're not telling us, Artifexian!
There are a small minority of languages that don't strictly show a preference for S, O, and V in any particular order - usually, they follow animacy, focus, or thematic rules (theme being the main topic of wider discussion, and focus being the main topic of the particular sentence). The subject would tend to still be towards the beginning of the sentence, but because of a wider trend (focuses and themes tend to be the subject, which also tends to be animate), and it may be up to the speaker where V and O fall. I'm not sure that they account for the missing 2.5% entirely, but there could be other similar situations (like how German is V2 - "Ich lese eine Zeitung im Raum" or "Ich lese im Raum eine Zeitung" or "Eine Zeitung lese ich im Raum" or "Im Raum lese ich eine Zeitung" all mean "I'm reading a newspaper in the room." The default is SVO, but as long as the verb is second and the subject is adjacent to it, the other arguments can go almost wherever the speaker wants, like to put more focus on the newspaper or something).
@@i_teleported_bread7404 Vertical word order. You pronounce the subject, object and verb simultaneously rather than in order as horizontal word orders would suggest.
Japanese can actually have SOV or OSV alignments - "the goat the sandwich ate" or "the sandwich the goat ate". That's because the particles indicate where things go - there's all kinds of particles, like " ha" for subject and "o" (wo) for object. Or "ni" for "location" and many more. ~fun facts~
@Tòochi im not 100% sure but i think you can either mark the subject with wa and object with o or mark the subject with ga and object with wa, which is used in a similar way to passives in english
Yeah, as long as sentences and clauses end with predicates or verbs, the order is very free since the particles decide which part do what. But interestingly, since relative clauses directly modify nouns without any marker, it made OVS and SVO appear to exist in Japanese. サンドイッチを 食べた ヤギが 逃げちゃった… Sandwich-OBJ eat-PAST goat-SUBJ run-away-UNINTENDED-PAST The goat who ate the sandwich ran away ... ヤギが 食べた サンドイッチは もう だめ だ！ Goat-SUBJ eat-PAST sandwich-TOPIC already no-good COPULA/DECLARATIVE The sandwich that the goat ate is no longer good!
technichally, yoda doesnt use OSV, because the writers take the whole predicate and front it, but in english the predicate often includes the main verb like "he is running fast" turns into "running fast he is" in yoda-speak, causing the verbs to bookend the sentence
@@isaiahsamuels9827 I'd say that is OSV since grammatically the verb in the sentence is "is," not "running." "Running" is kind of acting like an adjective in that context.
@angeldude101 "run" is most certainly the main verb. the sentence is about the act of running and the detail that it is fast, not the quility or being of running (whatever that would be) which is what one would need to conclude in order to say that "is" is the main verb, rather than an auxiliary rendering the main verb as a participle in accordance with english grammer rules for expressing the continuous/simple present.
@@isaiahsamuels9827 "run" is _semantically_ the main verb, but "be" is _grammatically_ the main verb. If you use a conjugation without an auxiliary, it becomes "he runs fast" which then gets Yodafied into "fast, he runs." Still OSV (assuming O can just be an adverb). You would never have Yoda say "runs fast, he."
@@qwertyTRiG thanks to two world wars most people in English speaking countries stopped speaking German as not to face discrimination (during the war being seen as part of the enemy, after the war because there were no large German communities anymore mostly economically(of course you hire the guy that's better at the national language) ) . So heritage doesn't really mean anything anymore
@@theultimatefreak666 He has said before that because of his german father he decided he wanted to learn german. So I guess heritage does mean something
The doubling thing makes me think of how negation changed in French. At first, the main word that carried negation was "ne", which was placed before the verb. Then, we added other words like "point" or "pas" after the verb sometimes to accentuate the negation. After some time, the main meaning shifted from "ne" to those words ("pas" was the one that stayed in the end, others like "point" faded out of use). Nowadays, in spoken French, "ne" is often dropped, but is still sometimes kept to accentuate negation. Which leads to some weird things. Written French is a lot more conservative with its grammar, so it is seen as acceptable to drop the "pas", since in this context, we consider "ne" the main carrier of negation, like it was the case in an older form of French. Which also means that dropping "ne" is deemed incorrect in writing. In spoken French, however, the main carrier is "pas", so we would never drop it, unless we were imitating a written/older style. We can, however, drop "ne" all we want. So, in practice, we learn that we should always write "ne", so we always write "ne", but while we also learn that "pas" could be dropped, almost nobody does it, because intuitively, it's "pas" that carries negation, so it would make no sense to drop it. Instead of being the main carrier of negation, "ne" is seen as a sort of dummy word that we just put in every negative sentence in writing because it's mandatory. Of course, that's only for essays, articles and novels and whatnot; in speech-like writing, like while chatting on the Internet or while texting, "ne" is generally dropped.
Very interesting. I always found that little 'pas' curious, since, in Spanish, we negate exclusively using 'no' and it precedes the verb. My first impression was that it was a little bit silly. But after some further thought, I realised that we do the same in Chile, at least in uneducated speech. So for example, one could say "yo no fuí nah a la escuela" I did not go to school (emphatic). It comes from "nada", which means nothing. What about "pas", what is its etymology?
Why did my French teacher never tell us thissss! That's a really interesting way to show formality, and I always found the dropping of one of the particles confusing and irregular, but now it makes some sense
I'll be honest, the timing couldn't be better on this one - I've just restarted the conlang for my fictional world and have been wondering if the word order stuff was naturalistic enough to make sense and this really helped - thanks Artifexian!
Reasonably, an argument can be made that, at least in OSV languages, the speakers consider the object to be thematic? “The goat ate” yea, sure, but what did he eat? “The sandwich the goat ate.”
Something to consider, though, is that these principles are specifically a product of human nature and that certain regularities that appear stem from that. If your conworld is populated with a different kind of beings or creatures that might not perceive things in the same manner as we do, they might end up with a language in which human commonalities are entirely out of place and make no logical sense.
"the sandwich ate the goat" The only time, so far, that I've delved into this in conlangs I went by decreasing order of importance of information. So "Danger will robinson" instead of "will robinson, you're in danger"
@@ajinkyatarodekar9099 My work-in-progress conlang's grammar so far is as follows: Words are broken into two main groups, within which parts of speech are specified. I like to use Ithkuil's terms "formative" and "adjunct," although the language is nothing like Ithkuil. If you're not familiar with the idea of a stack, it's a way to store a sequence of items, which can be "pushed" onto it or "popped" off of it. Think of it as a stack of books, pancakes, etc, where the Last thing In the stack (on top) is the First to be taken Out (hence, LIFO). Saying a formative (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) pushes it onto the stack, and saying an adjunct (postpositions, case markers, subordinating conjunctions) causes the stack to be traversed downward until two appropriate items are found. These are then joined together and the one higher on the stack is popped off. E.g. "the house near the lake" = "house lake near," since the first two words are pushed onto the stack and the postposition (near) finds its object (lake) to connect to the thing the phrase modifies (house). It's also VSO: "the man opened the door" = "opened man SUBJECT-MARKER door DIRECT-OBJECT-MARKER". First, "opened" is pushed onto the stack, then "man." The subject marker finds a noun (man) and a verb to link it to (opened) and does so, popping off "man" in the process, so only "opened" remains. Saying "door" and then the DO marker does the same thing as adding the subject did: push "door," then pop it off and connect it to the verb. Of course the grammar carries plenty of edge cases and some exceptions to make speaking easier, but this youtube comment's getting a little long!
Your project sounds cool. Even I am making a conlang for my novel- in -the-making! As per the rules me and my friends have set, its gonna be an abugida with the word order like Yoda. 😂
@@lexuanhai6999 Funny you mention it. I only heard about Fith after coming up with the basic principles of my conlang, but there are definitely resemblances!
This video is so funny as a native French speaker. Every time you’re saying something shouldn’t be used or isn’t used anymore I instantly find a commonly used French example
Oh, also, the word order can change based on what parts of speech are being used in a sentence. Typically, in most Romance languages, the standard word order is SVO, with nominal objects (la chèvre mange le sandwich; the goat is eating the sandwich). However, with pronominal objects, most Romance languages switch to SOV (la chèvre le mange; the goat is eating it).
I didn't know "The goat ate, unfortunately, the sandwich." was wrong in English. This sentence would be pretty okay in Portuguese, though not the most common word order choice.
Most of the time it would be incorrect, but in the rare case where it's important that it was the sandwich that was eaten, not something else, it could be correct. "The goat ate, unfortunately, the sandwich," could only be used in the sense that there were many things the goat could've eaten, but the goat picked, unfortunately, the sandwich.
