Kirilo81:There may be a bit of a bias here in an English forum, don't you think?

No doubt you're right to be skeptical, but if I may quote from Lingvistikoj aspektoj de Esperanto: "La plej ofta tipo en la lingvoj de la mondo estas la verb-dua tipo aŭ tipo SVO. Al tiu tipo, kompreneble, apartenas Esperanto." - approved by the UEA, written by John Wells. ...who is British. The bias may run deep indeed.

Eltwish:

Kirilo81:There may be a bit of a bias here in an English forum, don't you think?

No doubt you're right to be skeptical, but if I may quote from Lingvistikoj aspektoj de Esperanto: "La plej ofta tipo en la lingvoj de la mondo estas la verb-dua tipo aŭ tipo SVO. Al tiu tipo, kompreneble, apartenas Esperanto." - approved by the UEA, written by John Wells. ...who is British. The bias may run deep indeed.

Wells might also be a bit outdated, the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) has found 565 languages with SOV order compared to 488 SVO languages. SOV languages are more widely distributed than SVO languages.

The most frequent of the six orders is SOV and it is widely distributed across the globe. Perhaps the most striking region in which SOV predominates is an area covering most of Asia, except in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. It is also overwhelmingly the dominant order in New Guinea, most of the exceptions being along the north coast. It is the most common order among languages in Australia which have a dominant order at all, although even in languages in which SOV is dominant, the order is generally flexible. It is clearly the dominant order in North America outside of the Pacific Northwest and Mesoamerica.

The map shows three areas where SVO order predominates: (i) an area covering much of sub-Saharan Africa, though with a scattering of SOV and VSO languages; (ii) an area extending from China and southeast Asia south into the Austronesian languages of Indonesia and the western Pacific; and (iii) Europe and around the Mediterranean. SVO order is not common outside these areas.

Wells also said that no OSV language had been found but WALS has four OSV languages:

• Warao
  
• Nadëb
  
• Wik Ngathana
  
• Tobati

Kirilo81:

sudanglo:But as has been pointed out in this thread already, the default SVO order makes sentences like John batis Fred clear anyway.

There may be a bit of a bias here in an English forum, don't you think?

You don't think there is a (quasi-) default word-order in practical Esperanto, Kirilo? Not 100% but, say, 90+% of sentences using SVO?

etala:Wells might also be a bit outdated, the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) has found 565 languages with SOV order compared to 488 SVO languages. SOV languages are more widely distributed than SVO languages.

John wouldn't dispute any of what you've written, except for the "bit" qualifier in "bit outdated". He published the book in 1978 using the knowledge that was around at the time, and said to me three years ago that the book was massively out of date and should be completely reworked. He hasn't the time to do it but it would be an excellent project for a young linguist to undertake.

Timtim:

Kirilo81:

sudanglo:But as has been pointed out in this thread already, the default SVO order makes sentences like John batis Fred clear anyway.

There may be a bit of a bias here in an English forum, don't you think?

You don't think there is a (quasi-) default word-order in practical Esperanto, Kirilo? Not 100% but, say, 90+% of sentences using SVO?

Yes, SVO is the unmarked word order, and because of that the probability that in "John batis Fred" the one beaten is Fred is higher than the other way around, but there is no certainty, just because 90% is not 100%.

Contrast the case of the object with the one of the predicative. Although there is no explicit rule in the Fundamento or a Lingva Respondo, in at least 99,9% of the attestations the predicative comes after the subject, so with the sentence "Kŝat estas Ĉot", containing unknown words, there is no doubt that it means "Cshat is a chot" (the interpretation "Chot is a Cshat" would even be ungrammatical im my opinion).

Number of languages isn't necessarily so meaningful; more meaningful would be a list of how many people *speak* a SOV versus SVO language in the world.

For that matter, I think the placement of the verb is almost irrelevant. English is a SVO language but if I said "Erin Fred hit", it would be much more likely to be understood as "Erin hit Fred" than "Fred hit Erin".

Since OVS, OSV, etc is a vanishingly rare situation in world languages, I think that so long as the subject comes before the object in the sentence, the first noun (proper name in this case) would be almost certain to be understood as the subject, and the second noun as the object. That is, of course, unless the grammar of the sentence is complicated by other factors.

