3 ms·

"So, I'm in this hotel, right? And there's this shop across the street, yeah? And it's got this suit, man - and I'm, like, I really wanna try that on." Order o

by eszed 2y ago

"So, I'm in this hotel, right? And there's this shop across the street, yeah? And it's got this suit, man - and I'm, like, I really wanna try that on." Order of information is mainly prescribed by formal rules of expression; language itself is amenable to its users' idiosyncratic preferences and priorities. At least, English is. Can anyone who knows Japanese comment on whether the reverse order is possible / plausible there?

mattkrause 2y ago
Somewhat possible but not particularly plausible. Japanese is a SOV language, so the verb generally goes at the end. You couldn't move that all the way to the front. The "subject" can be implicit and Japanese also distinguishes between the overall topic, marked with 'wa', and the actual subject (i.e., the agent that does something). There's a fairly neutral order for many other parts of the sentence components. You can shuffle them around a bit, but it ends up changing the emphasis. As a rough analogy, you normally put size adjectives before colours: "I caught the big red balloon." Inverting this either sounds wrong or puts emphasis on the other adjective: "I caught the red big balloon" suggests that "big balloons" are a distinct category known to the speaker.
- wlerin 2y ago
  While it is true that basic sentence components like direct objects or phrases that modify the verb can be moved around without changing the meaning of the sentence in Japanese, there is a very strict head-final requirement for phrases and dependent clauses that modify nouns that makes larger sentences, especially heavily nested ones like the OP's example, virtually guaranteed to flow the opposite direction of the equivalent sentence in English. Said example contains two dependent clauses, one inside the other. In English, dependent clauses and phrases come after the noun they modify ("suit [that] I saw", "shop that is"), while in Japanese they must come before (「見たスーツ」, 「あるお店」). Thus the resulting translation is an exact mirror of the original. This head-finality opposing head-initiality is the main reason Japanese sentences tend to flow in the opposite direction of English ones, rather than simply SOV vs SVO. (The same also applies to the order of words within ホテルのむかいに vs. across the street from the hotel, I just don't know of a convenient single phrase to describe both constructions).
rkunde 2y ago
I enjoy the mental imagine of this live translation widget making every Japanese person sound like Luis from Ant-Man.
tsunagatta 2y ago
I’ll preface that I’m absolutely not an expert in Japanese, but in my amateur understanding I think the same sort of thing you showed is possible, at least in casual speech. I hear this sort of construction quite often: “着てみたい、あのスーツ。” or roughly “I want to try it on, that suit,” reversing the verb/object order from normal.
littlekey 2y ago
An interesting thought, but you've really just made 3-4 SVO sentences rather than 1 SOV sentence.
- eszed 2y ago
  Fair point. I should have posted this as a reply to the post that invoked cultural thought-patterns. Specifically grammatical conventions harder to break, they are.

by eszed 2y ago

mattkrause 2y ago

Somewhat possible but not particularly plausible. Japanese is a SOV language, so the verb generally goes at the end. You couldn't move that all the way to the front. The "subject" can be implicit and Japanese also distinguishes between the overall topic, marked with 'wa', and the actual subject (i.e., the agent that does something). There's a fairly neutral order for many other parts of the sentence components. You can shuffle them around a bit, but it ends up changing the emphasis. As a rough analogy, you normally put size adjectives before colours: "I caught the big red balloon." Inverting this either sounds wrong or puts emphasis on the other adjective: "I caught the red big balloon" suggests that "big balloons" are a distinct category known to the speaker.

wlerin 2y ago
While it is true that basic sentence components like direct objects or phrases that modify the verb can be moved around without changing the meaning of the sentence in Japanese, there is a very strict head-final requirement for phrases and dependent clauses that modify nouns that makes larger sentences, especially heavily nested ones like the OP's example, virtually guaranteed to flow the opposite direction of the equivalent sentence in English. Said example contains two dependent clauses, one inside the other. In English, dependent clauses and phrases come after the noun they modify ("suit [that] I saw", "shop that is"), while in Japanese they must come before (「見たスーツ」, 「あるお店」). Thus the resulting translation is an exact mirror of the original. This head-finality opposing head-initiality is the main reason Japanese sentences tend to flow in the opposite direction of English ones, rather than simply SOV vs SVO. (The same also applies to the order of words within ホテルのむかいに vs. across the street from the hotel, I just don't know of a convenient single phrase to describe both constructions).

rkunde 2y ago

I enjoy the mental imagine of this live translation widget making every Japanese person sound like Luis from Ant-Man.

tsunagatta 2y ago

I’ll preface that I’m absolutely not an expert in Japanese, but in my amateur understanding I think the same sort of thing you showed is possible, at least in casual speech. I hear this sort of construction quite often: “着てみたい、あのスーツ。” or roughly “I want to try it on, that suit,” reversing the verb/object order from normal.

littlekey 2y ago

An interesting thought, but you've really just made 3-4 SVO sentences rather than 1 SOV sentence.

eszed 2y ago
Fair point. I should have posted this as a reply to the post that invoked cultural thought-patterns. Specifically grammatical conventions harder to break, they are.