In Esperanto, almost all words have an ending to show the part of speech. Subjects end in -o but objects end in -on, and there's no mistaking that a word is a verb and what tense it is (-as, -is, -os or -us, and active/passive participle forms -anta/-ata, -inta/-ita, -onta/-ota). Words not using these endings are well-known conjunctions and prepositions whose functions are understood. Word-order is fully freed up. People might use the word-order common in their native language but still be understood by others. In practice there is good reason to choose SVO or SOV for the reasons Art gave, and other word-orders for emphasis of one element more than another.
No such thing as fully free wordorder. All languages use it for something and fall into conventions. It's not random whatsoever. Meaning you can't just use any in Esperanto, conventions will arise in speaking communities and ignoring them would be tantamount to neutering expression.
@@skyworm8006 Oh, yes, I said the factors (of Theme First Principle, Animated First Principle and Verb-Object Bonding) would encourage SVO or SOV order. But there is great latitude for people to learn Esperanto "their way", in imitation of features of their language, and still be understood. Esperanto syntax will often express no preference. In English you yell "Help me!" In German you yell "Help to me!" In Esperanto you may hear both in a crisis.
not ready to delve into languages for my fantasy world yet. but "this video enjoyed you" made me happy in a way I can't explain or just haven't felt in some time, so I had to stop in to leave a comment and a like. definitely coming back to this one when I'm ready to conlang.
There's one word order that isn’t on your chart at 3:33, probably because it's so rare, but English occasionally allows OVS, as in "Pop goes the weasel." I can only think of that one example, and I had to double-check that "go" in that sentence is considered transitive.
Mhm. Saying German is SVO is a bit too simplified. I'd describe it as: (Something) (main part of the verb) (everything else) (rest of the verb). (Gestern) (hat) (die Ziege den Kuchen) (gegessen). (Yesterday) (has) (the goat the cake) (eaten).
Great video. The whole time I was thinking about how Welsh kind of throws some of these rules out. For instance it's demonstratives for this/that come after the noun (which is also preceded by the definite article): y ci yma 'this dog' - literally 'the dog here'; y ci yna 'that dog' - literally 'the dog there'. Welsh also has 'hwn/hon' which are "proper" words for this/that but are only used in the Literary register. Numerals come before the noun, except for 'first', which comes after: y ci cyntaf - the first dog yr ail gi - the second dog y trydydd ci - the third dog y pedwerydd ci - the fourth dog, etc. Adjectives almost always come after the noun, but with a few exceptions: 'Hen' (old) always comes before a noun: 'yr hen gi' (the old dog) vs 'y ci ifanc' (the young dog) 'unig' has a different meaning depending on if it is placed before or after: 'y ci unig' (the only dog) vs 'yr unig gi' (the lonely dog).
3:47 I love how I automatically make VSO and VOS a question in my head since in Dutch, we switch to these when the sentence is a question. Eventough I read it in English I still made it a question the Dutch way by putting more stress on the end of the sentence😂
I'm trying to, develop a naturalistic word order for my conlang, but this goat this is dummy thicc, and the clap of its asscheeks keeps alerting the guards
just want to say thank you for all of these great videos! I'm starting year 11 and doing English Language, and watching all of your videos has helped me so much my teacher actually said I might as well be teaching the class :)
In Hungarian, every possible SVO combination is possible (with modifiers being a bit less flexible). Since the language is agglutinative (prefixes and affixes are "glued" to the base word), the words themselves determine which one is the subject, the verb or the object. The word order can be used to signify importance or emphasis, while the purpose or meaning of the sentence (question, exclamation, etc) is conveyed with punctuation marks in writing and intonation in speech.
The agglutinative nature of the language isn't a requirement here. Most Slavic languages aren't (they add suffixes, but they often also modify the original word) and have the same feature. The language just has to have noun cases.
In german, the word-order is SVO, but there is the V2-Principle. So the cunstruct SV-Adv-O is totally okay in german. "Die Ziege aß unglücklicherweise das Sandwich". V2-Principle means, that the verb always in the second position. You could say, that it could be the last part ("Die Ziege hat das Sandwich gegessen"). But in this sentence the verb isn't only "gegessen", but "hat ... gegessen". It's a verbal bracket, so to speak.
@@SchmulKrieger Wrong. The sentence is "Ich habe einen Apfel" and not "Ich einen Apfel habe", where "habe" is the verb and "einen Apfel" is the object.
In my dialect of norwegian, we have relatively recently gotten rid of the nominative/accusative case suffixes, now only distinguished by pitch accent. The thing is; pitch accent is not distinguished in single syllable words, including third person pronouns. This makes distinguishing the subject/object in sentences using only third person pronouns and single syllable nouns entirely based on context.(though it's mostly SVO)
I am a bit disappointed there was no mention to French's double negative for the "middle step in evolution" example (since Old French had only "ne VERB", but then it became "ne VERB pas", where a different word started as emphasis but later became part of a frame; and now the younger generations are dropping the "ne", so informal negative is only "VERB pas")
In Croatian, all these combinations of S, V and O are possible and make sense. True, some resemble older poetic kind of writing and speech, which would seem odd and outdated, but it works and can be understood.
One exception I know of to the word order of modifiers in English: if the modifiers sound similar and are mostly differentiated by a vowel, they go in the order i-a-o. Example: "Big Bad Wolf". Words arrange this way more generally too - "tic-tac-toe", "pitter-patter", "clip-clop". Not sure where other vowel sounds fit into this hierarchy tho.
I'm probably a bit too late since the follow up video is already out but at 3:25 it should be: Die Ziege hat Hunger, weil sie den Sandwich isst. The correct definite article for a male noun in the accusative case is "den". The article "das" is only used for neutral words in the nominativ or accusative cases. Also "frisst" technically correct but when talking about a Sandwich the word "essen" or it's conjugated form "isst" is probably more fitting. Also why should the goat be hungry, if it already ate the sandwich?
I'm currently doing a linguistics major in university, and I'm almost done...but I'm really burning myself out trying to finish. Your videos cover a lot and beyond what I study in class, and they are one of the few things that keep the subject fresh and interesting. So, thank you for putting out such great content over and over again, I really enjoy and appreciate all the hard work. Cheers!
@@the_biblioklept2533 I don't know how it works where you live, but in Canada you start learning about the general field, and then the option of specializing is available as a graduate.
another interesting thing about German: normal sentence order is SVO (as you mentioned), but if you want to ask a question, often you can just put the same sentence into VSO.
Well, English also actually does that, just in a little bit more complex way. "The goat ate the sandwich" may also be expressed as "The goat did eat the sandwich" Then you treat "did" as the main verb and keeping it in mind, make it VSO: "Did the goat eat the sandwich?" and you get a perfect English question.
@@kpc211 huh it does. Never thought about that. In German they just do it without auxiliary verbs making it more obvious so that's probably why I never noticed it in English.
So question about word order. I'm not sure i'ts as strict as you say it is. Take the combos of "green elder dragon", and "elder green dragon". The first describes a dragon that is know as an 'elder dragon' , but also happens to be green in color. The second describes a member of the species of 'green dragon' that is old.
Well, everyone do not agree on the details of the adjective order, but if my understanding is correct (after searching on internet), the last category of adjectives stand mostly for purpose but not only, and this category of adjective is very close to forming a compound with the noun. That perfectly explain your example, here we are talking not about dragon but more specifically about either an elder dragon or a green dragon. Very interesting how deciding in which category the adjective fit changes subtly the meaning conveyed by the phrase.
In my native language, the sentence "You enjoyed this video" can be in any word order because : - a video cannot enjoy anything; it's not sentient or animate. - the verb will be 2nd person also, but replacing "you" with "he" still has the rule above apply. What I guess I want to point out is that not any word order is possible, it has to "make sense" in a way.
In a future video, could you discuss how punctuation plays into the relationship between arguments of a sentence, even regardless of word order? I find it interesting how, "He ran away, sadly," means something different from, "He ran away sadly;" and then there's the ever-famous, "'Let's eat kids!' - Punctuation saves lives," or confusion with the Oxford comma, as in, "My greatest inspirations are my parents, Joan of Arc and Alex Trebek." I'm particularly interested to find out what similar conundrums might appear in other languages, and what some repair strategies might be used to amend them (or how to naturalistically introduce them!).
