Comment by sparkie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sparkie | Hacker News Reader

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Not strict, but there is underlying structure.

It's not really practical, but it is interesting to compare it structurally to programming languages.

A verb (or verbal adjective) basically forms the "root" of a clause, and typically appears at the end of it. If we related that to the concept of a function, it would be like writing them in postfix form, with whatever comes before it acting as the arguments to it.

    (args)func

    (WORDS)VERB

Other parts of the clause are suffixed with a spoken "particle", which denotes its purpose in the sentence. These kind of resemble optional/named parameters/keyword arguments, where we can specify them out of canonical order - but the particle behaves like the named parameter to specify which it is, and they too appear in postfix position.

    (arg1:subject, arg2:object)VERB

    ;eg
    (NOUN:ga, NOUN:wo)VERB
    (NOUN:wo, NOUN:ga)VERB

Both examples mean the same, but the former would be more typical, and the latter less common.

A verb clause which appears before a noun modifies the noun, which bears similarity to a subexpression.

    (NOUN:wa, ((NOUN:ni)VERB NOUN):wo)VERB

Some particles modify a sentence and come after the verb - for example, to make it a question it's followed by a particle like `ka`, `no`, `ne` or `na`. These might resembled keywords - again appearing in a posfix position.

    (NOUN:ga)VERB ka

Compared with a typical programming language, Japanese is structured the opposite way - from right to left.

> A verb (or verbal adjective) basically forms the "root" of a clause, and typically appears at the end of it.

> Compared with a typical programming language, Japanese is structured the opposite way - from right to left.

How consistent is that across different types of phrases?

English is generally described as being strongly right-headed. But that's really a statement about English noun phrases. Prepositional phrases are left-headed. Determiner phrases, if that's your thing, are left-headed. Verbs are normally positioned between their subject and object, with other modifiers generally after the object.

I had a Chinese tutor who complained that everything in Chinese was the other way around compared to English, but as far as I can tell the odds are about 50-50 that any given structure will match or reverse. Mandarin sentences are SVO just like English. Mandarin prepositions go after their nouns instead of before. Mandarin adjectives go before their nouns. Mandarin noun compounds work the same way as English noun compounds. (牙刷 "tooth brush" is a brush, not a tooth.) Mandarin verbs have indirect objects before the verb instead of after. Mandarin discourse particles occur at the end of the sentence instead of the beginning.† Mandarin relative clauses work just like English noun phrases, which is funny because English relative clauses have their own bespoke ordering. (English: the man who has five sisters; Mandarin: has five sisters who [the] man.)

The big lesson I drew from this is "it doesn't make a lot of sense to describe languages overall as having a particular orientation". Is Japanese more consistent, or is orientation more sensitive to the specific structures you're using?

† Note that "beginning" and "end" aren't the only options. In classical Latin and Greek, particles like this always appear as the second word in a sentence.

Japanese is consistent about the verb (or adjective, adverb) coming last in the clause/sentence (besides certain sentence-ending particles). There are no "particles" necessary on verbs because they're always in the right position.

The subject/object/means/destination/etc are flexible and can appear in any order - but typically subject appears before object - `NOUN ga NOUN wo VERB`, `NOUN ga NOUN ni VERB` (where `ga` denotes the subject), whereas `NOUN wo NOUN ga VERB` would be atypical, but not incorrect.

When a verb (or adjective/adverb) appears before a noun, as in `VERB NOUN`, it modifies the noun - acting like an adjective - `VERB NOUN` is like "NOUN that/which VERBS". All adjectives work this way - ADJ NOUN, because verbs and adjectives are not really disjoint word classes in Japanese. Even the noun adjectives ("na-adjectives") function this way - they appear as `NOUN na NOUN`, but `na` is secretly a verb disguised as a particle. Examples:

    sora ga aoi             (The sky is blue)
    aoi sora                (Blue sky)    [i-adjective]
    sora ga kirei desu      (The sky is pretty)
    kirei na sora           (Pretty sky)  [na-adjective]
    sora ga haiiro ni naru  (The sky turns grey)
    haiiro ni naru sora     (Sky which turns gray) [verb clause as adjective]

Spoken Japanese is very context sensitive, so things can be omitted if they're already known to the listener - this can include the verb, and any of the particles.

Verbs can appear out of order - for example at the start of a sentence - but the meaning is understood based on tone or pause in the speech - basically, if what were being spoken were to be written it would be with a comma after the verb. `VERB, NOUN`

Example:

    watashi wa hara ga hetta (I'm hungry).
    hara ga hetta, watashi   (Hungry, I am).
    hara ga heru watashi     (Me who is hungry) [no pause or comma]

Japanese is often described as "strictly head final". However, there are some exceptions such as head-initial phrases with modifiers like "dake", "bakari", "goro", "gurai" and "hodo".

Also, the morphology in verb inflection and case declination is often head-initial, if it makes sense to say that about morphology. Word formation seems to be kinda mixed.

But Japanese syntax is a lot more consistently head-final than with how many European languages have their parameter setting.

English is mixed head-initial and head-final, for example objects go after verbs (head-initial) but adjectives go before nouns (head-final). Japanese is strictly head-final.

> for example objects go after verbs (head-initial)

There would be a better argument that this was an example of left-headedness if subjects also went after verbs.

That’s part of why English is mixed.

It's more like a stack language like FORTH.

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