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VSO and Master Yoda Right, I'll simply assume that you are all Star Wars fans and know Master Yoda. Ever notice something weird about the way he talks? The creaky voice aside I mean. Considering that he is speaking English (in a galaxy far far away ... how weird is that??) his word order is all up the spout. To put it in linguist-speak, he is using OSV word order. Which makes it sound so weird because English really is a SVO language. Ok, maybe I should elucidate on this S, V and O stuff first. All languages make utterances that contain information about who is doing what to whom, bluntly speaking. Nit-picking about Agent-Patient languages aside, the WHO bit is commonly called the subject (=S), the ACTION bit is the verb (=V) and the TO WHOM bit is the object (=O). Broadly speaking. Now take a simple English sentence: Jack is kicking Jill. Who's doing what to whom? Jack is the one who's doing the kicking, so he's the subject (= S). Kicking is the action in question, so that bit is the verb (= V). And Jill is getting muddy footprints on her new Chanel costume, so she is the object (= O) here. So in this sentence the word order is SVO - subject first, then the verb and last the action. If you look at more English sentences, you will see that that is the overall structure of an English sentence. Which brings us back to Master Yoda (we're not worthy, we're not worthy!). Consider his ominous revelation to Luke Skywalker: "Your father he is". Hm ... here we start with the object first, followed by the subject and then by the verb at the end. OSV. While not all his sentences follow this strict structure, a lot of them do and that is what makes him sound so odd. Now for a bit of linguistic trivia. Assume that languages beg to differ as to their word order. How many different combinations of S, O and V does that give us? Yup, six: SVO, SOV, VSO, VOS, OSV and OVS. By far the most common two are actually SVO & SOV which roughly 75% of the world's languages use, including English. Another 15% or so use VSO and the remaining three make up about 10% of the world's languages. Bet you're dying for some examples, so I'll try not to disappoint you.
Wonderful, but where does that leave us? Well, as some of you may already have guessed from the above Irish example, Gaelic falls into the select category of VSO languages. And it is quite strict about that - which is lucky for us. Practically speaking this means that no matter what bits come in between, the verb comes before the subject, and the subject before the object. Let's just look at a few examples:
So why did I say "quite strict"? Because there is a select group of particles that can come before the verb: interrogative particles, past tense markers and negative particles and so on. Here's a list of particles which can commonly come before the verb and a few examples:
So your average sentence will look like this:
Chunnaic is in the list because there is one of those famous linguistic zeroes (= ø)in front of it. A linguistic zero is a marker for a something that used-to-be-there/would-occupy-this-position-if-it-were-marked. In Old Irish, past tense was quite regularly marked by sticking a particle in front of the verb (don't ask, it was messy). Curiously, one dialect of Irish still preserves this paradigm (it also has a largely synthetic verb structure, ie it uses endings as opposed to individual words):
That's why chunnaic is in the list. The do then got reduced to d' before vowels and f in Irish (eg d'ith mé) and to dh' in Scottish Gaelic (eg dh'ith mi). Anyway, it doesn't really matter if you ignore this particular one. It certainly gets more complicated than that, but for now remembering that Gaelic is a VSO language will do nicely. Watch this space as there is lots more on syntax to come, including a lovely tree diagram even though we're definitely not generativists. |
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