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Linguistic typology
Subject Object Verb (SOV) is a term used in linguistic typology to state the general order of words in a language's sentences: "Sam oranges ate".
The SOV type is the most common type found in natural languages.
It corresponds roughly to reverse Polish notation in computer languages. Turkish, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Latin and most Indian languages belong to this category.
German uses SVO in main clauses, but employs SOV in subordinate clauses.
SOV languages tend to have the adjectives before nouns, to use postpositions rather than prepositions, to place relative clauses before the nouns to which they refer, and to place auxiliary verbs after the action verb. Some have special particles to separate the subject from the object, such as the Japanese wa. SOV languages also seem to exhibit a tendency towards using a Time-Manner-Place ordering of prepositional phrases.
An example in Japanese is:私は昨日ご飯を食べた watashi wa kinou gohan wo tabeta ("I ate rice yesterday"), in which watashi is the subject (topic, to be precise), gohan is the object and tabeta is the verb (past tense form of "taberu").
The other permutations in rough order of importance:
- Subject Verb Object (e.g. English, Spanish, ItalianItalian is a Romance language spoken by about 70 million people, most of whom live in Italy. Standard Italian is based on Tuscan dialects and is somewhat intermediate between the languages of Southern Italy and the Gallo-Romance languages of the North., KiswahiliSwahili (also called Kiswahili see Kiswahili for a discussion of the nomenclature) is an agglutinative Bantu language widely spoken in East Africa. Swahili is the mother tongue of the Swahili people (much dispute exists over the identity of the Swahili pe, ChineseThe Chinese language (/, /, or ; pinyin: hany, huay, or zhongwen) is a member of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. Although most Chinese view the many varieties of spoken Chinese as a single language, regional variations in spoken language are compara)
- Verb Subject ObjectVerb Subject Object commonly used in its abbreviated form VSO is a term in linguistic typology. It represents one type of languages when classifying languages according to the sequence of these constitutents in neutral expressions: Ate Sam oranges''. (e.g. WelshWelsh redirects here, and this article describes the Welsh language. For other meanings, see Wales (disambiguation). Welsh Cymraeg y Gymraeg , not to be confused with the Welsh dialect of English, is a Brythonic branch of Celtic spoken natively in the wes and ArabicArabic is a Semitic language, fairly closely related to, for instance, the Hebrew language and the Aramaic language, spoken throughout the Arab world and widely known outside it. It has been a literary language for over 1500 years, and is the liturgical l)
- Verb Object SubjectVerb Object Subject commonly used in its abbreviated form VOS is a term in Linguistic typology. It represents one type of languages when classifying languages according to the sequence of these constitutents in neutral expressions: Ate oranges Sam''. (e.g. FijianFijian is an Austronesian language of the Malayo-Polynesian family spoken in Fiji. It has 350,000 first-language speakers, which is less than half the population of Fiji. Fijian is a VOS language. Pronunciation There are some consonants that are pronounce)
- Object Subject Verb (e.g. Xavante)
- Object Verb Subject (e.g. Guarijio, Hixkaryana, and Klingon)
