I have a question about languages. Specifically, sentence construction and literal translation. I speak a lot of Spanish and am familiar with Hebrew, so I will use these languages as my context.
In Spanish, you’d say “te lo doy” to mean “I am giving (an object) to you.”.
In Hebrew, you’d say “ani mitgagea elayich” to mean “I miss you.”
My question arises in word order and literal translation. Te lo doy literally means “to you it I give.”. And Ani mitgagea elayich literally means “I am longing towards/at you” (elayich means “towards you or at you”).
These direct translations sound stilted in Modern English. If I was a native speaker, I feel like I would be like “what’s wrong with my language?” when I encounter all these English speakers speaking things “normally.” I understand that different languages have different cadences and implications, and I understand that this explains why often non-native speakers will try to apply their own grammar to English (Janosz from Ghostbusters 2 is an example).
I am just amazed that Spanish speakers can say “te lo doy” and not feel like it’s backwards. If I am trying to say that phrase, I have to think “ok, how do I arrange this correctly? I have to take time to reverse the word order from what is normal.” As an English speaker, I prefer “I am giving it to you” which sounds normal. And that Hebrew speakers can say “I am longing to/at/toward you” and not prefer the much cleaner (if not consistent) grammar of “I miss you”. Further, in Hebrew “good boy” is spoken as “yeled tov” which literally translates as “boy good.” Do they think the word order they grew up with is “correct?” and that English is “wrong?”
Sorry for all these questions, but I’m trying to understand how other speakers justify their own languages in the face of a language (English) that’s more frequently used and seems more direct.
It’s not a question question of the sentence being said “backwards”. The word order of the central word types in the syntax, subject and predicate, is the same as in English (at least that applies to your Spanish example; I can’t say anything about Hebrew). The difference lies in the position of the pronouns that replace the direct and indirect objects. In the Spanish sentence, they come before the verb (and, more specifically, the indirect object before the direct object). In the English sentence, they come after the verb (with the direct object coming before the indirect object: “I give it to you.”). There is no inherent logic other than the grammar of the languages that would require favouring one of these word orders over the other, so the Spanish word order would come just as natural to a native speaker of Spanish as the English word order would come to you.
Word order is unique to each language, evolved over millennia of use by people who didn’t know or care what word order other language speakers used. Most languages seem to have gravitated toward a subject-verb-object structure, but not all. In some more highly inflected languages, it has less importance, as a direct object, indirect object and prepositional object will have different case endings to show what would otherwise have to be revealed by word order.
All that is needed for people to “justify” their language is to understand each other with a minimum of ambiguity. Wait until you meet an agglutinative language, like Inuit, where a sentence like “He said he wanted to see me very badly yesterday” would be one word, a root with a lot of attached qualifiers .
Remind me of the quote from Mark Twain:
“When the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.”
Personally, I find that I get into a different mindset when speaking/reading/hearing a foreign language that I understand (Spanish and Portuguese for me), and idea of using English word order feels “wrong.”
You realize, of course, that’s it’s far more likely they would be thinking “What’s wrong with English?”. English is normal to you because it’s your native language, but “I give it to you” is not objectively easier to understand than “to you it I give”
Interesting how you feel that “I am giving this to you” is simple, while as someone who speaks Dutch as a first language all that “I am …” stuff always seemed an unnecessary hassle to me (until I got used to it). Just say “I give this to you”.
If you’re still in the literal translation phase of learning languages everything seems weird. But at some point you get used to it.
Actually, in English, the natural order is Subject, Verb, Indirect Object, Direct Object : “I give you the ball”
(The ‘to’ in your example changes things because now ‘you’ is part of ‘to you’ so it’s gramatically not an indirect object but a prepositional phrase used as an adverb; and in English adverbs can generally move all around)
There are many different orderings of words in various languages. The most obvious one is the different orderings of subject, verb, and object. All six orderings occur in some language:
(Note that 0% given for object-subject-verb in the first link doesn’t mean that no language does that. It means that they’ve rounded the percentage to the nearest whole number. They put 0% down because it’s less than 0.5%.)
There are other orderings that differ:
adjective-noun or noun-adjective
determiner-noun or noun-determiner (a, the, this, etc. being determiners)
numeral-noun or noun-numeral
possessor-noun or noun-possessor (my, your, their, etc. being possessors)
relative clause-noun or noun-relative clause
preposition-noun or noun-postposition (where a postposition is what happens when a preposition goes after a noun)
verb-suffix or prefix-verb or ve-infix-rb (when a verb is conjugated) (I mean by infix that sometimes the conjugation of the verb is done by changing something in the middle of the verb)
noun-suffix or prefix-noun or no-infix-un (when a noun is declined) (I mean by infix that sometimes the declension of the noun is done by changing something in the middle of the noun)
auxiliary-verb or verb-auxiliary (where an auxiliary is a verb other than the main verb of a sentence like would, have, is, etc.)
direct object-indirect object or indirect object-direct object
intensifier-adjective or adjective-intensifier (very, more, etc. being intensifiers)
negative particle-verb or verb-negative particle (not is a negative particle)
question particle-main sentence or main sentence-question particle (so that in English “You’re coming home, aren’t you?” the phrase “aren’t you” is the question particle)
In other words, essentially every bit of word ordering that you know of in English goes the opposite direction in some other language. There is nothing natural in the orderings of English. Some of the orderings of English are in fact exactly opposite the most common orderings among all languages.
