We're Waiting for the End of the Sentence | Hacker News Reader

We're Waiting for the End of the Sentence

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34 pointsthinkingemote17 comments

"So, I'm in this hotel, right? And there's this shop across the street, yeah? And it's got this suit, man - and I'm, like, I really wanna try that on."

Order of information is mainly prescribed by formal rules of expression; language itself is amenable to its users' idiosyncratic preferences and priorities.

At least, English is.

Can anyone who knows Japanese comment on whether the reverse order is possible / plausible there?

Somewhat possible but not particularly plausible.

Japanese is a SOV language, so the verb generally goes at the end. You couldn't move that all the way to the front. The "subject" can be implicit and Japanese also distinguishes between the overall topic, marked with 'wa', and the actual subject (i.e., the agent that does something).

There's a fairly neutral order for many other parts of the sentence components. You can shuffle them around a bit, but it ends up changing the emphasis. As a rough analogy, you normally put size adjectives before colours: "I caught the big red balloon." Inverting this either sounds wrong or puts emphasis on the other adjective: "I caught the red big balloon" suggests that "big balloons" are a distinct category known to the speaker.

While it is true that basic sentence components like direct objects or phrases that modify the verb can be moved around without changing the meaning of the sentence in Japanese, there is a very strict head-final requirement for phrases and dependent clauses that modify nouns that makes larger sentences, especially heavily nested ones like the OP's example, virtually guaranteed to flow the opposite direction of the equivalent sentence in English.

Said example contains two dependent clauses, one inside the other. In English, dependent clauses and phrases come after the noun they modify ("suit [that] I saw", "shop that is"), while in Japanese they must come before (「見たスーツ」, 「あるお店」). Thus the resulting translation is an exact mirror of the original. This head-finality opposing head-initiality is the main reason Japanese sentences tend to flow in the opposite direction of English ones, rather than simply SOV vs SVO.

(The same also applies to the order of words within ホテルのむかいに vs. across the street from the hotel, I just don't know of a convenient single phrase to describe both constructions).

I enjoy the mental imagine of this live translation widget making every Japanese person sound like Luis from Ant-Man.

I’ll preface that I’m absolutely not an expert in Japanese, but in my amateur understanding I think the same sort of thing you showed is possible, at least in casual speech. I hear this sort of construction quite often: “着てみたい、あのスーツ。” or roughly “I want to try it on, that suit,” reversing the verb/object order from normal.

An interesting thought, but you've really just made 3-4 SVO sentences rather than 1 SOV sentence.

Fair point. I should have posted this as a reply to the post that invoked cultural thought-patterns. Specifically grammatical conventions harder to break, they are.

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!

"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.

So until the very last word many interpretations might be possible, depending on the sentence construction.

I dated a live translator and she complained about a single word at the end could either leave the whole meaning of the sentence suspended, or revert it at the last minute.

As a German learner I always struggle with holding the second half of a word in my head for the length of a sentence.

Fun language.

We joke that it is a twisted way to force people to keep attention.

> 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.

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.

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.

That style is not restricted to Asian speakers. Reading (a translation of) Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude" with its deep recursive layers of introducing a topic and then giving the backstory thereof - the firing squad from the first paragraph gets explained a hundred or so pages later - I immediately recognized my wife's normal pattern of discourse. I then congratulated her on having a Nobel prize winning speaking style :-)

I'm afraid I'm cheating -- I've never read the book but I am watching the Netflix series.

So I can't say if it's a faithful or reasonable adaptation of the book, but it is quite well done. I suspect that it's less deeply recursive than the book, but it captures a sense of magical realism for which I've heard the book praised. The camerawork is remarkable and the performances are excellent.

I often wonder how this changes the way tension is built during spoken dialogue. Are there minor moments of suspense when someone lists a bunch of names and the listener waits to hear what verb is happening to them?

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.

[1] see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar

I'll be honest, y'know the hotel, the shop across the street has a suit I wanna try on.

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