Object Verb Subject

Notice: This article is in the progress of being extended. For an earlier version of the article that is not in an "under construction" state: Object Verb Subject (Revision as of 22:45, 12 Feb 2004)

Table of contents

1 Explanation 2 Long Example 3 See also

Explanation

This part between lines is for people from non-English speaking countries.--------------------- What is an object, subject, verb? The subject is roughly said who does an action in a sentence.
The object is roughly said what undergoes the action in a sentence.
The verb is of course what the subject does to the object.

OVS languages are a type of languages when classifying languages according to the dominant sequence of these constituents. In this case the sequence of the constituents Object Verb Subject. This sequence is the rarest. Examples of human languages that actually use it include Guarijio and Hixkaryana.

This sequence was chosen for the artificial language Klingon, a language spoken by the extraterrestrial Klingon race in the fictional universe of the Star Trek series, in order to make the language sound deliberately alien and counterintuitive to the human mind.

The other permutations of expression in the order of most common to languages to rarest to languages:

• Subject Object Verb (SOV) Sam oranges ate. (e.g. Persian, Latin, Turkish, Korean, Japanese)
• Subject Verb Object (SVO) Sam ate oranges. (e.g. English, German, Kiswahili, Chinese)
• Verb Subject Object (VSO) Ate Sam oranges. (e.g. Welsh, Hawaiian and Arabic)
• Verb Object Subject (VOS) Ate oranges Sam. (e.g. Fijian)
• Object Subject Verb (OSV) Oranges Sam ate. (e.g. Xavante)
• Object Verb Subject (OVS) Oranges ate Sam. (e.g. the artificial language Klingon)

Long Example

• Word-order in Latin