When using gestures, rules of grammar remain S-O-V

http://www.physorg.com/news134065200.html

by silentbicycle • 18 years ago

26 19 18 years ago

physorg.com

jaytee_clone• 18 years ago

I wonder if it will be more effective to use SOV in graphical presentations like PowerPoint.

Company A -> Company B -> Acquire

karmaVS• 18 years ago

Despite what the article seems to imply, S-O-V is also the most common standard word order (in number of languages, though almost certainly not in number of native speakers, given that both English & Chinese are both S-V-O)

iamwil• 18 years ago

aren't most latin language descendents S-V-O? The only S-O-V languages I can think of off the top of my head are Japanese and Korean. Anyone know about African or South American languages?

Scriptor2• 18 years ago

Actually, French is S-O-V when you're using pronouns. Some quick testing with Google Translate suggests that Spanish might follow the same rule as well.

My first language, Bengali, an Indo-European language spoken in Bangladesh and thus distantly related to Latin, is S-O-V. I'm assuming from this that Hindi and other Indian subcontinental languages are as well.

I think S-O-V makes sense when communicating visually. Say someone kicks a ball. Initially you see a person and a ball. Then you see the person kick it. The action comes after the presence of the two objects. You don't see a person, see him kick, and only then see the ball.

lunchbox• 18 years ago

Japanese, Burmese, Basque, Latin, Pashto.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject_Object_Verb

khafra• 18 years ago

Latin itself was flexible, but usually S-O-V. It was long ago I learned it, around the same time that I started using an HP-48. I was pretty pleased with myself when I noticed the similarity with reverse polish.

jfarmer• 18 years ago

I think I'm turning Japanese!

whacked_new4• 18 years ago

I guess it makes sense to say this evidences a stack-based model of human memory.

push memory boy

push memory ball

push action kick

evaluate.

silentbicycle3• 18 years ago

Perhaps

  boy.ball.kick()

or just

  boy ball kick

This also reminds me of the way verbs can accumulate in German. (http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?ReadsLikeGerman) :)

whacked_new4• 18 years ago

I actually can't see how that works, at least out of the languages that I know, none of them fit the dot-syntax. The only ones that do (again, in the ones I know), are the lisp variants, but you need to flip the sexpr around. (I suspect the reason why lisp is "flipped" could be because programs are action centric whereas utterances are subject centric (this is a very risky statement to make, but interesting to think about.))

Anyhow, with this in mind, translating the above is absolutely trivial:

((action kick) (object boy) (object ball)) for prefix, or

((object boy) (object ball) (action kick)) for postfix

a-priori2• 18 years ago

I think the reason most languages are either SVO or SOV has more to do with memory recall time. Putting the subject at the start of the sentence maximizes the time the brain has to retrieve information about the subject, and probably then speeds parsing of the remainder of the sentence by priming information about the verb and object.

silentbicycle3• 18 years ago

Interesting. So, there's more processing needed for the context associated with the subject and object rather than the action?

When using gestures, rules of grammar remain S-O-V

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