Apologies for climbing back on my hobbyhorse of minimising potential misunderstanding among people of different cultures and expectations, but the whole point of having non fixed word order is for people to communicate clearly while using whatever word order they are comfortable with, and the language should have ways for people to do so without the potential of misunderstanding.

The argument that SVO is the default simply avoids the issue, and opens the door to asking "if that is so then why bother with an accusative case to mark the object"?

erinja:Number of languages isn't necessarily so meaningful; more meaningful would be a list of how many people *speak* a SOV versus SVO language in the world.

For that matter, I think the placement of the verb is almost irrelevant. English is a SVO language but if I said "Erin Fred hit", it would be much more likely to be understood as "Erin hit Fred" than "Fred hit Erin".

Since OVS, OSV, etc is a vanishingly rare situation in world languages, I think that so long as the subject comes before the object in the sentence, the first noun (proper name in this case) would be almost certain to be understood as the subject, and the second noun as the object. That is, of course, unless the grammar of the sentence is complicated by other factors.

Counting only the ten most widely spoken languages, I count some 30% (of world population) natively speaking SVO and some 10% (of world population) natively speaking SOV. But this covers only 40% of the total.

Kirilo81:Contrast the case of the object with the one of the predicative. Although there is no explicit rule in the Fundamento or a Lingva Respondo, in at least 99,9% of the attestations the predicative comes after the subject, so with the sentence "Kŝat estas Ĉot", containing unknown words, there is no doubt that it means "Cshat is a chot" (the interpretation "Chot is a Cshat" would even be ungrammatical im my opinion).

I am not sure about the 99.9%, but Z also used Verb-Predicative-Subject (without doubt less frequently than SVP). For example in the Antauxparolo we find "estas plej necesa antaux cxio unu kondicxo" (VPS) or "estas bone cxiam peni" (VPS).
This surely is not stadistical data, but I don't have an Esperanto corpus with markup.

Further more VPS seems to be quite common when the subject is a whole sentence: "estas necese, ke", etc. But in these cases the VPS might occur, because there is a cataphoric (and at the same time phonetically not realised) subject at the beginning ("it is necessary, that" ). No idea, though.

Bemused:Apologies for climbing back on my hobbyhorse of minimising potential misunderstanding among people of different cultures and expectations, but the whole point of having non fixed word order is for people to communicate clearly while using whatever word order they are comfortable with, and the language should have ways for people to do so without the potential of misunderstanding.

The argument that SVO is the default simply avoids the issue, and opens the door to asking "if that is so then why bother with an accusative case to mark the object"?

It's a perfectly reasonable question. The accusative case makes the object clear in situations where the sentence is more complex than a subject, a verb, and an object. There has been more than one time when I've used -n to figure out exactly what was going on in a sentence, because otherwise I wasn't sure how to match things up, or how things go together. Even toki pona, an exceedingly minimalist language, includes an object marker.

There's an excellent essay, I think it's in Lingvo kaj Vivo, about the importance of redundancy in languages. That is, when people speak a language they might make a mistake, or you might mishear, or the surroundings might be noisy and it's hard to understand. By having built-in redundancy, even if something is misheard, the meaning is still clear. So, for example, if the usual word order is subject-verb-object, and if the object is also marked, then even if the word order is varied you still know what the object is, and if the speaker makes a mistake, you still have a pretty good guess as to the object. This applies to other things, like plural endings being repeated on an adjective and its noun (bonaj hundoj, rather than bona hundoj).

nornen:I am not sure about the 99.9%, but Z also used Verb-Predicative-Subject (without doubt less frequently than SVP). For example in the Antauxparolo we find "estas plej necesa antaux cxio unu kondicxo" (VPS) or "estas bone cxiam peni" (VPS).
This surely is not stadistical data, but I don't have an Esperanto corpus with markup.

Further more VPS seems to be quite common when the subject is a whole sentence: "estas necese, ke", etc. But in these cases the VPS might occur, because there is a cataphoric (and at the same time phonetically not realised) subject at the beginning ("it is necessary, that" ). No idea, though.

Your totally right, I was a bit unclear in my post (I just thought about it afterwards and was too lazy to change it, my bad): I was talking about the "NOUN estas NOUN" cases of predicative, the other cases with other parts of speech or with objects are formally always clear and in fact you can easily find attestations like idioto mi opiniis lin.
This makes the point about a bound word order in the case of "NOUN estas NOUN" even stronger.