Well that is true for languages with few noun cases. For languages with a lot more grammatical cases, there are much less rules for word order: On vidi mene - he sees me On mene vidi - he me sees Mene on vidi - me he sees Mene vidi on - me sees he Vidi on mene - sees he me Vidi mene on - sees me he And these are all used in every day. But it can get a lot messier if you add adverbs, indirect objects etc. On meni lepo čita knjigu (in order, he - to me - nicely - reads - book, and the meaning is same for other examples) Meni on knjigu čita lepo Knjigu čita meni on lepo Čita meni lepo on knjigu Lepo knjigu on meni čita... Yup, these all are grammatically correct and nothing sounds odd
Hebrew doesn't obey the modifier universal. It does when the number is one (haez hashmena haakhat hazo, goat fat one that) but in any other number, the number comes before the noun and bunks this up (shtei ha'izim hashmenot ha'ele, two goats fat those) But then again, it was reanimated two millenia after going extinct, so I suppose glitches can be expected
I would expect it the other way around - every naturally evolving language will have exceptions to its rules. Languages with some artificial background (either pure conlangs, or revived ones like Hebrew, or others with heavy standardisation) would have fewer irregularities. Ad as always with language, that guideline should have a lot of exceptions. :D
In Linnic (my conlang), you can have SOV or OSV word order, with the adverb coming first. So for example "I slowly closed the doors" in Linnic is Des la nan seq pod oq cim ta. Des = slow la = adverb or prepositional phrase marker nan = I seq = subj. marker pod = door oq = direct obj. marker cim = to close ta = past-tense marker
Great video! I'd just mention that there are languages with "free" word order, or rather word order governed by other principles than syntactic relations. Some Slavic languages, such as Czech, are primarily SVO, but this is often overruled by the Theme First Principle - the old information (theme) tends to come first and the new information (rheme) comes near the end of sentence. E.g. if the main information is conveyed by the verb, the sentence can be SOV or OSV. So given the right context, you can use any of the primary word order permutations.
Můžeš prosím mi dát příklady kdy se používá SVO, OSV a podobně? Dokud jsem nečetl ty komenty že ve slovanských jazycích je ten Free Word Order. Tak bych si to nikdy o češtině neuvědomil. Omlouvám se za moji trochu horší češtinu. Ale v ČR jsem šel do školy až do 3 třídy. Od 3 jsem studoval v anglii kde se čeština někde ve veřejných školách neučí. Dekuji
@@darkwolfcz434 Nemusíš se omlouvat, pořád máš češtinu na skvělé úrovni:) Zkusím uvést příklady: SVO: *Petr koupí mouku.* (Petr will buy the flour.) This is the default form, no particular word gets extra focus. OVS: Mám vzít mouku? - Nemusíš. Mouku koupí *Petr.* (Should I get some flour? - You don't have to. *Petr* already gets some flour.) Here, the main focus is on *who* gets the flour. SOV: Petr mouku *koupí.* Ale musíš mu ji zaplatit. (Petr *will* get the flour after all. But you will have to pay him.) Here, the focus is on whether the flour will be bought. Petr probably doesn't feel like searching the supermarket shelves. OSV: _Mouku_ Petr *koupí.* Ale pro vajíčka si dojdi sám. (Petr *will* get the _flour_ after all. But the eggs you go get yourself.) This construction implies that Petr will get you only the flour. Which is made explicit by the second sentence. The verb-first constructions work mostly as questions or need to be a part of more complex sentences. VSO?: Koupí Petr mouku? (Will Petr get some flour?) Basic question with no special focus. VOS?: Koupí mouku *Petr?* (Will it be *Petr* who will get the flour?) This question may imply the wish that it should be Petr who gets the flour, for his superior flour-buying skills. VOS: Tak koupí mouku *Petr.* (So let *Petr* buy the flour!) In this emphatic sentence, the act of buying is the thema and who will do it is the point of focus. But also the extra "tak" particle makes the verb-first construction look less weird. To oversimplify it, SVO is the default. Any deviation from that introduces some narrow focus. The first component of a sentence is what links it to the preceding sentences, while the last component is the new information, or what links the sentence to the sentences that follow. This of course may be overridden or reinforced by explicit focus markers or by prosody.
With Chinese you can often put the Object behind the Subject, Sandwich the goat ate, which is not the primary proper Chinese, but the construct is very very permanent because it allows to say the most important thing before everything else. And the language by itself doesn't have any word changes for grammar (because it doesn't have words), so the word order is super important, but that's exactly the thing that allows to put subject after object, because the core of Subject -smth- Verb has to be intact regardless, so it is obvious what is the object
Note for those going the free word order route: it only works if you have other ways of denoting which word does what, like declension. Like with Finnish, the sentences "vuohi söi voileivän" and "voileivän söi vuohi" mean that the goat ate the sandwich. There's a bit of a difference in what situations you'd use either in, (newer information toward the end) but if you use one instead of the other people will still understand you. But if you say "voileipä söi vuohen" (or "vuohen söi voileipä" if you're in a bizarre detective novel), you have the reverse event. The other word orders work too but anything that's not SVO (for any normal telling of an event) or OVS (when you knew what's been done but only now know who did it), will be more poetic and feel a bit weird. Finnish isn't the only one though. Latin also does this, but tends toward SOV in normal use while Finnish tends toward SVO.
Most Slavic languages (except Bulgarian, if I am not mistaken) do that. "Koza zjadła kanapkę" vs. "Kanapkę zjadła koza" (both mean the sandwich - kanapka - got eaten by the goat - koza) and "Kanapka zjadła kozę" vs. "Kozę zjadła kanapka" (both mean the goat - koza - got eaten by the sandwich - kanapka) Koza - (what?)the goat Kozę - (whom?)the goat Kanapka - (what?)the sandwich Kanapkę - (whom?)the sandwich Actually, English is also like that, but only with personal pronouns. If you say "Her I like" - my guess is that it will be understood correctly, and not as "She likes me".
@@kpc211 Yeah English used to have declension but it's mostly disappeared. It's only in some pronouns nowadays, which makes sense since they get used to much. It's why "thee I marry" works too, since when "thee" was in use, it was the second-person equivalent of "me" or "her". The literary canon is probably what's kept that understandable, since most people who study English tend to read at least a little bit of Shakespeare or someone else who used it. And it's great to have those Slavic examples. Declension works differently in different languages, so more examples helps any conlanger with deciding what cases to have.
7:18 isn't there a problem with the chart ? I'm french and in france we could say: ces deux chèvres grasses (these two goats fat) so I wonder if I didn't interpret the chart well or if there was simply a misunderstanding of the universal when making it.
They seem to follow the same order before the noun, Demonstrative Number Noun. The adjective is postpositional, meaning it's free to follow a different order, as if it were in a language that put all its noun modifiers after the noun.
"Enjoyed you this video this" and "Enjoyed this video this you" are both possible in Malagasy depending on whether the focus is on the video (either "passive" or "relative" in modern terms, but really object-focus or goal/location-focus in Austronesian alignment) or the focus is on the you ("active" in modern terms, but really agent-focus). By extension, its cousin Tagalog does the same (but doesn't wrap demonstratives; they follow the noun in a ng-genitive construction).
aaahh thank u for this!! im used to working mostly with morphological features and im currently working on an analytic conlang so its rly helpful to have these rules and universals in my toolbelt so i can represent features syntactically :)
Talking of headedness and varying headedness of phrases, a real world example from the the Lakota language of North America may provide some inspiration. In Lakota, adjectives follow the nouns they modify, but other nouns precede the noun modify in compounds: "Witka ska" is white egg (literally "egg white") "Kȟokȟoyaȟʼaŋla witka" is chicken egg (in that order) Possessors also precede the nouns they modify, so "the boy's egg" would be "hokšila tȟawitka" (hokšila is boy). Notice also that the possessive marker tȟa is on the word for egg witka, so it's kind of like "boy his-egg", so you can really get creative in how you do these. So, mix it up in your conlangs if you want to. Have some fun!
Norwegian doesn't follow the verb-object bonding: The goat unfortunatly ate the sandwich - Geita spiste desverre smørbrødet direct translation: The goat ate unfortunatly the sandwich
In Serbian, we have cases, and we don't actually use any of these more than the others. "I walked down the street" is about the same likelihood as "Walked I down the street"
Interesting video as always Edgar. To be honest, the word order or in this case the primary word order was one of the first subjects I've researched when it came to conlang construction. Not only was it useful to know the popularity or at the very least the commonality of certain word orders, but also that secondary word orders exist. It does help with trying to make such composite languages such as English make some logical sense when it comes to using it as a basis. Also, thanks for the walkthrough of the modifiers. There was no way one could understand their execution without either the Head Initial/Final principle and the Hawkins' Universals, even then it would probably use a few practice runs just to fit one's head around it enough to make one's conlang plausible angle potentially fluent-able if that's even a word. Though it does give some ideas for even more alien languages not unlike Navi, Klingon, and Atlantean. Also, the word order change via evolution is both interesting and useful, though I can only assume that the singular modifier isn't always the demonstrative verb in such cases, correct? Though framing would help in that regard either way. Either way, thanks for posting this video, it does feed the imagination on that particular conlang subject.
