Is all language linear to a native speaker?
I hope this question will become clear by the following example:
When I state "Mother's Cooking," As a native English speaker, to me the sentence fragment is read kind of "in order" so to speak, each word being read in the order it is presented for me to understand the sentence.
However, when this sentence fragment is translated to Chinese, it becomes:
妈妈 做 的 菜
māma zuò de cài
Which I literally translate to:
"Mother's cooking of Dish"
and in practice I begin to learn to look for the phrase after "de" then "go back" to the "māma zuò" to figure out the whole sentence. Does this make sense? I have to go to the end of the sentence and then refer back to the part "in front" of it so to speak?
What is going on here, and is this perceived as such by native speakers? Do all native speakers feel like their language flows linearly ? I think I read somewhere that some languages start their sentences with the verbs at the front of the sentence (Arabic?)
I'm hoping that a linguist will be able to explain to me what phenomenon I'm experiencing.
Thanks in advance!
@lou 's disclaimer. I am speaking as a native speaker of Chinese and English, with a non-fluency in a smattering of other languages, not a linguist.
English is kind of weird. When we say "the cat ate the dog", we understand that the feline came out at the end unscathed only because of word order. If we swapped the two nouns, the dog ate the cat, the meaning is reverse.
But this doesn't imply a linear relationship. Take "the cat was eaten by the dog". We now have to mentally swap who did what despite word order.
Going back to your example sentence, I'm going to cheat and swap your noun "cooking" with the noun "dish", promising only the cooking meaning of dish and not the ceramic platter. Because the noun cooking is hiding the verb of "cook", which becomes unfair when you're talking about other languages that didn't choose to noun-i-fy their verb the same way.
So in your example, one could just as easily say 媽媽的菜, or Mother's cooking/mother's dish, the same as english. Or to maintain the same structure as 媽媽做的菜, we would say "the dish which mother made", or more literally and more stilted manner: mom's homemade/handmaid dish.
You see, what is happening here is that colloquially we understand the apostrophe s to mean cooking "which originated from the hand of" mom. In a different context, one where mother is a guest at a cook off and it's clear she didn't make anything today, only there to judging cooking samples from many others, "Mother's dish" could mean the one she deemed prize worthy. If she were captured by aliens and assigned nutrition, Mother's dish is simply the one alloted to her without her choosing. In all examples of mom's homemade cooking, cook off and Alien canteen, 媽媽的菜 make sense in each context the same way as the English "Mom's dish".
The 's is doing a lot of hidden heavy lifting in your original, which 媽媽做的菜 explicated: it is a hand made dish, made by mother. This is also implied by your choice of noun, cooking, which hides the verb "to cook".
TLDR you choose a very specific sample with loaded hidden meanings, so it's unfair to draw general rules about another language from your sample.
Languages are fluid and every culture has its own way of saying the same thing a hundred ways, to add colour and emphasis.
Another example in ancient Greek:
The cat ate the dog, we know the cat is doing the eating because it's ò cat (subject) and τὸν dog (object).
Exact same sentence structure, but now the dog is ò dog, and so we know the dog is doing the eating. The same sentence can be rearranged with no loss of meaning:
(1) Subject dog (2) object cat (3) verb eat
The sentence has been completely rearranged and yet the meaning remains: the dog ate the cat. English is actually the weird one here where order mandates meaning: "the dog the cat ate" means the opposite thing! In ancient Greek (and I suspect a lot of other languages where order doesn't matter as much due to very clear particles or non placement dependent grammatical features), one is then more free to rearrange sentences for emphasis. In this example, the writer wants the reader to understand that the most important thing here is the dog has done something.
I suspect that all native speakers feel their (human) language flow naturally and beautifully and logically, because languages are made by humans who wish to express themselves in a flowing manner, beautifully and logically.
But I also suspect that linearity is not a commonly prized trait in a language. In Japanese, it's very common for sentences to lack many of the blocks that English deem vital, because it'll be clear in context.
There's a sad-funny scene in an anime season finale, where a boy and a girl are watching summer fireworks together, which is traditionally a very romantic setting for two people to confess their feelings and move from friends to lovers. The girl is madly in love with the most oblivious boy in the universe. Her heart is pounding and she's thinking about confessing her love. Her internal monologue goes:
And then out loud, she finishes her very naturally flowing and beautiful sentence with the sentence ending verb
The out loud portion, hence, has no subject or object. It works in Japanese because she knows the context is very clear. 'I love you' is clearly and straightforwardly communicated.
