"So, I'm in this hotel, right? And there's this shop across the street, yeah? And it's got this <i>suit</i>, man - and I'm, like, I really wanna try that on."<p>Order of information is mainly prescribed by <i>formal</i> rules of expression; language itself is amenable to its users' idiosyncratic preferences and priorities.<p>At least, English is.<p>Can anyone who knows Japanese comment on whether the reverse order is possible / plausible there?
Every time that image goes viral, it's fun to see how many people in the comments are surprised by this. You're the lucky 10,000!<p>"Why is Japanese like this" Not just Japanese! Subject-Object-Verb is the most common word order by number of languages and by number of language families.
(Though going by number of speakers, I would guess Subject-Verb-Object might win... European, Chinese, Arabic are all SVO)
This also happens in German, as the key verbs usually come at the end of sentence.<p>So until the very last word many interpretations might be possible, depending on the sentence construction.
> The Japanese mostly think like Yoda. They first establish some concepts and facts, like when you're pushing data to the stack of a scientific calculator, and finish it with the intended action.<p>Thanks, this actually explains a lot. Korean is like this too. I'm realizing that a lot of communication difficultly comes from my aging mother speaking more slowly with words coming out this way. I get impatient thinking 'what are you talking about? get to the point' and frustrated if it takes very long or if I'm already busy or in a rush. It's like watching a movie with no context and an extended set up--not great if you weren't expecting the pace.<p>It definitely does extend beyond sentence structure. There will be preamble that sets the stage and covers considered adjacent points, then finally get to the ask/point.
From a sequence modelling perspective it was common to train models for language translation (long before LLMs) on the assumption that, over a long text, the cursor in one document follows the cursor in another document. There seems to be a limited amount of variation between grammars of different languages [1] but one of those variations is that you can basically reverse the words in a sentence.<p>[1] see <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar</a>