I like OSVSB with B being a variation of the "be" verb "The sandwich the goat ate it did" Or the warning "The sandwich you leave, the goat ate the sandwich it will" to cover an event which is certain to have happened in the future if the present course is maintained.
@@colleenforrest7936 Well, I admit that I was confused by your previous reply to me. This more succinct reply is easier to handle. So then, is the "it did" part like a grammatically necessary part of this phrasing, or is it more just reinforcing the rest of the sentence but is otherwise unnecessary? Like how in English, some old-timey dialogue may include something like "I sawr it wit' me own eyes, I DID" to reinforce the sentence, but would still be fine as "I sawr it wit' me own eyes."
@@SovairuSorry about the long windedness :) A bit like your "old timey" phrase, yes. The SB phrase is redundant, in that the sentence can be understood with out it, but it does add a little color to the phrasing. Like what's being said is not just me saying it, but its a time honored Truth. Does that make sense?
the chart at 7:15 doesn't seem to show all the possibilities. It seems to be implying that something like Dem-Num-Noun-Adj couldn't exist but that is not an order which seems to actually contradict any universals discussed.
Reeeally? I mean, I know that ASL is related to French Sign Language, so fronting the object, like in questions, or putting object pronouns before the verb make sense, but are object nouns also put before the verb in ASL?
Interesting thing about word order is that it itself can convey certain meaning For example, Spanish and Portuguese care about were you put an adjective Because both "wild lion" and "lion wild" are valid constructions But what they imply is very different "wild lion" implies it is general state, lion can't not be wild "lion wild" implies this particular lion is wild, generally lions are not wild And it extends to certain words having different meaning depending on where you put them For example Tengo los libros diferentos (I have different books) Tengo los diferentos libros (I have several books)
French did that last thing with negation. The old form of negation were putting "ne" before a verb. Then we started adding adverb after the verb to make it more specific, with ne V pas, ne V plus, ne V jamais, etc… Double negation. Officially, we're still there. But even in formal, political speech, more than often the initial "ne" is lost, leading to a verb-initial negation. The french linguist youtuber Linguisticae made a video about this (or was is featured in in Future French series ?).
At 5:59, could a genitive be placed BEFORE the noun in order to support the Subject, verb, object structure, assuming the genitive could be treated like a verb as it may be.
In my native language (yiddish) SVO and VSO is common and required, OVS is common and optional, and SOV and OSV is in songs. That means that 5/6 are allowed and it only leaves 1/6 (VOS) to not make any sense. That's crazy. So, for example, SVO: I drink a coffee - most common VSO: drink I a coffee - common in day-to-day speech OVS: a coffee drink I - common when telling stories OSV: a coffee I drink - found in songs/poetry SOV: I a coffee drink - not very common but is allowed and can be found in songs/poetry The only one not allowed: VOS: drink a coffee I That's crazy that 5/6 options are allowed and okay to use in speech!
An interesting thing in English, that I only mention because it's an example one of those oddities of natural language that we artlangers strive for, is when adjective order changes from the norm because of sound rules... so we'd expect "Bad big wolf" but we get "Big bad wolf" because when part of a word is repeated we tend to prefer to come before a or o (think zig-zap or wibbly-wobbly) and Big and bad are close enough that we apply the vowel order rule and it's more important than the adjective order rule. This is ablaut reduplication and it's very much an unwritten rule of English. While you may not want to ape English it's worth considering if there are similar sound rules that can mess with word order in your conlang.
I like how edgar says sandwich so it rhymes with language
I no longer know how to pronounce sandwich. It sounds wrong the way I say it now
Wow, i didnt notice that!
Sanguage ;)
Except in German, there he pronounces sandwich like I do in English.
@@joshuahillerup4290 Germans tend to pronounce all the recent loanwords from English and French like speakers of English and French do.
Therapist: "Enjoyed you this video this" isn't real, it can't hurt you.
Enjoyed you this video this: 9:18
"This video enjoyed you"
IKEA BIRD No2 this video this enjoyed you
This video this you enjoyed.
You enjoyed this this video
This is what happens in my language LOL
btw, sorry if your nightmares are back
Ok, it had to be done:
In American, you can enjoy the video.
In Soviet Russia, the video enjoys you.
В советском союзе местоименные никогда не использовалось после глаголов, кроме как в музыке и стихах
.
Why use many word when few do trick?
Beat me to it
In Soviet Russia, the sandwich eats you
Someone had to say it.
But in Soviet Russia, say it had to someone.
T H E S A N D W I C H A T E T H E G O A T
Who are Thes & Wich and why did they ate the goat? Are they T-Rex's or smth??
It's the sand which ate the goat.
@@markschultz2897 i don't like sand it's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere!
Mark Schultz *wich
@@dondeestaCarter whoosh
Artifexian: "The links in the usual places"
The doobeedoo: Cmon
#Justiceforthedoobeedoo
doobleedoo
My conlang: *exists*
*New Artifexian Video*
My Conlang: Ah sh!t, here we go again.
American Sign Language has a OSV order, and it really makes a lot of sense for a signed language. Though sometimes multiple things are conveyed at the same time since a sign language is a 3D language like a cube, whereas a spoken language is more like a line.
I learned that ASL sentence structure was either Topic-Comment or SVO? Can I see an example of OSV?
@@realeuphoniism It's always OSV. Sign-language, I know. Table Cup-on-top-of. It's not SVO.
"So, which of these word orders does your language use?"
Me, a Slav: "Yes."
Also, why is none talking about the fact that the numbers at 0:41 do not add up to 100%, but 97,5% at most?
Makes me think what else is there that you're not telling us, Artifexian!
Sergej Radošević Maybe free word order like slavic? Dunno
There are a small minority of languages that don't strictly show a preference for S, O, and V in any particular order - usually, they follow animacy, focus, or thematic rules (theme being the main topic of wider discussion, and focus being the main topic of the particular sentence). The subject would tend to still be towards the beginning of the sentence, but because of a wider trend (focuses and themes tend to be the subject, which also tends to be animate), and it may be up to the speaker where V and O fall. I'm not sure that they account for the missing 2.5% entirely, but there could be other similar situations (like how German is V2 - "Ich lese eine Zeitung im Raum" or "Ich lese im Raum eine Zeitung" or "Eine Zeitung lese ich im Raum" or "Im Raum lese ich eine Zeitung" all mean "I'm reading a newspaper in the room." The default is SVO, but as long as the verb is second and the subject is adjacent to it, the other arguments can go almost wherever the speaker wants, like to put more focus on the newspaper or something).
@@zozzy4630, that makes sense.
Thank you for taking time and explaining it to me.
(Something new learning I am every day :) )
Dark linguists, show me the forbidden seventh word order.
@@i_teleported_bread7404 Vertical word order. You pronounce the subject, object and verb simultaneously rather than in order as horizontal word orders would suggest.
This video enjoyed me?
Aw, shucks.
This is soviet Russia
This video ejoyed *I. It's still the subject.
(and yeah I know it's a joke. I'm just saying.)
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Japanese can actually have SOV or OSV alignments - "the goat the sandwich ate" or "the sandwich the goat ate". That's because the particles indicate where things go - there's all kinds of particles, like " ha" for subject and "o" (wo) for object. Or "ni" for "location" and many more. ~fun facts~
Polish can have all 6 orders. Though SOV is the most common or natural (though I've seen sentences where I personally found other orders more natural)
@Tòochi im not 100% sure but i think you can either
mark the subject with wa and object with o
or
mark the subject with ga and object with wa, which is used in a similar way to passives in english
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic-prominent_language Oops, I dropped something.
@@adapienkowska2605 *SVO
Yeah, as long as sentences and clauses end with predicates or verbs, the order is very free since the particles decide which part do what. But interestingly, since relative clauses directly modify nouns without any marker, it made OVS and SVO appear to exist in Japanese.
サンドイッチを 食べた ヤギが 逃げちゃった…
Sandwich-OBJ eat-PAST goat-SUBJ run-away-UNINTENDED-PAST
The goat who ate the sandwich ran away ...
