859: Word-Order Apr 15, 2017

Of the many factors that play into sentence-structure, languages are often classified by how the subject, object, and verb are placed. In English the order is subject-verb-object (SVO) while in Latin it tended to be subject-object-verb (SOV). Given that there are three elements here, there are 6 ways to arrange them, with the two most common being SVO and SOV, and the two least common OSV and OVS in that order. Malagasy spoken on Madagascar is one of the only well-documented languages to have object-subject-verb which is one noticeable indication that it is not related to other languages on mainland Africa. Klingon, the invented language created for Star Trek by Marc Okrand is in OVS which is incredibly rare globally as Okrand wanted his language for aliens to sound as foreign for humans as possible, though of course to someone who doesn't know Klingon this feature would be entirely lost. If you wanted to learn a natural OVS language, you might have to learn Portuguese first because the only known ones are spoken in the jungles of Brazil.

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