That happens in Spanish as well, and we make it even more fun with our custom of elliding subjects.
Los militares enviarán el mensaje a sus aliados. The military will send the message to their allies.
Los militares lo enviarán a sus aliados. The military will send it to their allies.
Los militares se lo enviarán. The military will send it to them.
Se lo enviarán. [Somebody that you’re supposed to already know] will send it to them.
Whenever anyone says English doesn’t rely on tones AT ALL, my go-to example is “I’m going to record and record.” There are actually a lot of examples in English where the word is exactly the same except for the syllable which is stressed, and it’s pretty consistent that the noun form is stressed on the first syllable, and the verb form on the second.
Is that from “The Awful German Language”? very, very funny.
But stress is not tone. Tone means change of pitch.
English is a stress-accent language, not a pitch-accent language. Stressed syllables may have a higher pitch than unstressed syllables, and be held longer, but that is not the same thing as tone.
English uses tone to indicate shades of meaning in a sentence.
It’s more than just stress. Your voice actually does go up for re-CORD and down for RE-cord. It doesn’t make English a tonal language, any more than the fact that there is the the vestige of a genitive case makes English a declined language; mainly, if a person who is Deaf, a non-native speaker, of speaker through bad electronic transfer or broadcast equipment doesn’t get the tones right, usage and syntax will most likely make it entirely understandable anyway.
This is still something I like to throw out there when I’m trying to educate people about the difficulty Deaf people have learning to speak an oral language, and 1) shouldn’t be forced to, and 2) should have it only as a back-up-- they should always have their country’s sign language first.
And, especially in speech, as with Romanian, putting the subject at the end is rather common (and getting more common, I read somewhere):
Se lo enviarán, los militares. The soldiers will send it to them.
(Often, the comma is omitted).
This is becoming yet more common in colloquial French, according to an article I could dig up if anyone cared.
I recently saw an interview with the guy who invented Belter for The Expanse. He mentioned that the guy who invented Klingon deliberately made every choice based on what was least common or non-existent in Earth languages.
By high school best friend used to tease (lovingly) his grandparents for the way they spoke English. His go-to example was “Throw me down the stairs my hat.”
The odd thing is, they were from Spain. I didn’t think Spanish worked that way.
Mine doesn’t. I’ve just tried a dozen sentences with different … intents, I guess (agreeing with someone, correcting someone, etc.). My voice either had the same pitch for each syllable in both words or went down in both words.
Your examples, however, include two objects. They look the same as Romanian - probably a little bit easier, but I’m not sure.
I find it entertaining to delve into this topic a little bit, so I’ll try to come up with several more examples.
(a) SUBJECT & OBJECT = NOUNS
The actors will dance the tango. (SOV) -> Actorii vor dansa tangoul. (SOV)
(b) SUBJECT = NOUN ; OBJECT = PRONOUN
The actors will dance it. (SOV) -> Il vor dansa actorii. (OVS)
OR
The actors will dance it. (SOV) -> Actorii il vor dansa. (SOV)
Given the various word orders in their language, Romanians have more options to play with emphasis. Written sentences lack intonation, but the subject and object can be stressed differently depending on whether one chooses OVS or SOV.
(c) SUBJECT & OBJECT = PRONOUNS
They will dance it. (SOV) -> Il vor dansa ei. (OVS)
OR
They will dance it. (SOV) -> Ei il vor dansa. (SOV)
Again, the subject and object are stressed differently, depending on whether one chooses OVS or SOV.
If one wants to lay no stress on either the subject or the object, one should leave the subject out:
They will dance it. (SOV) -> Il vor dansa. (OV)
This is possible because in Romanian the subject is included in the verb form.
Initially I wanted to give examples of sentences where two objects are used, such as “My colleague will offer flowers to the pianist” (SOV) -> “Colega mea va oferi flori pianistului” (SOV), and see how things change dramatically when one object turns into a pronoun, and then the second object turns into a pronoun, or maybe the other object turns into a pronoun, and finally the subject turns into a pronoun, but the whole demonstration would be unbearably tedious. I think it is already clear that the ability to choose whether to leave the subject out or not, and whether to start with the object or the subject gives Romanians more choices to lay the stress, especially in writing.
I picked those examples to be able to show how both DO and IO behave when pronominalized. The examples work exactly the same if you eliminate the IO. They are also simplified and picked from a whole slew of other options, because I wanted to show only a specific subset of features.
I think specialists should look not only into simple sentences but also into compound sentences because communication rarely occurs as a series of simple sentences. I have just realized that in a compound sentence (where there are more than just one subject), the second subject will often lie at the end (both in speaking and in writing - so, it is not a matter of formal vs informal).
e.g.
English: The soldiers will execute what the general will command. [SV] + [SV]
Romanian: Soldatii vor executa ce va comanda generalul. [SV] + [VS]
This is a formal, neutral statement. If I choose to make the sentence even longer by adding “until the president shows up (=appears in Romanian)”, the third subject will also lie at the end: “pana cand va aparea presedintele.” This causes numerous expressed subjects to lie at the end in Romanian. In formal, neutral statements.
UY Scuti writes:
> . . . communication rarely occurs as a series of simple sentences.
Except in Pirahã.
The Spanish and Romanian examples are holdovers from Latin which tended to prefer the verb at the end of the sentence (SOV). At some point, people starting moving the object to the end of the sentence if it wasn’t a pronoun. Maybe this was because the non-pronoun object represented new information and they wanted to emphasize it. But the pattern SOC was retained where the object(s) were pronouns.
One can draw a distinction between languages where the word order conveys meaning and those where it does not. For example, in English, <Ivan ate the crocodile> and <The crocodile ate Ivan> mean two different things. In Russian, as long as you put the proper endings on the nouns, it is clear who is the eater and who is the meal; no matter the order. Ivan ciel crocodila (Ivan ate the crocodile) Ivana ciel crocodil (The Croc ate Ivan)
Yes, in the terminology others have been using, Russian is an inflected language.
The perfect oracle.
That is kind of inaccurate. The ending you are showing is the genitive, not the accusative. Both Иван and крокодил are masculine, which means that the accusative is identical to the nominative (singular and plural, except for the few animate masculine words that end in -а or -я).
Your construction does makes sense in the context of the “partitive genitive”, in which case it would translate to “Ivan ate some of the crocodile” or “the crocodile ate some of Ivan”.
Oops, it’s been a long time since my last Russian class. Maybe I should have used an example with feminine nouns. Thanks for the correction.
If the nominative and accusative are the same, then how would one disambiguate that sentence?