ヤギが 食べた サンドイッチは もう だめ だ！
Goat-SUBJ eat-PAST sandwich-TOPIC already no-good COPULA/DECLARATIVE
The sandwich that the goat ate is no longer good!
Like Yoda, few languages are.
The best order, Yoda uses.
lol
technichally, yoda doesnt use OSV, because the writers take the whole predicate and front it, but in english the predicate often includes the main verb like "he is running fast" turns into "running fast he is" in yoda-speak, causing the verbs to bookend the sentence
@@isaiahsamuels9827 I'd say that is OSV since grammatically the verb in the sentence is "is," not "running." "Running" is kind of acting like an adjective in that context.
@angeldude101 "run" is most certainly the main verb. the sentence is about the act of running and the detail that it is fast, not the quility or being of running (whatever that would be) which is what one would need to conclude in order to say that "is" is the main verb, rather than an auxiliary rendering the main verb as a participle in accordance with english grammer rules for expressing the continuous/simple present.
@@isaiahsamuels9827 "run" is _semantically_ the main verb, but "be" is _grammatically_ the main verb.
If you use a conjugation without an auxiliary, it becomes "he runs fast" which then gets Yodafied into "fast, he runs." Still OSV (assuming O can just be an adverb). You would never have Yoda say "runs fast, he."
wtf I'm german and yours is the best german I've ever heard an English speaking UA-camr speak
He has German heritage. I think he's half or quarter German.
@@qwertyTRiG thanks to two world wars most people in English speaking countries stopped speaking German as not to face discrimination (during the war being seen as part of the enemy, after the war because there were no large German communities anymore mostly economically(of course you hire the guy that's better at the national language) ) . So heritage doesn't really mean anything anymore
@@theultimatefreak666 He has said before that because of his german father he decided he wanted to learn german. So I guess heritage does mean something
So is this a video about New Word Order?
How does it feel
To conlang like you do
The doubling thing makes me think of how negation changed in French. At first, the main word that carried negation was "ne", which was placed before the verb. Then, we added other words like "point" or "pas" after the verb sometimes to accentuate the negation. After some time, the main meaning shifted from "ne" to those words ("pas" was the one that stayed in the end, others like "point" faded out of use). Nowadays, in spoken French, "ne" is often dropped, but is still sometimes kept to accentuate negation.
Which leads to some weird things. Written French is a lot more conservative with its grammar, so it is seen as acceptable to drop the "pas", since in this context, we consider "ne" the main carrier of negation, like it was the case in an older form of French. Which also means that dropping "ne" is deemed incorrect in writing. In spoken French, however, the main carrier is "pas", so we would never drop it, unless we were imitating a written/older style. We can, however, drop "ne" all we want.
So, in practice, we learn that we should always write "ne", so we always write "ne", but while we also learn that "pas" could be dropped, almost nobody does it, because intuitively, it's "pas" that carries negation, so it would make no sense to drop it. Instead of being the main carrier of negation, "ne" is seen as a sort of dummy word that we just put in every negative sentence in writing because it's mandatory. Of course, that's only for essays, articles and novels and whatnot; in speech-like writing, like while chatting on the Internet or while texting, "ne" is generally dropped.
Very interesting. I always found that little 'pas' curious, since, in Spanish, we negate exclusively using 'no' and it precedes the verb. My first impression was that it was a little bit silly. But after some further thought, I realised that we do the same in Chile, at least in uneducated speech. So for example, one could say "yo no fuí nah a la escuela" I did not go to school (emphatic). It comes from "nada", which means nothing. What about "pas", what is its etymology?
@@pablomunoz3119 'pas' comes from Latin 'passus', meaning a step or pace, so 'ne ... pas' literally means 'not a step.'
Why did my French teacher never tell us thissss!
That's a really interesting way to show formality, and I always found the dropping of one of the particles confusing and irregular, but now it makes some sense
I'll be honest, the timing couldn't be better on this one - I've just restarted the conlang for my fictional world and have been wondering if the word order stuff was naturalistic enough to make sense and this really helped - thanks Artifexian!
Wow, thats amazing!
That cool. I'm working on a similar project about a fictional world.
Reasonably, an argument can be made that, at least in OSV languages, the speakers consider the object to be thematic? “The goat ate” yea, sure, but what did he eat? “The sandwich the goat ate.”
Imagine having word order.
This comment made by Finnish gang was
In Latin laughs
i understand don’t
Polish nods in agreement
Laughs in Hungarian
cries in english
Shit, no matter how much I learn about languages, there's always more to learn. It makes language creation/learning easier though.
Yeah, its like math.
This is true of any subject.
“The goat the sandwich ate”
.-.
The horror!
I agree, yhe sandwich ate the goat!
Yeah that’s Hindi word order for ya.
Apka naam kya hai?
Your name what is?
Another example,
The boy the book reads
ヤギがサンドイッチを食べた
yagi ga sandoitchi wo tabeta
Something to consider, though, is that these principles are specifically a product of human nature and that certain regularities that appear stem from that. If your conworld is populated with a different kind of beings or creatures that might not perceive things in the same manner as we do, they might end up with a language in which human commonalities are entirely out of place and make no logical sense.
"the sandwich ate the goat"
The only time, so far, that I've delved into this in conlangs I went by decreasing order of importance of information. So "Danger will robinson" instead of "will robinson, you're in danger"
7:11 I think this combination: demonstrative-numeral-noun-adjective, is also possible.
In Spanish, this order is the most common.
*cries in VSO postpositional LIFO-stack-based engelang*
Slow I am, please explain this, you must
@@ajinkyatarodekar9099 My work-in-progress conlang's grammar so far is as follows:
Words are broken into two main groups, within which parts of speech are specified. I like to use Ithkuil's terms "formative" and "adjunct," although the language is nothing like Ithkuil. If you're not familiar with the idea of a stack, it's a way to store a sequence of items, which can be "pushed" onto it or "popped" off of it. Think of it as a stack of books, pancakes, etc, where the Last thing In the stack (on top) is the First to be taken Out (hence, LIFO). Saying a formative (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) pushes it onto the stack, and saying an adjunct (postpositions, case markers, subordinating conjunctions) causes the stack to be traversed downward until two appropriate items are found. These are then joined together and the one higher on the stack is popped off.
E.g. "the house near the lake" = "house lake near," since the first two words are pushed onto the stack and the postposition (near) finds its object (lake) to connect to the thing the phrase modifies (house).
It's also VSO: "the man opened the door" = "opened man SUBJECT-MARKER door DIRECT-OBJECT-MARKER". First, "opened" is pushed onto the stack, then "man." The subject marker finds a noun (man) and a verb to link it to (opened) and does so, popping off "man" in the process, so only "opened" remains. Saying "door" and then the DO marker does the same thing as adding the subject did: push "door," then pop it off and connect it to the verb.
Of course the grammar carries plenty of edge cases and some exceptions to make speaking easier, but this youtube comment's getting a little long!
Your project sounds cool. Even I am making a conlang for my novel- in -the-making! As per the rules me and my friends have set, its gonna be an abugida with the word order like Yoda. 😂
@@aresharesh8671 Are you inspired by Fith ?
@@lexuanhai6999 Funny you mention it. I only heard about Fith after coming up with the basic principles of my conlang, but there are definitely resemblances!
This video is so funny as a native French speaker. Every time you’re saying something shouldn’t be used or isn’t used anymore I instantly find a commonly used French example
For me as native Russian speaker it's literaly pleasant to hear English with all those word order variations, that I would use due to mistake.
Theodor Zhitnikov Yeah, I always find it easier to go from a more restrictive word order to a freer one than the other way around
Oh, also, the word order can change based on what parts of speech are being used in a sentence. Typically, in most Romance languages, the standard word order is SVO, with nominal objects (la chèvre mange le sandwich; the goat is eating the sandwich). However, with pronominal objects, most Romance languages switch to SOV (la chèvre le mange; the goat is eating it).
I didn't know "The goat ate, unfortunately, the sandwich." was wrong in English. This sentence would be pretty okay in Portuguese, though not the most common word order choice.
Most of the time it would be incorrect, but in the rare case where it's important that it was the sandwich that was eaten, not something else, it could be correct. "The goat ate, unfortunately, the sandwich," could only be used in the sense that there were many things the goat could've eaten, but the goat picked, unfortunately, the sandwich.
@@joeradford1055 That's what I imagined, like: "I thought that the goat had eaten the mango, but the goat ate, unfortunately, the sandwich."
@@joeradford1055 why there would one not say "the goat ate the sandwich unfortunately"?
@@sohopedeco and here it would more likely be: "I thought the goat had eaten the mango but unfortunately it had eaten the sandwich".
