Week 4: Word order is a decision

Six possible orders, two of which cover most of the world's languages. What yours predicts about the rest of your grammar, whether you meant it to or not

15 March 2027

George R. R. Martin’s novels contain only a scattering of Dothraki — names, a few nouns, no grammar. When HBO needed a working language, the Language Creation Society ran a competition and David J. Peterson won it, which meant taking those fragments as fixed data and building a grammar that did not contradict any of them. He later did the same again, at greater length, for High Valyrian.

That is the ordinary condition of this work: you are always building outward from constraints somebody else set, including the ones you set yourself in week one. Word order is the decision with the widest consequences.

There are six logically possible orders of subject, object and verb. Two of them — subject-object-verb and subject-verb-object — account for the great majority of the world’s languages. Verb-initial orders are a respectable minority. Object-initial orders are extremely rare, which is why Okrand gave Klingon one. Greenberg’s observation, still one of the most useful results in typology, is that these choices tend to occur together: knowing where a language puts its verb lets you predict, well above chance, where it puts its adpositions, its relative clauses and its adjectives.

You can ignore those correlations. Natural languages sometimes do. But that should be a deliberate choice, made now rather than discovered later.

Outline#

• the six orders, and why two of them do most of the work
• Greenberg’s correlations: what your verb position predicts about everything else
• Peterson, thirty-odd words of Dothraki, and building outward from fixed data
• fixing your order, and working within what it implies