Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2023 September 16

= September 16 =

English word order
Are the following word order possible in English:

--40bus (talk) 16:11, 16 September 2023 (UTC)
 * 1) Chased a cat the dog, would be used to emphasize that it is chasing that cat did to the dog, rather than some other thing.
 * 2) The dog a cat chased, would be used to emphasize that it is the dog that cat chased, rather than some other thing.


 * No. 1 would not really be seen outside of some high-falutin' old-fashioned poetry. No. 2 would be interpreted as containing a relative clause. AnonMoos (talk) 17:01, 16 September 2023 (UTC)
 * I read No.1 as saying that the dog chased a cat. Read a book the boy seems more likely than Read a boy the book. The latter sounds as if it is missing a subject, as in I read a boy the book. But it's all a bit Yoda. -- Verbarson talkedits 17:28, 16 September 2023 (UTC)
 * And the answer to your question is no, while it may be possible, neither is normal English usage. Alansplodge (talk) 10:38, 17 September 2023 (UTC)
 * I guess The dog chased by a/ the cat would sound a bit more natural... 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 14:52, 17 September 2023 (UTC)
 * That sounds natural but is only a noun phrase. I think the phrases in the question are meant to be full declarative sentences, each expressing the same statement as a cat chased the dog, but with a different word order intended to put a component in the focus by moving it to sentence-initial position. This works to some extent in some languages (e.g. Latin and ASL) and even in modern English (He knew he had to work. And work he did! < He knew he had to work. And he worked!), but not in these sample sentences. --Lambiam 08:20, 18 September 2023 (UTC)
 * Ah, yeah. I guess since English doesn't decline nouns by case, a rigid word order would be necessary to maintain context. I read something about an Indonesian pidgin having neither noun declension, nor a particuarly fixed word order, and as a result, it was often difficult to understand sample sentences without a given context. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 10:57, 18 September 2023 (UTC)
 * Dutch normally has SVO word order in main clauses, but the object can be made the focus by bringing it in initial position. Since the finite verb obligatorily takes the second position in Dutch main clauses, this turns the order into OVS. Usually, this is seen with pronouns for the subject or object, which mostly are different in the oblique case, exceptions being plural ze and regiolectal hun. Here is an example of OVS order in a Dutch main clause, from a well-known Dutch poem: Maar doodslaan deed hij niet ("But he didn't commit beating to death"). The subject is a pronoun, making this syntactically unambiguous. But this inversion is sometimes also used with common nouns, as seen in tarwebrood lustte de bankier niet ("the banker did not appreciate wheat bread"). Here it does not create a semantic ambiguity, but (although I could not find an example in the wild) occasionally it does. --Lambiam 13:51, 18 September 2023 (UTC)
 * --Lambiam 20:01, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

Futurama - Latin American dub.
Hi everyone.

So, when people from Spanish speaking Caribbean regions listen to the Spanish (LAT-AM) dub of Futurama, does the voice actor for Hermes strike them as sounding like an actual speaker from the region, or does he sound like a Mexican Spanish speaker imitating a Caribbean speaker?

Duomillia (talk) 17:16, 16 September 2023 (UTC)
 * Not sure if the Spanish Caribbean would carry the same connotations to a Hispanic, as Jamaica would to an anglophone, though. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 09:24, 17 September 2023 (UTC)
 * Some Spanish is spoken in Trinidad and Tobago, which might carry more of the same connotations than, say, the Dominican Republic. --Lambiam 11:53, 17 September 2023 (UTC)

Not an accent specialist by any means, but from listing to Hermes in latino version on youtube, I'd say the Jamaican accent of the character is either completely or almost completely lost in translation. --Soman (talk) 19:08, 21 September 2023 (UTC)