@@MrCrackbear Sounds naturalistic to me tbh
In Esperanto, almost all words have an ending to show the part of speech. Subjects end in -o but objects end in -on, and there's no mistaking that a word is a verb and what tense it is (-as, -is, -os or -us, and active/passive participle forms -anta/-ata, -inta/-ita, -onta/-ota). Words not using these endings are well-known conjunctions and prepositions whose functions are understood.
Word-order is fully freed up. People might use the word-order common in their native language but still be understood by others. In practice there is good reason to choose SVO or SOV for the reasons Art gave, and other word-orders for emphasis of one element more than another.
Not really. People who speak Esperanto natively will generally stick with SVO word order. Other orders are mostly just for poetry.
No such thing as fully free wordorder. All languages use it for something and fall into conventions. It's not random whatsoever. Meaning you can't just use any in Esperanto, conventions will arise in speaking communities and ignoring them would be tantamount to neutering expression.
@@skyworm8006 Oh, yes, I said the factors (of Theme First Principle, Animated First Principle and Verb-Object Bonding) would encourage SVO or SOV order. But there is great latitude for people to learn Esperanto "their way", in imitation of features of their language, and still be understood. Esperanto syntax will often express no preference. In English you yell "Help me!" In German you yell "Help to me!" In Esperanto you may hear both in a crisis.
In soviet russia, words order you
not ready to delve into languages for my fantasy world yet. but "this video enjoyed you" made me happy in a way I can't explain or just haven't felt in some time, so I had to stop in to leave a comment and a like. definitely coming back to this one when I'm ready to conlang.
There's one word order that isn’t on your chart at 3:33, probably because it's so rare, but English occasionally allows OVS, as in "Pop goes the weasel."
I can only think of that one example, and I had to double-check that "go" in that sentence is considered transitive.
OSV is also possible! Technically correct Yoda speak is.
Mhm. Saying German is SVO is a bit too simplified. I'd describe it as:
(Something) (main part of the verb) (everything else) (rest of the verb).
(Gestern) (hat) (die Ziege den Kuchen) (gegessen).
(Yesterday) (has) (the goat the cake) (eaten).
The main part follows SOV, however the auxiliaries stay in second place where the verb normally is. That's how I'd describe it.
the SVO, VOS, OVS, etc format is supposed to be simplified. It's just a very general description of how a language organizes its bits.
they tend to call it V2 word order which overrules SVO
There is also a minor VSO order in describing scene setups, particularly in setting up certain jokes, aka "Stehen zwei Leute auf der Straße."
@@fuuryuuSKK isn't that just a omited "Es"?:
"Es stehen zwei Leute auf der Straße."
(that isn't a rhetoric question, i don't know.)
Listen to me, I'm gonna say this again: I did not have textual relations with this video!
"We don't want no textual perverts enjoying a video a little too MUCH! We're RESPECTABLE townsfolk here!"
"This video enjoyed you" ...I know, video, I'm such a delight 😂😂😂😂
Great video. The whole time I was thinking about how Welsh kind of throws some of these rules out. For instance it's demonstratives for this/that come after the noun (which is also preceded by the definite article): y ci yma 'this dog' - literally 'the dog here'; y ci yna 'that dog' - literally 'the dog there'. Welsh also has 'hwn/hon' which are "proper" words for this/that but are only used in the Literary register.
Numerals come before the noun, except for 'first', which comes after:
y ci cyntaf - the first dog
yr ail gi - the second dog
y trydydd ci - the third dog
y pedwerydd ci - the fourth dog, etc.
Adjectives almost always come after the noun, but with a few exceptions:
'Hen' (old) always comes before a noun: 'yr hen gi' (the old dog) vs 'y ci ifanc' (the young dog)
'unig' has a different meaning depending on if it is placed before or after:
'y ci unig' (the only dog) vs 'yr unig gi' (the lonely dog).
3:47 I love how I automatically make VSO and VOS a question in my head since in Dutch, we switch to these when the sentence is a question. Eventough I read it in English I still made it a question the Dutch way by putting more stress on the end of the sentence😂
6:05 thicc
Undeniable G.O.A.T.
I'm trying to, develop a naturalistic word order for my conlang, but this goat this is dummy thicc, and the clap of its asscheeks keeps alerting the guards
ƭƕlkc
just want to say thank you for all of these great videos! I'm starting year 11 and doing English Language, and watching all of your videos has helped me so much my teacher actually said I might as well be teaching the class :)
In Hungarian, every possible SVO combination is possible (with modifiers being a bit less flexible).
Since the language is agglutinative (prefixes and affixes are "glued" to the base word), the words themselves determine which one is the subject, the verb or the object.
The word order can be used to signify importance or emphasis, while the purpose or meaning of the sentence (question, exclamation, etc) is conveyed with punctuation marks in writing and intonation in speech.
The agglutinative nature of the language isn't a requirement here. Most Slavic languages aren't (they add suffixes, but they often also modify the original word) and have the same feature.
The language just has to have noun cases.
Thanks for the word order in Irish. Now I'll be able to construct sentences at school with ease :D
This really helped my conlangs. Thanks Edgar!
Guys you need to do more of these videos. Imagine deconstructing the inner workings of prose and poetry?! It's going to be EPIC!!!
Edgar your german pronunciation is very much on point. Im impressed!! (A German guy here)
In german, the word-order is SVO, but there is the V2-Principle. So the cunstruct SV-Adv-O is totally okay in german. "Die Ziege aß unglücklicherweise das Sandwich".
V2-Principle means, that the verb always in the second position.
You could say, that it could be the last part ("Die Ziege hat das Sandwich gegessen"). But in this sentence the verb isn't only "gegessen", but "hat ... gegessen". It's a verbal bracket, so to speak.
German also has SOV order.
@@SchmulKrieger Wrong. The sentence is "Ich habe einen Apfel" and not "Ich einen Apfel habe", where "habe" is the verb and "einen Apfel" is the object.
In my dialect of norwegian, we have relatively recently gotten rid of the nominative/accusative case suffixes, now only distinguished by pitch accent. The thing is; pitch accent is not distinguished in single syllable words, including third person pronouns. This makes distinguishing the subject/object in sentences using only third person pronouns and single syllable nouns entirely based on context.(though it's mostly SVO)
the more I look into Norwegian dialects, the more it seems like learning Norwegian means learning 10+ different languages...
Wow! I really enjoyed this video! It's so in-depth and also really amusing at the end! I learned so much! Thank you!!!
I am a bit disappointed there was no mention to French's double negative for the "middle step in evolution" example (since Old French had only "ne VERB", but then it became "ne VERB pas", where a different word started as emphasis but later became part of a frame; and now the younger generations are dropping the "ne", so informal negative is only "VERB pas")
In Croatian, all these combinations of S, V and O are possible and make sense.
True, some resemble older poetic kind of writing and speech, which would seem odd and outdated, but it works and can be understood.
One exception I know of to the word order of modifiers in English: if the modifiers sound similar and are mostly differentiated by a vowel, they go in the order i-a-o. Example: "Big Bad Wolf". Words arrange this way more generally too - "tic-tac-toe", "pitter-patter", "clip-clop". Not sure where other vowel sounds fit into this hierarchy tho.
I'm probably a bit too late since the follow up video is already out but at 3:25 it should be: Die Ziege hat Hunger, weil sie den Sandwich isst.
The correct definite article for a male noun in the accusative case is "den". The article "das" is only used for neutral words in the nominativ or accusative cases.
Also "frisst" technically correct but when talking about a Sandwich the word "essen" or it's conjugated form "isst" is probably more fitting.
Also why should the goat be hungry, if it already ate the sandwich?
0:36 The moment you realise that in your language every single one of these combinations is correct...
I'm currently doing a linguistics major in university, and I'm almost done...but I'm really burning myself out trying to finish. Your videos cover a lot and beyond what I study in class, and they are one of the few things that keep the subject fresh and interesting. So, thank you for putting out such great content over and over again, I really enjoy and appreciate all the hard work. Cheers!
HBon111 General linguistics or a specialized field of it? It's what I'm planning on doing, I'm just unsure of my focus.
@@the_biblioklept2533 I don't know how it works where you live, but in Canada you start learning about the general field, and then the option of specializing is available as a graduate.
I have missed this channel so much! Thanks for the fresh content.
another interesting thing about German: normal sentence order is SVO (as you mentioned), but if you want to ask a question, often you can just put the same sentence into VSO.
Well, English also actually does that, just in a little bit more complex way.