So then when he turns to her, leans in close to her ear, and whispers
He puts emphasis on himself, and repeats the utterance of love.....
😂 But there's no subject here.... Her confession only had the verb and his response lacks a subject. He goes on to clarify that he thought she was saying how much she loves the fireworks, and that's why he responds with, yes, indeed I also love the fireworks. (For folks who already know which anime this is, here's the scene - for folks who don't, I won't spoil it for you)
So, no, linearity isn't universal, and we would have a less funny world if all languages valued the same things. :')
It may be more helpful to translate the phrase as "the food that Mom cooks," as in 妈妈做的菜很好吃 ("The food that Mom cooks is delicious"). Here, it functions like a relative pronoun in English (e.g. which, that, who, etc.):
你买的车太贵了 The car (that) you bought is too expensive.
我喜欢的女孩不喜欢我 The girl (that) I like doesn't like me.
桌上的书是小说 The book (which is) on the table is a novel.
Generally speaking, in English, nouns are modified by simple and compound adjectives on the left and by most other things (e.g. relative clauses and adjectival prepositional phrases) on the right. In French, many adjectives that English speakers expect before a noun go after it, as in "le chat noir" ("the black cat). In Chinese, when modifying a noun similarly to how you would in English, the modifiers go to the left of the noun. In fact, if you continue to learn Chinese, you will find that there are a lot of phrases and sentence structures that go in reverse of the order you are accustomed to, but at least it usually follows subject - verb - object order, which not every language does.
People learning a language with a word order different from that of their mother tongue tend to find it difficult at first, and may even complain that they need to "think backwards" in order to produce or understand phrases in the target language, but it's really just a difference of convention, and they usually get used to it once they learn to think in the target language instead of translating into and out of their native language.
I've heard that in Latin, due to the heavy inflection, you can basically put the words in any order you like without affecting the meaning of the sentence, but I don't have any first-hand knowledge of that.
This is true, Latin does have free word order, but its default word order was SOV and presumably variations on word order had pragmatic or information-structural effects on the interpretation of the resulting utterance. This is generally the case with languages that have free word order (and tbqh is even true of constructions that change word order in languages with relatively fixed word order like English).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_typology#Syntactic_typology
I learned a verb–subject–object language to relative fluency and I agree with what you've written here. You get used to the difference of order and after that it doesn't really affect how you "linearly" you can process sentences after that.
It's interesting to note that while languages do have a dominant word ordering, many languages use one or more alternate orderings for playful or emphatic use like poetry or casual conversation.
In Tagalog for example you can put actor focus or the object focus first to emphasize that it was a specific person doing something or a specific object that was acted upon:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagalog_grammar#Word_order
This is actually also true in Greek, including modern Greek. SVO is still formally the most common, but you can generally mix and match depending on what you actually want to emphasise in your sentence. E.g. considering the following elements:
[Ena] milo (Obj. "[an] apple")
Efage (Verb "he/she/it ate")
O Nikos (Subj. (a name))
The following sentences are all equally valid:
You can pick one depending on what you want to emphasise; the earlier the word appears in the sentence, the more you want to emphasise it. Some of these can sound a little poetic sometimes, but they are still valid if that's what you're trying to emphasise.
Knowing such a highly inflected language, I'd say that (in my personal experience) I never had to "overthink" phrasing in any language I've "experienced", regardless of its word order. "Yoda speech" to me comes just as naturally as its inverse, etc. If anything, I mix and match for funsies on occasion.
So disclaimer, I did my undergrad degree in linguistics and my master's in computational linguistics. So if I say something that's kinda opaque, assume I'm one of these guys from xkcd and don't be ashamed to ask for clarification. Anything you don't understand is a failure on my part to explain clearly.
There are a couple ways to approach this question. The first, and most straightforward, is: yes, everyone feels this way about their native language compared to non-native languages they're learning. Your brain is very used to parsing things in the order your native language does, so it feels natural to you. Someone who speaks a language with a different default word order will feel the same way about theirs. Adapting to differences between your native language and the language you're learning is one of the hard parts of learning a language, so this is totally natural. This feeling of weirdness will almost certainly go away (or at least lessen considerably) as you become more proficient in your target language.
