Importance of Word Order in Different Languages
Thinking about the role word order plays in different languages. This is partially because I've been studying Latin and Toki Pona again. What's interesting is how different languages see the role of sentence structure.
To play around with this concept, I'm going to use the following languages, chosen because I have enough familiarity with these languages to be dangerous:
- English. My native language. (American English, I'm from America.)
- Latin. My first linguistic love.
- Tagalog. I spoke it at a near-native level for two years.
- Toki Pona. A new love and the only constructed language in this list.
When discussing word order I'm going to identify the roles each word plays in the following way:
- The Actor is a noun that is performing the action of the sentence.
- The Location is where the sentence is happening. This is also where an indirect object would fit, but we'll call it the Location for now.
- The Object is a noun that is having its state changed in the sentence.
- The Verb is the action being performed.
So let's use a very simple sentence:
The girl gives the rose to the boy.
Now lets split that out into the linguistic parts of speech in each language:
| Language | Actor | Location | Object | Verb |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| English | girl | boy | rose | gives |
| Latin | puella(nom.) | puero (dat.) | rosam (acc.) | dat |
| Tagalog | dalaga | lalaki | rosas | bigay (conj as ibinibigay for present “ng”) |
| Toki Pona | meli | miji | kasi kule | pana |
For most languages various particles and/or articles are needed to make the sentence work:
| Language | Sentence |
|---|---|
| English | The girl gives the rose to the boy. |
| Latin | Puella rosam puero dat. |
| Tagalog | Ibinibigay ng dalaga ang rosas sa lalaki. |
| Toki Pona | meli li pana kasi kule e miji. |
note that in toki pona two words are being used to translate “rose”. As a language with only 200-ish words, most English nouns become noun phrases in toki pona.
Role Assignment
In a sentence, how do you identify the role each word is playing? The verb is generally fairly obvious, as it's an entirely different part of speech. But what about the three nouns?
English
In English, word order is used in conjunction with particles. In the sentence above “to” identifies the location of the sentence. The article “the” is used to emphasize that we are talking about one specific girl and one specific rose and one specific boy. Swapping out “a” for “the” in any of these phrases changes the sentence subtly, but noticeably:
The girl gives the rose to a boy.
indicates that we aren't really concerned with the identity of the boy. She could have given it to Juan, Michael, or Ncuti, we're really focused on the girl and the giving of a specific rose. Maybe she's on a stupid show like The Bachelorette and giving the rose indicates a choice she has made.
The girl gives a rose to the boy.
Suggests that roses are effectively a commodity, all roses are created equal, this just happens to be one out of a set of roses. We care about the girl and the boy, the rose is just lucky to have been chosen for this transaction.
A girl gives a rose to a boy.
Sounds like we are just stating a fact about how humans behave.
Latin
In Latin the case of the noun identifies the role of the noun. Latin cases are expressed as inflections on the noun stem. Put another way, the ending of each noun identifies its case. In our sentence above the word puella, puellæ is in the nominative, rosa, rosæ is conjugated in the accusative as rosam, and puer, pueri is conjugated in the dative as puero.
Tagalog
In Tagalog there is a concept of “focus, out of focus, location” identified by the use of the particles “ang, ng, & sa”. These concepts don't directly exist in English. But the conjugation of the verb tells you which of these foci is the actor of the sentence. the verb “bigay” has been conjugated in the present “ng” as “ibinibigay”, so we know that the actor is “out of focus” and we put the particle ng before the noun dalaga. Because we used this conjugation, rosas is the “focus” of the sentence (it has the particle ang before it) which tells us which word in the sentence is the most important. Lalaki is put in the sa position, identifying them as the location (or indirect object) of the sentence. To put the focus on the dalaga we would conjugate the verb differently. We could conjugate it in a third form to put the focus on the lalaki like so:
Bumibigay ang dalaga ng rosas sa lalaki.
Binigyan ng dalaga ng rosas ang lalaki.
But both of those sentences are weird. The second one has connotations that are hard to express in English, but it would kind of feel like you are trying to hype up dalaga, focusing a sentence on her in a way that is unnatural. You would probably never use the third one, even in poetry. I'm honestly not even sure that one is correct.
Toki Pona
Toki Pona uses word order and the particles li and e to identify the role of each noun. The Actor in a Toki Pona sentence is the first word (unless you use a prepositional la phrase), followed by li which indicates that we are looking at the main verb. The Object comes right after the verb, and the Location is identified by the e particle before it.
Toki Pona is a deliberately constructed language with a deliberately simple syntax. There is no verb conjugation nor noun declension.
Usual Word Order
Each language has a common word order. Using the initials of each role:
- Actor
- Location
- Object
- Verb
They look like this:
- English: AVOL
- Latin: AOLV
- Tagalog: VAOL
- toki pona: AVOL
Can you change the word order and still have the sentence make sense?
English
Only to an extent.
- “To the boy the girl gives the rose.” is “poetic”.
- “The rose the girl gives to the boy...” becomes a noun phrase that identifies a specific rose, not a complete sentence in it own right.
- “The boy the girl gives the rose to...” is considered ungrammatical because of the dangling participle, and is again a phrase (this time identifying a specific boy), not a sentence.
- “The rose the girl the boy gives to.” is nonsense, and
- “The rose gives the girl to the boy.” is a sentence but one that belongs in a weird sci-fi movie where plants give people to other people. The meaning of the original is totally lost in this word order.
Latin
Totally. All day long. The word order gives us a sense of how important each word is in the sentence. Generally the first and last word are the most important, but all of these sentences are correct:
Puella rosam puero dat.
Rosam puella puero dat.
Puero rosam puella dat.
even
>Dat puella rosam puero.
The point is that not only are all these sentences correct, they all mean the same thing. There might be a slight shift in emphasis, but most likely you chose an alternate word order to make the sentence scan correctly in a poem.
Tagalog
Not really. VAOL is pretty inviolate, but you can use the particle ay to move the actor before the verb:
Ang dalaga ay bumibigay ng rosas sa lalaki.
This sentence doubly emphasizes the dalaga as the most important part of the sentence. It's grammatical, but it has connotations that make it kinda funny in the context of the language. Messing around with the word order further, even with the ang ng sa particles identifying roles, is weird.
Ibinibigay ang rosas ng dalaga sa lalaki.
parses but just barely, while
Ibinibigay sa lalaki ng dalaga ang rosas.
sounds like you're having a stroke. Or singing a song. A very bad song.
Toki Pona
Nope. “actor li verb object e location” is built into the language. You can't put the e location phrase before the li verb phrase. The location of the object as the next word after the verb is critical to the sentence being parsed correctly.
Is there a point to all of this?
No, not really. I just enjoy “armchair linguistics” and thought I would share. 😃