1401: Exceptions to Word Order: Mongolian
This is Word Facts' 1400th post. Please consider sharing.
In discussions of word order, it might seem that there must be consistency for languages to be able to be categorized, but this is not always the case. Disregarding the fact that some languages don't have subjects (see more here), exceptions to word order still exist in many languages. These appear in English in some contexts, usually due to pronouns, and other Indoeuropean languages have small exceptions here and there, but in Middle Mongolian this was very different. In this language, the order consistently depended upon whether the subject was a noun or a pronoun; in the former case, the order was subject–object–predicate, but when the subject was a pronoun, the order was object–predicate–subject. This may be similar in concept to an ergative-absolutive language, but not quite the same.
In discussions of word order, it might seem that there must be consistency for languages to be able to be categorized, but this is not always the case. Disregarding the fact that some languages don't have subjects (see more here), exceptions to word order still exist in many languages. These appear in English in some contexts, usually due to pronouns, and other Indoeuropean languages have small exceptions here and there, but in Middle Mongolian this was very different. In this language, the order consistently depended upon whether the subject was a noun or a pronoun; in the former case, the order was subject–object–predicate, but when the subject was a pronoun, the order was object–predicate–subject. This may be similar in concept to an ergative-absolutive language, but not quite the same.
Comments
Post a Comment