VSO and Master Yoda

Right, I'll simply assume that you are all Star Wars fans and know Master Yoda.

Ever notice something weird about the way he talks? The creaky voice aside I mean. Considering that he is speaking English (in a galaxy far far away ... how weird is that??) his word order is all up the spout. To put it in linguist-speak, he is using OSV word order. Which makes it sound so weird because English really is a SVO language.

Ok, maybe I should elucidate on this S, V and O stuff first. All languages make utterances that contain information about who is doing what to whom, bluntly speaking. Nit-picking about Agent-Patient languages aside, the WHO bit is commonly called the subject (=S), the ACTION bit is the verb (=V) and the TO WHOM bit is the object (=O). Broadly speaking.

Now take a simple English sentence: Jack is kicking Jill. Who's doing what to whom? Jack is the one who's doing the kicking, so he's the subject (= S). Kicking is the action in question, so that bit is the verb (= V). And Jill is getting muddy footprints on her new Chanel costume, so she is the object (= O) here. So in this sentence the word order is SVO - subject first, then the verb and last the action. If you look at more English sentences, you will see that that is the overall structure of an English sentence. Which brings us back to Master Yoda (we're not worthy, we're not worthy!). Consider his ominous revelation to Luke Skywalker: "Your father he is". Hm ... here we start with the object first, followed by the subject and then by the verb at the end. OSV. While not all his sentences follow this strict structure, a lot of them do and that is what makes him sound so odd.

Now for a bit of linguistic trivia. Assume that languages beg to differ as to their word order. How many different combinations of S, O and V does that give us? Yup, six: SVO, SOV, VSO, VOS, OSV and OVS. By far the most common two are actually SVO & SOV which roughly 75% of the world's languages use, including English. Another 15% or so use VSO and the remaining three make up about 10% of the world's languages. Bet you're dying for some examples, so I'll try not to disappoint you.

SVO

English	Jack S	kicks V	Jill O
Vietnamese	Bích S Bích	ăn V eat	cơm O rice
	Bích eats rice
Haussa	bā yā NEG S not he	cîn V eat	nāmā O meat
	he doesn't eat meat

SOV

Chechen	as S I	Gürzhiini motta O Georgian language	büütsa V speak
	I speak Georgian
Tongan	kuo u PAST S I	sio V see	he kulī O the dog
	I have seen the dog

SVO

Japanese	Ryōko wa S TOPIC Ryōko	terebi o O DAT television	mimasu V watch
	Ryoko watches TV

VSO

Welsh	mae V be	dwy ferch S two girl	gyda fi O with I
	I have two daughters
Cebuano	adúna V have	siyáy S she	duhá ka anák two COUNT child
	she has two children
Irish	phóg V PAST-kiss	sé S he	an madra O the dog
	he kissed the dog

VOS

Malagasy	manana V have	akondra O banana	aho S I
	I have a banana
Tzotzil	lá snákan PAST seat	ti vĩnike THEME man	yu'un ti xpétule AG S Peter
	Peter seated the man

OSV

Apurinã	anana O pineapple	nota S I	apa V fetch
	I fetch a pineapple
Amharic	shay O tea	yït'at'all S-V he-drinking
	he's drinking the tea
Yanomami	rorõ O cigarette	ya kona S INC I	taarema V see
	I see a cigarette

OVS

Hixkaryana	toto O the fish	yonoye V ate	kana S the man
	the man ate the fish
Xavante	ma PAST	wĩrĩ O-V him kill	ni S someone
	someone killed him

Wonderful, but where does that leave us? Well, as some of you may already have guessed from the above Irish example, Gaelic falls into the select category of VSO languages. And it is quite strict about that - which is lucky for us.

Practically speaking this means that no matter what bits come in between, the verb comes before the subject, and the subject before the object. Let's just look at a few examples:

bidh mi ag ithe ùbhlan a-màireach, a bhalaich! V S O

chunnaic mo mhàthair cù aig an doras V S O

bhiodh m' athair ag obair air càraichean nuair a bha mi òg V S O V2 S2

So why did I say "quite strict"? Because there is a select group of particles that can come before the verb: interrogative particles, past tense markers and negative particles and so on. Here's a list of particles which can commonly come before the verb and a few examples:

Sentence Initial

an/nach

an deach cha(n) cha tuig có, càite, cuine, carson ... cuine a bhios ma, nan nan digeadh tu

Phrase Initial

an/nach

... an deach có, càite, cuine, carson ... ... cuine a bhios far an, nuair a ... ... nuair a bha mi ma, nan ... nan digeadh tu gun ... gun robh e

So your average sentence will look like this:

am bi mi ag ithe ùbhlan a-màireach, a bhalaich? V S O

ø chunnaic mo mhàthair cù aig an doras V S O

dh'fhàg mo mhàthair cù aig an doras V S O

cha bhiodh m' athair ag obair air càraichean nuair a bha mi òg V S O V2 S2

Chunnaic is in the list because there is one of those famous linguistic zeroes (= ø)in front of it. A linguistic zero is a marker for a something that used-to-be-there/would-occupy-this-position-if-it-were-marked. In Old Irish, past tense was quite regularly marked by sticking a particle in front of the verb (don't ask, it was messy). Curiously, one dialect of Irish still preserves this paradigm (it also has a largely synthetic verb structure, ie it uses endings as opposed to individual words):

Munster Irish Standard Irish

Gaelic

do dhúnas do dhúnais do dhún sé/sí do dhúnamair do dhúnabhair do dhúnadar dhún mé dhún tú dhún sé/sí dhún muid dhún sibh dhún siad

dhùn mi dhùn thu dhùn e/i dhùn sinn dhùn sibh dhùn iad

That's why chunnaic is in the list. The do then got reduced to d' before vowels and f in Irish (eg d'ith mé) and to dh' in Scottish Gaelic (eg dh'ith mi). Anyway, it doesn't really matter if you ignore this particular one.

It certainly gets more complicated than that, but for now remembering that Gaelic is a VSO language will do nicely. Watch this space as there is lots more on syntax to come, including a lovely tree diagram even though we're definitely not generativists.