Word Order

The next general aspect of language seems to be the order in which words are spoken, which is very important, like getting your vowels correct in Chinese.

  • Not I

  • I not

The 1st means I am not the one you are looking for, the 2nd means I have nothing. In other instances the word order is irrelevant, like:

  • No food

  • Food no

These mean the same thing. Why is this? The grammarians have an answer for everything, always couched in arcane special clauses. But Chomsky points out it is very hard, if not impossible, to clarify the logic behind these rules. They just is. It's a rule. It would be futile arguing with the police officer as to the morality of jaywalking, it’s the law, and you will be punished, unless you repent, in which case you might be granted amnesty on the spot.

The word order is baked into each language, but I will speak only of English, because to discover these things, like I enjoy doing, requires proficiency in the language. I could never to this with Egyptian or Lithuanian, where I must follow the rules, because I am not a native speaker. Now, remember the NVA? This is the English word order, nouns first, then verbs, then adjectives. Why is this so?

  • NVA - Birds fly high.

  • NAV - Birds high up fly.

  • VNA - Flying do the birds, high up.

  • VAN - Flying high up do the birds.

  • AVN - High up fly birds.

  • ANV - High up are the birds, flying.

The reason English is said to have NVA word order is because no little words (pronouns, adverbs, particles, etc etc) are needed to connect all the words. For the NAV word order we could say "Birds high fly", which makes only partial sense, and so as a listener we grope for the meaning, and assume the sentence is in the present continuous tense. But we are speaking in the abstract, and mean birds can gain elevation more then a cricket, often up to 1,000 feet above ground level.

As a general rule language is infinitely subtle. New words and phrases can be invented with no trouble at all, so we must be always be distinguishing between rote phrases and new phrases. I might call "Fire!" in a movie theatre, a rote phrase, or a hippie might be on a hallucinatory dream journey, and be jumping around shouting "Fire!", referring to their mind, and we need to distinguish between reality, fakeness, fantasy, religion, spirituality and hallucination, in other peoples minds, though this is hard to distinguish even in our own minds.

We have the NVA word order, referring to individual words, such as might be seen on a sign for a business, “Good Food”, not “Food Good”. But to make a sentence there is the SUBJECT PREDICATE and OBJECT. “He is the mayor of the city” can be broken down as:

  • Subject - “He”

  • Predicate - “is the mayor of”

  • Object - “the city.”

Why these terms have been chosen as usual makes no sense. The object would be a person, animal, or thing, as well as the subject, but the word is used in the sense of “objectified”, but then when we look at the term “subject” we could use this as well for the object and call it the “subjectified”, they are actually grammatical terms of art for 'the thing' and 'the other thing', 'this thing' and 'that thing'.

A sentence need not contain a noun, a verb, much less an adjective, and the little words are also optional when you take proper word order into account. THE WORD ORDER IS THE LOGIC, hence the inflected languages so called lack of particles.

But I have not finished with word order, because we must take the small words into account. To go back to the "Bird flying high", we can also expand upon this to sound more articulate, "The bird can fly high up", which is a nNvVAa, but we can also say "The bird is flying up high", although this has a different meaning, and implies the bird is currently up above, whereas my example is in the infinitive, making a statement about all birds, so the first example is what I mean.

This wikipedia article is typical of grammatical pedants, it goes on and on and "Hammarström calculated the constituent orders of 5,252 languages..." and he found there is no fixed order in the slightest, which is not a big surprise since there is really no fixed order in English either. This is why we have the little words, to free us from these constraints. The Subject Predicate and Object can be in any order.

  • SPO I am running

  • SOP I run now

  • OSP Running I am

  • POS Now run I

  • PSO Now I run

  • OPS Running am I

Some of these are a little awkward, but all it would take is a generation of speakers to use the new word order and it would seem natural, so it seems more like a matter of convention then any necessity of verbiage. All verbs and nouns can be nisbyized into adjectives, all nouns can become verbs, and all verbs can become nouns. A native speaker can throw the grammars in the trash because their intuitive knowledge is where the grammars come from. The native speakers are not being educated by grammarians. But the academic kosher Brahmins who cannot even properly shut off a light switch nonetheless have memorized the millions of rules and thus can write perfectly, such brilliant sentences as "...cases like this can be addressed by encoding transitive and intransitive clauses separately, with the symbol "S" being restricted to the argument of an intransitive clause, and "A" for the actor/agent of a transitive clause." We have no trouble understanding such clarity of exposition like this since they are past masters of rule making and thus meaning making. The only small niggle is that in order to understand such crystalline purity we must first baptize ourselves in the sanctified holy waters of Orthodoxy.