zompist bboard

SOV changing to other word orders has been well-documented, however it seems to be much rarer for languages to change to SOV from another word order. I have been looking for an example of a language changing to SOV where the change is not due to language contact. So far i've only been able to find stray comments or short paragraphs about this:
- A few claim the only case any language will ever switch to SOV is through contact with an existing SOV language. (Presumably SOV derives from a Proto-World)
- Others say that it's mostly due to contact, but some languages have shifted from SVO to SOV with no influence from an existing SOV. However they fail to mention what these languages are.

So, does anyone know of any languages that have changed to an SOV order, and not due to contact with an SOV?
Also, does anyone know of or can anyone think of mechanisms that might cause a language to change to SOV word order from a different one?

Li and Thompson think that Mandarin is possibly shifting to SOV order. (However, they also think that the typology doesn't apply well to Mandarin.)

There are neighboring SOV languages, but this would be a very weird transference: Chinese speakers didn't generally learn Manchu or Mongolian, even when they were being ruled by nomads.

Sexendèƚo wrote:So, does anyone know of any languages that have changed to an SOV order, and not due to contact with an SOV?

Although Dutch is typically said to be V2, it could well be analyzed as a SOV in many respects. It has SOV in subclauses, and I think one could make a case for "ordinary" V2 clauses to be kind of SOV when considering the auxiliary a verbal particle. Like in true SOV languages, Dutch children start to speak (once they reach the two word phase) OV, since the content verb comes after the object. I don't know how it arrived at that (it may be that Germanic has an SOV substrate or something?), but I wouldn't be surprised that in a few hundred years, Dutch is classified as SOV proper.


JAL

jal wrote:(it may be that Germanic has an SOV substrate or something?)

Not so much a substrate as much as that proto-Germanic was actually itself SOV, according to Wikipedia.

Matrix wrote:Not so much a substrate as much as that proto-Germanic was actually itself SOV, according to Wikipedia.

Ah, right, feeling a bit silly now :).


JAL

(it may be that Germanic has an SOV substrate or something?)

Uh, wasn't PIE itself SOV ?

Terra wrote:

(it may be that Germanic has an SOV substrate or something?)

Uh, wasn't PIE itself SOV ?

Almost certainly.

zompist wrote:Li and Thompson think that Mandarin is possibly shifting to SOV order. (However, they also think that the typology doesn't apply well to Mandarin.)

There are neighboring SOV languages, but this would be a very weird transference: Chinese speakers didn't generally learn Manchu or Mongolian, even when they were being ruled by nomads.

Does this have anything to do with 把-construction (which is only used in extremely specific circumstances) and/or topicalization (although topicalization most of the time ends up in OSV word order, I think?)? Do you have more information about their hypothesis, like a paper or smth?

It's from their grammar-- Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar.

Topicalization is relevant, partly because, as they say, Mandarin is topic-prominent rather than subject-prominent.

Ugh -- pulling my hair out to remember the source, something in the Cambridge Series -- I have read that pigeon and creole languages have a tendency to switch to SOV even where the sub- and superstrate language are otherwise.

Putting the comments above together and going out on a limb, perhaps the influence of (a) (imperfect) language shift regardless of super/substrate + (b) the influence of child speech = refreshing the population of SOV languages. Or, at least, its is one hypothetical pathway for SOV to (re)occur. I.e., the element of causation is not contact with SOV languages but the contact environment itself.

Whatever the pathway, the numbers speak: http://wals.info/feature/81A#2/16.6/152.9

2+3 clusivity wrote:pigeon and creole

Li and Thompson's claim that Mandarin is shifting to SOV has been mentioned; this has been contested, and is not really that great an example because the unmarked clause structure with simple verbs is still SVO.

A much more interesting phenomenon, however, is that if you look at the WALS map for word order, there are exactly two blue dots: Basque and Sorbian. Sorbian is a minor offshoot of the West Slavic family, which is otherwise solidly SVO. I do not think contact accounts for it since German is not SOV in simple clauses, and I do not think it ever was in the time there has been intensive contact between German and Sorbian (which has, funnily, caused Sorbian to absorb the German compound construction of S VA [...] VVPP).

I don't know enough about Slavic diachronics to exclude the possibility that Sorbian is simply the only language in the family to preserve SOV and the others are all innovative, but it seems to me that here we have at least a very possible case of something going SVO -> SOV without contact to such languages.

Oh wonderful, another intrusion of the ZBB bird-meme at my spelling error -- how droll.

2+3 clusivity wrote:I have read that pigeon and creole languages have a tendency to switch to SOV even where the sub- and superstrate language are otherwise.

I find this a very suspicious claim, as, so *I* have read, SOV typically requires some kind of marking to distinguish/separate S and O, which are both NPs, something creoles have not. I don't think pidgins have a fixed word order, as they are typially not yet codified enough. As for creoles I have some knowledge of, Caribbean creoles are all SVO (as are the related African West coast English based creoles such as Krio), and afaik Tok Pisin is as well (as the name itself shows). A quick google shows that Juba Arabic is also SVO, as is Sangho (also African) and Bislama (Pacific). In fact, I have yet to encounter any SVO creole.


JAL

A couple of SOV pidgins are Russenorsk and the Russo-Chinese pidgin of Kjaxta. This is curious as all the source languages are SVO. The most likely explanation is that it derives from even earlier Russo-Altaic pidgins, adopting the SOV order of Altaic. That is, Russians must have got the idea that "foreigners use SOV" and carried it over to other pidgins.

zompist wrote:A couple of SOV pidgins are Russenorsk and the Russo-Chinese pidgin of Kjaxta. (...)

Interesting, thanks.


JAL

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niger%E2% ... Word_order says at least some scientists believe Niger-Congo started out SVO and then switched into SOV in many branches. The opposite theory is, of course, that it was the other way around.

There are some languages that appear to have had SOV without case marking, I think late Akkadian. It lost case marking but continued to use the SOV order it had developed from a Sumerian substrate.

I'll look into Sorbian and Niger-Congo.

This is just a wild hunch, but I have only ever created SOV conlangs at least since the late 1990s and to me it's alkways seemed like the natural word order. A lot of my languages use constructions like saumfuna sa-kia sa-kuniti "The monkey (saumfuna) held the lamp (kia) in its hands (niti)", where the noun class prefix of sa- "monkey" is repeated throughout the phrase. But this evolved from a definiteness system, i.e. originally the meaning was "the monkey held *its* lamp in *its* hands", and if a noun was not definite then it would not have the prefix. e.g. if that old stage of grammar still was valid, you could say saumfuna pauyu tuspipsa "the monkey gave a dog a pineapple", with indefinites for both the verb and the noun (yes this language has definiteness on verbs when they have indirect objects).

I odnt know if this is realistic at all but it's always made sense to me and it might be the source of some languages changing to SOV, even if without the noun class prefixes.

English generally has (short) modifiers before their heads ... objects can somewhat be thought of as modifiers of their heads. Imagine if this were to run away on its own ...

*A babysitter sits babies > A babysitter babysits.
A train drivier drives trains > *A train driver train-drives.
A bear hunter hunts bears > *A bear hunter bear-hunts.