"The goat ate the sandwich"
may also be expressed as
"The goat did eat the sandwich"
Then you treat "did" as the main verb and keeping it in mind, make it VSO:
"Did the goat eat the sandwich?"
and you get a perfect English question.
@@kpc211 huh it does. Never thought about that. In German they just do it without auxiliary verbs making it more obvious so that's probably why I never noticed it in English.
Ran over kindergarteners in my 2005 Honda Civic I did. OSV word order I use, Yoda I am.
Ketamine, I must find. Feed an addiction, I must.
😂😂😂😂😂
Thanks for the word order, it'll help with my language's evolution!
(Also, Bob made me smile 🤭)
Basque uses an underlying topic-focus-verb sentence structure switched for the negative and questions. You could have talked about that :D
1:48 Except for "She breathed on him (though a young lady should not eat, because of the known redolence of onions, onions) onions."
So question about word order. I'm not sure i'ts as strict as you say it is. Take the combos of "green elder dragon", and "elder green dragon". The first describes a dragon that is know as an 'elder dragon' , but also happens to be green in color. The second describes a member of the species of 'green dragon' that is old.
Well, everyone do not agree on the details of the adjective order, but if my understanding is correct (after searching on internet), the last category of adjectives stand mostly for purpose but not only, and this category of adjective is very close to forming a compound with the noun. That perfectly explain your example, here we are talking not about dragon but more specifically about either an elder dragon or a green dragon.
Very interesting how deciding in which category the adjective fit changes subtly the meaning conveyed by the phrase.
In my native language, the sentence "You enjoyed this video" can be in any word order because :
- a video cannot enjoy anything; it's not sentient or animate.
- the verb will be 2nd person also, but replacing "you" with "he" still has the rule above apply.
What I guess I want to point out is that not any word order is possible, it has to "make sense" in a way.
In a future video, could you discuss how punctuation plays into the relationship between arguments of a sentence, even regardless of word order? I find it interesting how, "He ran away, sadly," means something different from, "He ran away sadly;" and then there's the ever-famous, "'Let's eat kids!' - Punctuation saves lives," or confusion with the Oxford comma, as in, "My greatest inspirations are my parents, Joan of Arc and Alex Trebek." I'm particularly interested to find out what similar conundrums might appear in other languages, and what some repair strategies might be used to amend them (or how to naturalistically introduce them!).
Well that is true for languages with few noun cases. For languages with a lot more grammatical cases, there are much less rules for word order:
On vidi mene - he sees me
On mene vidi - he me sees
Mene on vidi - me he sees
Mene vidi on - me sees he
Vidi on mene - sees he me
Vidi mene on - sees me he
And these are all used in every day.
But it can get a lot messier if you add adverbs, indirect objects etc.
On meni lepo čita knjigu (in order, he - to me - nicely - reads - book, and the meaning is same for other examples)
Meni on knjigu čita lepo
Knjigu čita meni on lepo
Čita meni lepo on knjigu
Lepo knjigu on meni čita...
Yup, these all are grammatically correct and nothing sounds odd
A fine explanation of one of the most basic aspects of conlanging!
0:36 OSV says also yoda
0:36
Using the right form of the verb, italian can do everything except for the third order.
Which is really cool imo.
Well, I wasn’t planning to study linguistics today, but hey, I definitely needed this.
Thanks, dude.
Hebrew doesn't obey the modifier universal. It does when the number is one (haez hashmena haakhat hazo, goat fat one that) but in any other number, the number comes before the noun and bunks this up (shtei ha'izim hashmenot ha'ele, two goats fat those)
But then again, it was reanimated two millenia after going extinct, so I suppose glitches can be expected
I would expect it the other way around - every naturally evolving language will have exceptions to its rules. Languages with some artificial background (either pure conlangs, or revived ones like Hebrew, or others with heavy standardisation) would have fewer irregularities.
Ad as always with language, that guideline should have a lot of exceptions. :D
In Linnic (my conlang), you can have SOV or OSV word order, with the adverb coming first.
So for example "I slowly closed the doors" in Linnic is
Des la nan seq pod oq cim ta.
Des = slow
la = adverb or prepositional phrase marker
nan = I
seq = subj. marker
pod = door
oq = direct obj. marker
cim = to close
ta = past-tense marker
Great video! I'd just mention that there are languages with "free" word order, or rather word order governed by other principles than syntactic relations. Some Slavic languages, such as Czech, are primarily SVO, but this is often overruled by the Theme First Principle - the old information (theme) tends to come first and the new information (rheme) comes near the end of sentence. E.g. if the main information is conveyed by the verb, the sentence can be SOV or OSV. So given the right context, you can use any of the primary word order permutations.
Můžeš prosím mi dát příklady kdy se používá SVO, OSV a podobně? Dokud jsem nečetl ty komenty že ve slovanských jazycích je ten Free Word Order. Tak bych si to nikdy o češtině neuvědomil.
Omlouvám se za moji trochu horší češtinu. Ale v ČR jsem šel do školy až do 3 třídy. Od 3 jsem studoval v anglii kde se čeština někde ve veřejných školách neučí.
Dekuji
@@darkwolfcz434 Nemusíš se omlouvat, pořád máš češtinu na skvělé úrovni:) Zkusím uvést příklady:
SVO: *Petr koupí mouku.* (Petr will buy the flour.) This is the default form, no particular word gets extra focus.
OVS: Mám vzít mouku? - Nemusíš. Mouku koupí *Petr.* (Should I get some flour? - You don't have to. *Petr* already gets some flour.) Here, the main focus is on *who* gets the flour.
SOV: Petr mouku *koupí.* Ale musíš mu ji zaplatit. (Petr *will* get the flour after all. But you will have to pay him.) Here, the focus is on whether the flour will be bought. Petr probably doesn't feel like searching the supermarket shelves.
OSV: _Mouku_ Petr *koupí.* Ale pro vajíčka si dojdi sám. (Petr *will* get the _flour_ after all. But the eggs you go get yourself.) This construction implies that Petr will get you only the flour. Which is made explicit by the second sentence.
The verb-first constructions work mostly as questions or need to be a part of more complex sentences.
VSO?: Koupí Petr mouku? (Will Petr get some flour?) Basic question with no special focus.
VOS?: Koupí mouku *Petr?* (Will it be *Petr* who will get the flour?) This question may imply the wish that it should be Petr who gets the flour, for his superior flour-buying skills.
VOS: Tak koupí mouku *Petr.* (So let *Petr* buy the flour!) In this emphatic sentence, the act of buying is the thema and who will do it is the point of focus. But also the extra "tak" particle makes the verb-first construction look less weird.
To oversimplify it, SVO is the default. Any deviation from that introduces some narrow focus. The first component of a sentence is what links it to the preceding sentences, while the last component is the new information, or what links the sentence to the sentences that follow.
This of course may be overridden or reinforced by explicit focus markers or by prosody.
With Chinese you can often put the Object behind the Subject, Sandwich the goat ate, which is not the primary proper Chinese, but the construct is very very permanent because it allows to say the most important thing before everything else. And the language by itself doesn't have any word changes for grammar (because it doesn't have words), so the word order is super important, but that's exactly the thing that allows to put subject after object, because the core of Subject -smth- Verb has to be intact regardless, so it is obvious what is the object
Note for those going the free word order route: it only works if you have other ways of denoting which word does what, like declension. Like with Finnish, the sentences "vuohi söi voileivän" and "voileivän söi vuohi" mean that the goat ate the sandwich. There's a bit of a difference in what situations you'd use either in, (newer information toward the end) but if you use one instead of the other people will still understand you. But if you say "voileipä söi vuohen" (or "vuohen söi voileipä" if you're in a bizarre detective novel), you have the reverse event. The other word orders work too but anything that's not SVO (for any normal telling of an event) or OVS (when you knew what's been done but only now know who did it), will be more poetic and feel a bit weird.
Finnish isn't the only one though. Latin also does this, but tends toward SOV in normal use while Finnish tends toward SVO.
Most Slavic languages (except Bulgarian, if I am not mistaken) do that.
"Koza zjadła kanapkę" vs. "Kanapkę zjadła koza" (both mean the sandwich - kanapka - got eaten by the goat - koza)
and
"Kanapka zjadła kozę" vs. "Kozę zjadła kanapka" (both mean the goat - koza - got eaten by the sandwich - kanapka)
Koza - (what?)the goat
Kozę - (whom?)the goat
Kanapka - (what?)the sandwich
Kanapkę - (whom?)the sandwich
Actually, English is also like that, but only with personal pronouns.
If you say "Her I like" - my guess is that it will be understood correctly, and not as "She likes me".
