It is a superstition to think that all languages are predominantly SOV, SVO, VSO or some other combination of these hieroglyphs. This is not true of Latin, and certainly not true of ancient Indo-European languages like Sanskrit or Avestan, where the word order is almost completely free.

As TKR has very rightly pointed out, the “proverb” “errare humanum est” is not an example of SOV because humanum is not an object but a predicate adjective. By the way, this “famous proverb” is not actually quoted by any ancient author; the oldest attested version of it is in St Augustine of Hippo, who in fact wrote “humanum fuit errare”, so: predicate + verb + subject.

This said, I would actually agree that in the modern Romance languages the usual sequence is SVO. In cases like “je t’aime” one could argue “t(e)” is not a direct object but part of the verb complex; it is not a word in its own right. We also say things like “Toi je t’aime”, which you might want to analyse as OSOV, though I would analyse it as topic + (clitic+clitic+verb). Neither “je” nor “te” can be used as an isolated statement in French. The response to the question “Whom do you love?” is not “te” but “toi”.

It is a superstition to think that all languages are predominantly SOV, SVO, VSO or some other combination of these hieroglyphs. This is not true of Latin, and certainly not true of ancient Indo-European languages like Sanskrit or Avestan, where the word order is almost completely free.

As TKR has very rightly pointed out, the “proverb” “errare humanum est” is not an example of SOV because humanum is not an object but a predicate adjective. By the way, this “famous proverb” is not actually quoted by any ancient author; the oldest attested version of it is in St Augustine of Hippo, who in fact wrote “humanum fuit errare”, so: predicate + verb + subject.

This said, I would actually agree that in the modern Romance languages the usual sequence is SVO. In cases like “je t’aime” one could argue that “t(e)” is not a direct object but part of the verb complex; it is not a word in its own right. We also say things like “Toi je t’aime”, which you might want to analyse as OSOV, though I would analyse it as topic + (clitic+clitic+verb). Neither “je” nor “te” can be used as an isolated statement in French. The response to the question “Whom do you love?” is not “te” but “toi”.

It is a superstition to think that all languages are predominantly SOV, SVO, VSO or some other combination of these hieroglyphs. This is not true of Latin, and certainly not true of ancient Indo-European languages like Sanskrit or Avestan, where the word order is almost completely free.

As TKR has very rightly pointed out, the “proverb” “errare humanum est” is not an example of SOV because humanum is not an object but a predicate adjective. By the way, this “famous proverb” is not actually quoted by any ancient author; the oldest attested version of it is in St Augustine of Hippo, who in fact wrote “humanum fuit errare”, so: predicate + verb + subject.

This said, I would actually agree that in the modern Romance languages the usual sequence is SOV. In cases like “je t’aime” one could argue “t(e)” is not a direct object but part of the verb complex; it is not a word in its own right. We also say things like “Toi je t’aime”, which you might want to analyse as OSOV, though I would analyse it as topic + (clitic+clitic+verb). Neither “je” nor “te” can be used as an isolated statement in French. The response to the question “Whom do you love?” is not “te” but “toi”.

It is a superstition to think that all languages are predominantly SOV, SVO, VSO or some other combination of these hieroglyphs. This is not true of Latin, and certainly not true of ancient Indo-European languages like Sanskrit or Avestan, where the word order is almost completely free.

As TKR has very rightly pointed out, the “proverb” “errare humanum est” is not an example of SOV because humanum is not an object but a predicate adjective. By the way, this “famous proverb” is not actually quoted by any ancient author; the oldest attested version of it is in St Augustine of Hippo, who in fact wrote “humanum fuit errare”, so: predicate + verb + subject.

This said, I would actually agree that in the modern Romance languages the usual sequence is SVO. In cases like “je t’aime” one could argue “t(e)” is not a direct object but part of the verb complex; it is not a word in its own right. We also say things like “Toi je t’aime”, which you might want to analyse as OSOV, though I would analyse it as topic + (clitic+clitic+verb). Neither “je” nor “te” can be used as an isolated statement in French. The response to the question “Whom do you love?” is not “te” but “toi”.