SOV: Why is this the most popular word order across languages?
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- čas přidán 29. 06. 2023
- When languages around the world build a basic sentence, 43% arrange the words this way: subject - object - verb. Who does this? (Hint: not English!) How is it unique? Why is it so popular?
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~ Briefly, with spoilers ~
Today we learn the characteristics of SOV and figure out why it's the #1 word order. Along the way we'll cover:
- SOV's superlatives across history, geography, thought
- a feel for V (verb) final languages, using a garden path sentence
- roles: SOV as Agent-Patient-Action
- flexibility even within SOV languages
- cues: meaning, case marking, word order
- SOV as the "language of thought"
- animacy and (non-)reversible sentences
- an underlying human-inanimate-action order
- how removing family and area bias boosts SOV at the expense of SVO
- colonialism and the (future?) spread of SVO
Art, animation and music by me. I've written up a sources document for claims made and for pics, sfx, fonts:
Sources: docs.google.com/document/d/1r...
Continuing the call from my OSV video, here are groups to support:
Support: docs.google.com/document/d/1W...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Im early cant think of anything else to say but i appreciate your channel so much
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.
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
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
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.
This a heck of an unintentional birthday gift. Excellent video! Definitely looking forward to the next w.
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.
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.
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)
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?
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).
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 love all the animated linguistics! I was just watching your channel today and saw you made a new upload!
Always good with more Nativlang vid out
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.
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.
This is a beautiful video and I love you for how you think and how you made me think.
These videos are really interesting and well animated!
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.
Yayyyyy new NativLang video
this channel inspired me to love languages, thank you!
So interesting!!! Thank you so much!😊
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.
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
Great to see another NativLang video.
Super stoked for the SVO video now.
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?
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.
This is a very interesting presentation!
NativLang is back with a video!!! Yesyesyes thank you! *-*
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.
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
One of my favourite channels out there
Excellent! Thank you!
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”
The word order is something we don’t think of unless we want to put an emphasis on some word in a sentence, so we shuffle it around. Even in English the OSV is sometimes used. The more you know…
I have missed your videos a lot 😊
Can't wait for the SVO video!
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 ^^'
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.
Would love to see your look at conlangs and how you might create one of your own.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Yay new nativlang video
Nothing Like a new Nativ Lang video
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!
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.
i drop everything im doing when nativlang uploads
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.
My theory is that many languages like Latin and Chinese evolved SOV>SVO because, even though our mind order may be SOV, the need to express more complex ideas made objects increase in length whilst verbs remain relatively short. "I food eat" works just fine, whilst "I the food that I found yesterday while we were walking down the street that has the name of the 12th president of the USA ate" is odd, almost like you want to say the verb already before you forget while you are focused on giving details about the object.
You used SVO grammar in the middle of that sentence ("the street that has the name")
Anyway your whole exercise here is terribly english biased. Obviously when you mess up a language's word order it sounds bad. Actual SOV languages will have grammar rules designed to make SOV sentences concise (and don't just use english grammar all jumbled up lmao)
@@bobboberson8297Yeah I did use SVO in the subordinates without realising, but that doesn't change my point: objects can get long and complex. And of course it sounds bad in English anyway since it's not the natural order, but I was talking practicity. I don't know about other languages, but I speak Basque and there aren't all that many ways to make such an SOV sentence viable. Basque speakers will often find themselves changing to SVO when the object is too long. If they want to keep it SOV, they can make a shorter version of the sentence and then give all the extra data about the object "I the object saw, the one that you gave me" (this is a rather short example, but you get the idea), but this is often a conscious way to preserve SOV order that doesn't come naturally. Of course Basque isn't probably the best example since it's been influenced by romance grammar, but I've seen similar things happen in Dutch for example.
@@rovi3833 Basque and Dutch are both weak counter examples because basque is ergative and dutch uses both SOV and SVO
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.
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’d love if you talked more about the relationship between free word order and case marking.
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.
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".
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.
Can't wait for the SVO vid
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
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.
Thank you for such interestning video, but I suggest you to make a video about morphosyntatic alignments - why nominative-accusative laguages do dominate over ergative-absolutive ones?
I can offer you a theory from the study of prehistoric linguistics. Prehistoric linguists suggest that humanity collectively used an alignment called active-stative before advancements in our understanding of the world (using mesolithic and neolithic technology). You can still find pockets of active-stative languages exactly where you would expect to find them with this theory, such as guarani in paraguay. When language (mostly) collectively moved away from active-stative, the majority thought it would make more sense to mark nominative-accusative instead of ergative-absolutive. Sorry I can't give you an even deeper answer but at least it gets you closer.
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.
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.
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.
Changing the SVO order is used a LOT in poetry in various languages. Prepositions usually clarify the "who/what does what to whom/what".
