4 ms·
What would be interesting is if Lisp were invented by the Greeks. In Greek (I believe) there is no grammatical ordering. Each part of a sentence is declined a
by phamilton 16y ago
What would be interesting is if Lisp were invented by the Greeks. In Greek (I believe) there is no grammatical ordering. Each part of a sentence is declined according to what part of speech it is. So a noun is formed differently if it's an object or if it's a subject. Verbs are readily identifiable as well. So a sentence can be any of SVO SOV OSV OVS VSO VOS.
- daxelrod 16y agoLatin has that structure. Take a look at Lingua::Romana::Perligata, a Perl module that gives Perl a latin-style grammar: http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?Lingua::Romana::Perligata http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?Lingua::Romana::Perligata Damian Conway, its author, wrote a paper about it as well: http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/Perligata.html http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/Perligata....
- Ingaz 16y agoRussian language also allows VSO, SOV, VOS, OVS, OSV - all of combinations is correct. Although my 6-year son always prefers SVO. He has problems with with variants. He thinks they are "incorrect".
- angus77 16y agoIn Japanese, you can mix word order freely as well---nouns are marked with particles ("ha" = topic marker; "wo" subject; etc etc). You can think of it as the nouns being declined, but with the declensions being completely regular. These sentnces all mean the same thing ("Jim ate an apple"): Jim-ha ringo-wo tabeta. Tabeta ringo-wo Jim-ha. Ringo-wo tabeta Jim-ha. Jim-ha tabeta ringo-wo. Ringo-wo Jim-ha tabeta. Tabeta Jim-ha ringo-wo. However, putting the sentences in a non-SOV order changes which which get emphasized (the same thing happens in Latin and Greek, which were also both verb-final languages by default). The SVO form of the sentence is the most neutral, plainly informative version of the sentence.