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Comment by hiAndrewQuinn | Hacker News Reader

Over 80% of the world's languages are classified as SVO or SOV, actually, and probably over 90% of all first language speakers today speak one of these two. Their overwhelming dominance compared to the other four possibilities have led researchers to conclude there may actually be a cognitive benefit to putting the subject first.

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arabic can be VSO or SVO. i'm rather new to the langauge but tend to prefer VSO when writing, even as a native english speaker, which gets me to wonder if theres a correlation somewhere between arabic proficiency, other known languages, and VSO/SVO preference. my preference might come from the relative conciseness of VSO in arabic though; often placing the subject before the verb is a bit redundant given context. i'm sure theres a correlation to programming language typing schema somewhere there :)

VSO is kinda like AT&T-syntax x86 assembly, if you identify subject with source and object with destination:

    add %rdi, %rax

It's good to combined both to form a sort of palindrome to chain ideas together. This is explained in more detail in Style: Toward Clarity and Grace by Joseph M. Williams.

Or, in "Intel Latin" (machine code),

  01001000 00000001 11111000

adding to this, besides VSO and SVO. Arabic can also write in OSV and OVS, not very popular in day-to-day use, but is often found in more traditional contexts. What is more interesting is: Diacritical marks (aka vowels) in Arabic can completely alter what is subject and object!

They are a bit similar to strong types in programming, you can have one sentence, and by changing its marks/diacritics (specifically called short vowels), you change what gets to be subject or object.

This is why Arabic poetry (especially Pre-Isalmic) is very interesting in its expressivenss and structural complexity even in the shortest poems (reminds me of code-golfing).

Interesting see I. Don't Yoda harshly judge. ;o)

There probably is. For me receiving the subject after anything else requires me to buffer everything else awaiting the subject in order to parse it correctly. My brain seems to naturally work in cause->effect order so it's naturally easiest for me to process the cause first and then the effect. I don't think everyone works the same way, but there is definitely an order of information flow that is most efficient for me. I also generally seem to process things somewhat like an LLM would...

"My brain seems to naturally work in cause->effect order"

You must be Jesus. Most brains observe events first and use that information to reason about their causes.

Ha. That for me actually seems to be impaired, which is why I had to do special education. These days I usually have enough of a knowledge base to build hypotheses for most situations, but it was far more difficult for me to reason about the cause of things that I had nothing else to relate to. Stuff like this is probably why autism tends to be treated like some sort of super learning impediment.

Anyway, I think about causes first when I am either performing actions or processing other performances of actions. It's one of the reasons why I can appear to be good at empathy to certain people, because I can usually nail down the exact reason for something far better than others can guess why it maybe could have happened. It's weird how that works sometimes.

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