The thing you said at the end was what I was thinking the whole time. If I was asked to explain something purely through gestures or using pictures of objects then I definitely would go SOV but that probably mostly has to do with the fact that if you already know the subject and the object the action is more easily implied, and actions are difficult to illustrate purely through gestures or pictures because of their nature of being temporal. But if when speaking it does seem much more efficient to go SVO because in most cases the action is a lot more important than the object, which is probably why you can often leave the object out at least in SVO languages but not the verb. Like the sentence "I ran to the supermarket" communicates something pretty different than "I walked to the supermarket" and the action is the more important piece of information because it probably explains something like why I'm sweaty. In this case it could even be an answer to a question "why are you sweaty?" "I ran to the supermarket". But if I simply change the object then less information is changed, the difference between "I ran to the supermarket" and "I ran to the lake" is far less because it is less able to answer a question someone has.
Basically since languages are primarily about communication, and therefore the ability of another person to gather information you wanna put it in the order of most important information to least important information. And generally when talking the action undertaken is more important than the object it was taken on, because it can change the most about what actually happened.
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.
Teaching English in Czechia, you hear a lot of stuff like "Dinner cooked my wife."
When I was making a conlang and tried my best to set aside my Anglophone habits and come up with the most neutral way of forming a sentence, the one that came out as a clear winner was VOS, plus ergativity and more generally a consistent head initial phrase structure. Basically starting with the most general description followed, if you want, by a bunch of optional add-ons to make it more specific, for example some valid sentences in the language are:
Lani
(Lit. "Blue", except it's the first word so you know it's a verb: "be-blue")
Meaning: "It's blue" / "Something's blue"
Lani kaila
Lit. "(be-)blue house"
Meaning: "The house is blue"
Lani kaila nu
Lit. "(be-)blue house woman"
Meaning: "She coloured/is colouring the house blue"
Lani kaila nu kala nata
Lit. "(be-)blue house woman hair black"
Meaning: "The black-haired woman coloured/is colouring the house blue"
BTW, I've translated the nouns above in their singular forms, because English grammar requires me to encode number. The original sentences are really about an unspecified number of houses and an unspecified number of women, or could even be read as general statements, e.g. "Houses are blue".
Looks neat! I have a family of SOV, a couple of SVOs and a VSO. I like having some variety in my world :)
Because it goes "Lights, Camera, Action!"
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!
The verb is the most important and condensed with information part of the sentence. In SOV languages it looks like you're trying to hold the listener for the longest time, creating suspense and just showing the most important information in the end. While in SVO languages you receive the most important right away, and from the verb meaning you could just deduce the possible patient/object from the semantic information of the verb or the real world knowledge you got. In VSO languages I think it also gets more logic and efficient. Actually, if SVO is better for efficiency of thought why are SOV more common? I'd say it's because of historical reasons, deriving from some language families being SOV. Many Pidgins and Creoles also tend to be SVO by large, which would amount to saying SVO is easier to parse or even the default in the human brain.
What you say makes no sense. İf SVO we're better for efficiency, then a majority of languages would have defended from an SVO ancestor. SOV languages come from a far larger number of languages families that are so different. Even the older Indo-European languages are SOV before becoming the modern SVO languages of today.
There are also many SOV creoles and mixed languages that throw a wrench in the idea that creoles are primarily SVO, especially those that arose outside of European colonial areas. These include ones with an SVO lexifier like in China. There's also examples of SVO creoles shifting to SOV word order later on
@@eugeneng7064 SVO languages typically allow overlap-style speech - when two or more people are having a conversation it's common to start replying "early", before the other speaker has completed their sentence. It's natural - the end of the sentence is typically clear from the context. SOV languages, at least SOV languages like Japanese, don't allow this. You don't typically converse in overlap fashion. And that fits with the native culture: politeness and hierarchy. The overlap-style of speech typically used in Europe is sometimes considered terribly impolite by Japanese speakers, though somewhat depending on age.
@@tohaason what would you call Aizuchi then, if that is not overlapping speech?
That said, when I lived in Turkey I noticed a lot of overlapping speech and people talking simultaneously
@@eugeneng7064 I don't know Aizuchi. In any case, this possibly depends on other features of the language too, but in Japanese, at least, which is the only SOV language I can claim sufficient experience with, you can't really get the sentence unless you wait until the verb arrives. For the most part. And that does fit with the native culture - listen to the other party, *then* reply.
@@tohaason Aizuchi is where the listener is expected to consistently reply during a conversation to show they are following the conversation. This is also common in the Sinitic variaties I am familiar with. Nativlang actually has a video about it:
czcams.com/video/G-GQRYA_yMw/video.html
Edit: apparently Sinitic languages do it a lot less than Japanese
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
Is this the second episode of a Nativlang word order series?
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 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
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. 😂
As I watched this, I wonder aloud about the role of "topic-comment" in forming these word orders. Even in languages that have freer order or in SOV, you get a lot of topic/comment arrangements. Just thinking aloud. Thanks as always for the great video (series)!