1032: Flexible Word Order Oct 6, 2017

Characterising a language as having a certain word-order is more of a generalisation in many ways than it is a standard or rule. In English, even though there is some flexibility such as in "what say you", being in object-verb-subject (OVS), people use impersonal pronouns like 'it' in "it is raining" that don't mean anything but fill in for a subject first which English-sepakers will prefer to have in most constructions; one could not say *"the sky is raining" but it equally as strange to hear "is raining" with no subject at all. In other languages however, not only is word-order not consistently fixed in the way it is in English, such as in inflected languages like Latin, but some languages allow for omission of certain elements such that there is not always, say, a subject included. In these cases, including a few examples in certain dialects of English, usually it is said that whatever is omitted is implied, but strictly speaking there is not always a subject or verb in every sentence. These standards are also even less important in verbal utterances, which relies much less on sentence-based construction that most written work. At least a few languages don't have word-order at all also, but this will be discussed in a post in the future.