Basically, are there any languages where it's grammatically acceptable to say "blue this is" rather than "this is blue?"
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7Do you mean sentences like this?– user6726Commented Mar 20, 2022 at 18:48
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2The demonstrative isn’t at the end of the sentence in “blue this is”.– Janus Bahs JacquetCommented Mar 21, 2022 at 1:55
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It's an interesting question, that.– Colin FineCommented Mar 21, 2022 at 12:41
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"is" is the verb here, "this" is a demonstrative, although in this sentence it's behaving as a pronoun and can go in any position a noun could– TristanCommented Mar 21, 2022 at 14:18
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Any languages that met these conditions would be verb-initial, and Salishan languages might meet the conditions (which aren't exactly spelled out in the question). However, typically Lushootseed, for instance, doesn't allow more than one NP per sentence, with everything else being determined by affixes and context. In Lushootseed (which is reasonably typical of its family) the root comes first, and then morphology happens.– jlawlerCommented Mar 22, 2022 at 19:06
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2 Answers
The Malagasy language has a verb–object–subject (VOS) word order, so in the sentence “This is blue” the subject “this” is the last word in the corresponding Malagasy sentence:
English: This is blue.
Malagasy: Manga ity.
Manga “blue”;
ity “this”.
The verb “to be” is not used in Malagasy just like in other Austronesian languages.
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this answers the question as phrased in the title, but from the body of the text it appears Rachel actually wants languages with OSV (possibly also SOV) word orders– TristanCommented Mar 21, 2022 at 14:20
Classical Latin allows such a word order e.g. "caeruleus ille est" (literally "blue that is"). This word order, with the predicate first adds emphasis to it, and "ille caeruleus est" (literally "that blue is") would be more common. The word "est" is also often dropped.
The choice of a verb like "is" here (a copula) rather than a simple transitive verb like "eats" complicates things a little, because these verbs sometimes use different syntax (they don't really have a subject and object in the same way as transitive verbs). Looking at the transitive case though, an order "apples horses eat" to mean "horses eat apples" is Object-Subject-Verb, or OSV.
Languages in which this word order is the default, unmarked word order are extremely unusual, the World Atlas of Language Structures listing just four languages with OSV as their default word order.