A great many of the Spanish grammar rules are similar in French too (and I would guess the other Latin-derived languages). Adjectives usually after the noun. Pronouns used as direct or indirect objects before the verb also comes directly from Latin. Morituri te salutant!
The English habit of putting adjectives after the noun seems less logical. When you hear a phrase like “the red ball”, as soon as you hear the word “red” you don’t know yet what is red until you hear the word “ball”. But in the word order “The ball red”, when you hear the adjective, you already know what it’s talking about.
Hebrew also puts most adjectives after the nouns. But it is less strict about the subject-verb-object order. The Hebrew Bible begins: “In the beginning created God the Heavens and the Earth.” There is a marker word, אֵת, (et) that appears before the direct object, which doesn’t appear in the English, that simply marks the direct object as a direct object. It occurs twice in this sentence, before Heavens and before Earth.
English has some flexibility too, but strange word orders are often reserved for poetry.
ETA: The Hebrew Bible also famously has the passage “In His own image created He him, male and female created He them”, a Hebrew word ordering that was preserved in the King James translation.
I was told once that at international conferences, the interpreter who is translating speeches from German has a panic button he can press that flashes a red light on the German speaker’s podium, which means “Gimme a verb!”
If you’re familiar with modern Hebrew, you can (and probably have) read Biblical Hebrew. In the example cited by Senegoid for word order, the “created he them” part is one word only, a conjugated root (create) with the other bits of information stuck on. It is one of the glories and hallmarks of Biblical Hebrew and is used in modern Hebrew much less frequently, and certainly with fewer units surrounding the verb.
What? In English, the adjective normally comes before the noun, not after. But there is nothing logical about that-- you’re just used to it. There is no logical reason that one needs to know which noun is going to be red.
The flexibility of word order is a function of inflection. English used to be much more inflected, and word order was not so important because the inflection told you what part of speech the word was. Modern English, having lost many inflections, relies more on word order to tell you which part of speech the word is.
It occurs to me that beginning the sentence with the topic, as in Japanese, can be quite helpful to understanding, while in English you often have to wait until the end of the sentence for the key word that lets you know what the sentence is about.
Example:
(English) Where did you put the mayonnaise?
(Japanese) Mayonnaise, where put?
Having said that, there are many features of Japanese that make it harder to understand, so it probably all balances out.
I just wanted to mention that “I miss you” is an interesting example, because some other languages (French, Italian) express this sentiment with a verb that reverses the subject and object (you are lacking to me).
2 similar examples are “to be born” (which is an active verb in French, Spanish, and Italian) and “I like it” (expressed in Spanish and Italian as: “it pleases me”).
In Spanish, “it pleases me” is “me gusta”, with the “me” being the first person object pronoun (like English “me”), and “gusta” being the third person singular present tense form of gustar, meaning to please. It’s related to the English adjective “gustatory”.
Also, one common way to say “I love it” is “me encanta”, which is parallel to the example above but with the verb “encantar”, which is a cognate to the English “enchant” and more or less means the same thing.
Ah, but in Spanish, you don’t have the important detail required for accurately visualizing the thing until the end! It causes a mental swerve and glitch in the matrix, like when you’re reading a book and three paragraphs into the scene in the Great Hall, you find out the fireplace is on the left, and the one in your mind’s eye is on the right, and the whole room swings around in your brain to get the fireplace on the right side and you feel slightly ever so vertiginous.*
Of course, I’m kidding, mostly. Usually my brain is perfectly capable of waiting a moment to put “red” with “ball” in either order. But “logical” arguments can be made for just about any word order.
First off, subject verb object (SVO) is not the commonest. About 40% of the world’s languages use it. About 50% are SOV and 10% are VSO (including Irish and Welsh). Although it is said that there are, say, OVS languages, it is hard to see how you would know since what is the subject and what is the object has no clear definition. Upthread, it has been mentioned that to translate “I like it” into Spanish or French, you have to say the equivalent of “It pleases me”. Well, guess what? In older forms of English, you said the equivalent of “Me likes it” and “like” was understood to mean “please”. But eventually it was reanalyzed to its current meaning and the “me” replaced by “I”.
Here is another interesting fact. There is, generally speaking a correlation between V, O word order and N, Adjective order. Generally speaking, if the object comes after the verb in a language, the adjective will come after the noun. And vice versa. For example, French is SVO and adjectives follow nouns. German is considered to be SOV and adjectives always precede their nouns. Obviously there are exceptions to this rule and such languages are sometimes called inconsistent. I guess English got its SVO from French and its AdjN from German (or something). But English is not rigid about adjective placement, the way German is. I still recall the phrase, “Der vor dem hotel sitzende Herr” (literally, “The in front of the hotel sitting man”) to illustrate this.
Bottom line: there is just no standard word order. There are also some highly inflected languages in which word order is arbitrary, although I imagine meaning or emphasis changes slightly as you vary it. English has virtually no inflection and word order is quite rigid for the most part (although there is a lot of latitude with adverbs).
It causes a mental swerve and glitch in the matrix, like when you’re reading a book and three paragraphs into the scene in the Great Hall, you find out the fireplace is on the left, and the one in your mind’s eye is on the right, and the whole room swings around in your brain to get the fireplace on the right side and you feel slightly ever so vertiginous.*
