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Subject … Verb … Object (SVO)
That's the way we learned English. So when I studied German I was surprised to learn that not all languages follow that pattern.
Fascinating article about SVO vs. SOV vs. VSO here: http://blogs.physicstoday.org/thedayside/2011/10/
Not so sure about Gell-Mann's claim that VSO is the most "evolved." But still an interesting read for WWWers.
I think this person is making the kind of overreach you might expect from a physicist. In physics, one studies the fundamental behavior of a system, then adds in the details. For instance, first we look at falling bodies with respect to gravity. The we add in aerodynamics, wind, thermal gradients, and so forth.
There is a whole lot more complexity to language than its principal order. What about modifier order ("white house" vs. "casa blanca")? Or, for example, in Russian, where the richness of word inflections allows them to reorder a sentence for emphasis? I think I would consult a philologist before making huge sweeping inferences about language evolution, especially in a world where "more evolved" is taken to mean "better". Try telling a Muslim that the language of their holy text is "less evolved", see where that will get you.
Me, I wonder why it is that "most evolved" is taken by assumption to mean "superior". Don't get me wrong, it strikes me that way too. But is there any very compelling reason that it should?
I agree with Aodhan, the heavily inflected languages (I add Greek and Latin to Russian) can make the word order in their sentences much more flexible without confusion. It's one advantage to writing poetry in those languages. In English, where we have very little inflection, and even more in some Chinese languages, word order is much more important to keep things straight.
On the assumption that not everyone here knows what's meant by "inflection" (I didn't before I studied Greek in college), in language studies it doesn't have to do with your tone of voice; it's the way you modify words to show their different meanings. For example, in English if I write "kill", "killed" and "killing", these are all forms of the same word but they're used in different ways and in different parts of a sentence. It would be wrong to write "he killing me", but either "he kills me" and "he killed me" could be right and the endings ('-s' and '-ing') tell the reader something about what was meant.
In English there used to be many more such endings to indicate meaning, and in some other languages there still are. In Spanish, for example, they use not just "kill" and "kills" for the present tense, but a different ending for each of six possibilities: I kill, you kill, he kills, we kill, y'all kill, they kill—and that's just for present tense, for they have more endings for past and future and lots of other things. In Hebrew they have separate endings to show "he kills" and "she kills". In Swahili they use not suffixes but mostly prefixes. In Greek and Latin they have extra endings for active and passive ("to kill" and "to be killed"), perfect ("to have killed"), transitive and intransitive ("kill" and "die"), subjunctive and conditional and imperative, all sorts of things.
And those are just verbs; in some languages they inflect nouns too. In English the only nouns we inflect are the pronouns: I/my/me, we/our/us, he/his/him and so on. In German they have four "cases" instead of three and they do it to all the nouns, not just the pronouns—though in German many of the endings are alike. But in Greek they have five cases, and in Latin and Russian there are six. English, Mandarin, Cantonese, Swedish, all are almost completely devoid of such complications. That means we can learn to speak those languages with less effort, but it also means you have to pay closer attention to word order if you want to be understood.
Sorry, this is a pet interest of mine.
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
Grant Barrett
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