@@kpc211 Yeah English used to have declension but it's mostly disappeared. It's only in some pronouns nowadays, which makes sense since they get used to much. It's why "thee I marry" works too, since when "thee" was in use, it was the second-person equivalent of "me" or "her". The literary canon is probably what's kept that understandable, since most people who study English tend to read at least a little bit of Shakespeare or someone else who used it.
And it's great to have those Slavic examples. Declension works differently in different languages, so more examples helps any conlanger with deciding what cases to have.
Thanks, that actually answered a bunch of my questions on the subject. It'll definitely help with my conlang :)
7:18 isn't there a problem with the chart ? I'm french and in france we could say: ces deux chèvres grasses (these two goats fat) so I wonder if I didn't interpret the chart well or if there was simply a misunderstanding of the universal when making it.
They seem to follow the same order before the noun, Demonstrative Number Noun.
The adjective is postpositional, meaning it's free to follow a different order, as if it were in a language that put all its noun modifiers after the noun.
“The goat ate, unfortunately...” sounds like it could work in certain contexts.
"Enjoyed you this video this" and "Enjoyed this video this you" are both possible in Malagasy depending on whether the focus is on the video (either "passive" or "relative" in modern terms, but really object-focus or goal/location-focus in Austronesian alignment) or the focus is on the you ("active" in modern terms, but really agent-focus). By extension, its cousin Tagalog does the same (but doesn't wrap demonstratives; they follow the noun in a ng-genitive construction).
aaahh thank u for this!! im used to working mostly with morphological features and im currently working on an analytic conlang so its rly helpful to have these rules and universals in my toolbelt so i can represent features syntactically :)
Talking of headedness and varying headedness of phrases, a real world example from the the Lakota language of North America may provide some inspiration. In Lakota, adjectives follow the nouns they modify, but other nouns precede the noun modify in compounds:
"Witka ska" is white egg (literally "egg white")
"Kȟokȟoyaȟʼaŋla witka" is chicken egg (in that order)
Possessors also precede the nouns they modify, so "the boy's egg" would be "hokšila tȟawitka" (hokšila is boy). Notice also that the possessive marker tȟa is on the word for egg witka, so it's kind of like "boy his-egg", so you can really get creative in how you do these.
So, mix it up in your conlangs if you want to. Have some fun!
5:26 when we all said English was confusing, we never suspected it could come down to THIS.
I don't know why, but I think I enjoyed this video
Norwegian doesn't follow the verb-object bonding:
The goat unfortunatly ate the sandwich - Geita spiste desverre smørbrødet
direct translation: The goat ate unfortunatly the sandwich
In Serbian, we have cases, and we don't actually use any of these more than the others. "I walked down the street" is about the same likelihood as "Walked I down the street"
Wow! You’ve outdone yourself! Great video
In Polish, thanks to cases, you can put words in random order
You deserve more subs
Interesting video as always Edgar. To be honest, the word order or in this case the primary word order was one of the first subjects I've researched when it came to conlang construction. Not only was it useful to know the popularity or at the very least the commonality of certain word orders, but also that secondary word orders exist. It does help with trying to make such composite languages such as English make some logical sense when it comes to using it as a basis.
Also, thanks for the walkthrough of the modifiers. There was no way one could understand their execution without either the Head Initial/Final principle and the Hawkins' Universals, even then it would probably use a few practice runs just to fit one's head around it enough to make one's conlang plausible angle potentially fluent-able if that's even a word. Though it does give some ideas for even more alien languages not unlike Navi, Klingon, and Atlantean.
Also, the word order change via evolution is both interesting and useful, though I can only assume that the singular modifier isn't always the demonstrative verb in such cases, correct? Though framing would help in that regard either way.
Either way, thanks for posting this video, it does feed the imagination on that particular conlang subject.
I like OSVSB with B being a variation of the "be" verb
"The sandwich the goat ate it did"
Or the warning "The sandwich you leave, the goat ate the sandwich it will" to cover an event which is certain to have happened in the future if the present course is maintained.
Is the second instance of Subject an overt pronoun, or just indicative of agreement on the verb?
@@colleenforrest7936 Well, I admit that I was confused by your previous reply to me. This more succinct reply is easier to handle. So then, is the "it did" part like a grammatically necessary part of this phrasing, or is it more just reinforcing the rest of the sentence but is otherwise unnecessary? Like how in English, some old-timey dialogue may include something like "I sawr it wit' me own eyes, I DID" to reinforce the sentence, but would still be fine as "I sawr it wit' me own eyes."
@@SovairuSorry about the long windedness :) A bit like your "old timey" phrase, yes. The SB phrase is redundant, in that the sentence can be understood with out it, but it does add a little color to the phrasing. Like what's being said is not just me saying it, but its a time honored Truth. Does that make sense?
@@colleenforrest7936 Ah, alrighty. I see now.
the chart at 7:15 doesn't seem to show all the possibilities. It seems to be implying that something like Dem-Num-Noun-Adj couldn't exist but that is not an order which seems to actually contradict any universals discussed.
ASL also uses OSV sometimes. It also uses SOV, So it is better described as topic-comment in structure, and always verb final
Reeeally? I mean, I know that ASL is related to French Sign Language, so fronting the object, like in questions, or putting object pronouns before the verb make sense, but are object nouns also put before the verb in ASL?
Sovairu yeah they are with object fronting
@@Alice-gr1kb So, like "I a sandwich ate"? Interesting. Of course, there's apparently a lot of interesting things about sign languages.
Sovairu yeah. In ASL it would be like SANDWICH ME EAT or BEFORE SANDWICH ME EAT
@@Alice-gr1kb Fascinating! I wonder how it was decided to put the words into that order; it's just do different from spoken or written forms.
Interesting thing about word order is that it itself can convey certain meaning
For example, Spanish and Portuguese care about were you put an adjective
Because both "wild lion" and "lion wild" are valid constructions
But what they imply is very different
"wild lion" implies it is general state, lion can't not be wild
"lion wild" implies this particular lion is wild, generally lions are not wild
And it extends to certain words having different meaning depending on where you put them
For example
Tengo los libros diferentos (I have different books)
Tengo los diferentos libros (I have several books)
3:31 the phrase “hat hunger” is usually translated as “is hungry”
(like I VSO) (reminds it me of programming in LISP) (put you operator first) (put you arguments after)
French did that last thing with negation.
The old form of negation were putting "ne" before a verb.
Then we started adding adverb after the verb to make it more specific, with ne V pas, ne V plus, ne V jamais, etc… Double negation.
Officially, we're still there. But even in formal, political speech, more than often the initial "ne" is lost, leading to a verb-initial negation.
The french linguist youtuber Linguisticae made a video about this (or was is featured in in Future French series ?).
You missed one huge option: Polish has no fixed word order. It uses inflection instead.
Makes translating Yoda tricky.
In America, you enjoyed this video
In Soviet Russia, this video enjoyed you
Why Soviet?
ABDEFGHIKLMNOPRSTUVW
aȶ
At 5:59, could a genitive be placed BEFORE the noun in order to support the Subject, verb, object structure, assuming the genitive could be treated like a verb as it may be.
This video enjoyed I. Good work.
I love your videos, everytime I watch one it just inspired me to create
In my native language (yiddish) SVO and VSO is common and required, OVS is common and optional, and SOV and OSV is in songs. That means that 5/6 are allowed and it only leaves 1/6 (VOS) to not make any sense. That's crazy.
So, for example,
SVO: I drink a coffee - most common
VSO: drink I a coffee - common in day-to-day speech
OVS: a coffee drink I - common when telling stories
OSV: a coffee I drink - found in songs/poetry
SOV: I a coffee drink - not very common but is allowed and can be found in songs/poetry
The only one not allowed: VOS: drink a coffee I
That's crazy that 5/6 options are allowed and okay to use in speech!
I think it's pretty much the same thing for spanish
@@nicolasglemot6760 really that's interesting
An interesting thing in English, that I only mention because it's an example one of those oddities of natural language that we artlangers strive for, is when adjective order changes from the norm because of sound rules... so we'd expect "Bad big wolf" but we get "Big bad wolf" because when part of a word is repeated we tend to prefer to come before a or o (think zig-zap or wibbly-wobbly) and Big and bad are close enough that we apply the vowel order rule and it's more important than the adjective order rule. This is ablaut reduplication and it's very much an unwritten rule of English.
While you may not want to ape English it's worth considering if there are similar sound rules that can mess with word order in your conlang.
In Soviet Russia, video enjoy you!
FINNALLY
Why Soviet?
I know right