859: Word-Order Apr 15, 2017

-
Of the many factors that play into sentence-structure, languages are often classified by how the subject, object, and verb are placed. In English the order is subject-verb-object (SVO) while in Latin it tended to be subject-object-verb (SOV). Given that there are three elements here, there are 6 ways to arrange them, with the two most common being SVO and SOV, and the two least common OSV and OVS in that order. Malagasy spoken on Madagascar is one of the only well-documented languages to have object-subject-verb which is one noticeable indication that it is not related to other languages on mainland Africa. Klingon, the invented language created for Star Trek by Marc Okrand is in OVS which is incredibly rare globally as Okrand wanted his language for aliens to sound as foreign for humans as possible, though of course to someone who doesn't know Klingon this feature would be entirely lost. If you wanted to learn a natural OVS language, you might have to learn Portuguese first because the only known ones are spoken in the jungles of Brazil.
For more like this, click here

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Important Announcement: Blogspot Access Will Close

-
There will be no additional new content hosted on this blogspot account, and in 4 weeks from now (30th of September 2020), the blogspot account will no longer be publically available. If you are subscribed via email, please visit WordFacts.Org and subscribe via email there; there is a link to do so on the bottom of every page, so you will only need to scroll all the way down on any page you are on (see video below if needed). Apologies for the inconvenience, but the blog, video, and commercial services are now being moved specifically to WordFacts.Org 
Continue »

1511: "I'll be home in 3 days; don't wash" Might be False Jan 31, 2019

-
Image
Check out the latest podcast on the Patreon for as little as $1: • It is very easy for misinformation to spread so long as there is a grain of truth to it, such as the line of ' let them eat cake ', which was probably never said by Marie Antoinette. Another such disputed quote is "I return in 3 (or 5 or 8) days; don't wash" said by Napoleon to his wife Josephine. This quote is more likely to have been written than that attributed to Antoinette as he did often write her love letters, but many of the original lines from which the now-famous quote could have been drawn are often contradictory or not so reliable.
Continue »

852: delilah Apr 8, 2017

-
Plenty of common Western names have some biblical relevance. It is usually from the frequency of these names that terms like 'john' referring to a man who hires prostitute, or foundation the baseball team, Yankees , come about. Some names, such as 'Delilah', are also used as nouns separate from the name, but with connotations stemming from Scripture, and not contemporary connotations. It is from the story of Samson and Delilah where the sense of the word as 'seductress' began, but the name was around for much longer than this. There is disagreement concerning the true etymology of this word, but it either comes from the Hebrew element 'dal' meaning 'weak' or the Hebrew for 'delight'. Unlike other much older names like 'Matthew' or 'John', 'Delilah' only started to be used as a name in the 17th century with the Puritans, though it gained more popularity following Saint-Saens' opera, Samson and Delilah (1877). Li...
Continue »