Dumbass, I forgot the authors. They’re Russell D. Gray & Quentin D. Atkinson.
The source I just checked says that there are examples for all the possible orderings of subject, verb, and object, although they aren’t equally common. The frequency of each of them is about as follows among the world’s languages:
SOV 45%
SVO 42%
VSO 9%
VOS 3%
OVS 1%
OSV <1%
OK, so there are a few object-initial ones. But FWIW, I was just reading about an invented, logic-based language called Lojban (http://lojban.org/) which, if I understand it correctly, can use any of the six above orderings, though SVO is most common. If you like this thread, you’ll probably like learning Lojban too.
Jes, we could all be visitors to Lojbanistan.
hapaXL writes:
> Author goes to talk to a linguistics professor and his grad
> student. After 10 minutes of conversation, the professor looks
> at his grad student and asks, “Well?”
>
> (Paraphrased) Grad student says, referring to the
> author, “Well, he was born in New York, but moved to Georgia
> at a young age. Then he moved to Maryland at around 10
> before finally settling in New Jersey as a teenager.” And the
> author claims that this chronology is pretty much right on the
> money.
Have any of the people reading this thread (and I presume that most of the linguistics people on the SDMB are reading this thread) heard of anything even approximating this degree of accuracy in picking out dialects? This sounds to me far beyond what anyone can do even with training. And, further more, I don’t understand why one would get that kind of training as a grad student in linguistics. A linguist who was specializing in phonetics would learn to be able to listen to people speaking various languages and precisely transcribe them in IPA. A linguist who was specializing in dialectology (and particularly in American English dialectology) might be able to pick out certain words as being restricted to certain regions, although he wouldn’t memorize them so much as be able to look them up in a dictionary. The skill that this grad student supposedly has would, if anything, be closer to that of an acting teacher who specialized in teaching American dialects, but I don’t think anyone is nearly that good.
The book that hapaXL cites is Genie: A Scientific Tragedy by Russ Rymer, a popular account of a child who spent her childhood locked up by her deranged father. It’s not a linguistics textbook. I really wonder if Rymer misunderstood what was going on. Can anyone say more about the existence of this supposed ability citing a more authorative source?
And can anyone explain how I managed to misspell the words “furthermore” and “authoritative”?
Hehehe. andygirl said: “Yeah, _______!” (for those who don’t know, you’re supposed to fill in whatever it is that you’re enthusiatic about, spoken with a stress on the “yeah” and emphatic intonation on the rest)
<slight hijack, but still language related> One of my friends got me saying this after I spent a whole weekend with her and now it’s always “Yeah, pants!” or “Yeah, half-drunken-oral-sex!” Kind of annoying after a bit, really; especially when you can’t seem to stop it from popping into your head at every little thing. But it’s another example of how cool language is - the way a simple fragment, a flavoring word coupled with a NP (noun phrase), can be so thoroughly expressive and cognitive. Instantly, the speaker and the listener are connected by a shared experience or feeling and forge a unique bond that ties in to a deeper understanding of the individual. Like how andygirl and I both share enthusiasm for Grimm’s law - finally, a kindred spirit!
Blowsmymind. 
What determines how we classify in this respect is how a normal, declarative sentence does it - the most ‘unmarked’ (unremarkable, more or less) form. Imagine the sentence above without pronouns - something like “Jose dio un libro a Maribel” - it’s SVO in the most normal sentences; the location of the pronouns is the more marked way.
My brain hurts, too!
I share Wendell’s skepticism about that anecdote- I have never heard of someone having that level of dialect training.
Yamirskoonir, I too sense we are kindrid spirits. Wanna talk about Werner’s law?
I share Wendell’s skepticism about that anecdote- I have never heard of someone having that level of dialect training.
Yamirskoonir, I too sense we are kindrid spirits. Wanna talk about Werner’s law?
That isn’t a cognate, that’s a loanword. Cognates indicate a common root word in a dead language, such as Indo-European or Latin. An example would be Vater' and father’.
Too late to resurrect this thread? But we can´t let such an interesting thread die!
andygirl or Wendell Wagner or someone else, maybe you can help me out here - I remember some sort of anecdote from my English phonetics class about a linguist who was able to pinpoint the very village (Yorkshire? Rural England, anyway) a mass murderer came from just from his phone calls, but the police didn´t believe him. I tried googling it, but obviously with the wrong search terms.
Have you ever heard of this story? Any idea whether it´s true or apocryphal? I believe it was supposed to have taken place in the 1950s or 60s.
I´m afraid you got me all wrong. I didn´t say I thought one single language was more beautiful than others, I said I loved the differences. When comparing any given pair of languages, you will probably find some concepts in one that don´t exist in the other, and vice versa. Or the same concept may be expressed in one word in one language and requires a lengthy and somewhat awkward phrase in the other. Or one has a beautiful colourful expression where there is a simple word in the other. Fascinating etymologies, hilarious compound words, the mental images the words themselves evoke. Not only words, but grammatical structures as well. A whole new perspective. Often actually a different outlook on the world.
And the more different languages you know, the more different worldviews you get, and they change your (or at least my) way of looking at things, looking at the world. I just love playing with language.
I don´t prefer one language over the others, I rather like comparing them and learning as many as possible to broaden my perspective. And language as such is just plain beautiful. And linguistics, for the reasons stated in the OP and many more.