The more complex approach is that neither English nor Mandarin is linear in this respect, because there's a bunch of non-linear underlying structure. This is the "syntax" that syntacticians study and theorize about. There is a lot of arguing over the precise nature of this underlying structure and where it comes from and how universal it is across languages, but you don't need to even dip your toes in those arguments as a layperson. As a layperson, what matters is that the rules we unconsciously follow when speaking and interpreting language can't be modeled purely linearly. If you're familiar with computer science, natural languages are not even context-free, much less linear.
Now, it's true that spoken language must be produced linearly, as a sequence of sounds. But this is not actually a feature of Language generally, it's just an accident of our anatomy. As @bloup pointed out in their comment, sign languages are more than happy to produce morphemes (the building blocks of meaning) simultaneously, since that's much more doable than it is with a single human mouth. Hearing people fluent in sign language also sometimes use sign language as they're speaking spoken language to provide extra content if they're speaking with someone who understands both (a classmate of mine in undergrad did their independent research project on this phenomenon).
Also, as someone who studied some Mandarin, I'd advise against relying on interpreting 的 as "of". It's an easy crutch to rely on because sometimes it totally seems to work like that, but it can make some other structures harder to parse. For instance, in this example, the 的 is probably better translated as "that", since 妈妈做的菜 is more "food that mother makes/made". This doesn't change your "linear" question, since it's still "backwards" compared to English word order, but in some examples like this it can make the little translation in your head look a little more natural in English until you become more comfortable with Mandarin word order.
The concept of “linear” you have is entirely because you are used to your native language and not exposed enough to languages that use different structures. The ordering of words is ultimately arbitrary.
You’ve probably heard somewhere that there is a specific ordering of adjectives that you should use. If you don’t put your adjectives in that order, your sentence will feel stilted to native English speakers. But there is no formal rule about what order to put adjectives in. I was never taught that order in school. It’s a pattern that just sort of appeared one day naturally over time.
Every aspect of every language is built this way. And that includes overall word order.
There is a rule on order in English, and we adhere to it even if it's not explicitly taught.
It goes - non-physical/opinion-based quality, size, age, shape/physical quality, colour, origin, material, type, purpose.
E.g. the weird, green French spoon, not the French green weird spoon. The rough plastic cup, not the plastic rough cup. There may be some room for variation, ( e.g the beloved, sharp, old sewing scissors, could be the old, sharp, beloved sewing scissors, but not the old, sharp, sewing, beloved scissors) but this is the pattern it tends to follow. "The blue new car" sounds strange to native English-speakers, but "the new blue car" sounds correct. People learning English will know this as "OSASCOMP".
The things we do within our own languages that we don't even realize - it's interesting, isn't it!
The thing is, though, that it's not actually a rule, it's a convention. And the truth is that language is not made of rules, but of conventions. You can break from them, but doing so will lower the chances of your statements being understood the way you mean them to be. Foreign languages have different conventions because they grow in cultures that think differently, so you have to learn how to think in those ways to understand them.
This is what "rules" are in language. Languages absolutely have rules they follow -- rules that native speakers follow usually without thinking about them. They are no less rules because they aren't implemented from the top down externally (in fact, it's the "rules" that are established externally are usually fake and not actual rules or language). Calling them "conventions" implies that they're optional and extraneous to language, but they aren't. They can be super complex and allow some variation (as is the case for things like word order, even in English), but they exist. The fact that they change the meaning or impede understanding if you don't follow them (something adult native speakers pretty much never do on accident) means they do.
Insisting that these aren't "rules" and are just "conventions" is just insisting on making an arbitrary terminology distinction that doesn't match either how the word "rule" is used by your average person or how it's used by linguists studying these things (though tbf, linguists will usually call these features or attributes of the language rather than "rules"). The differences in grammatical rules or features between languages isn't because their speakers "think differently", it's because there is a huge variety in the number of ways language can work and which rules your language uses is ultimately arbitrary.
I am neither a linguist nor a scientist or specialist in any field that is relevant to linguistics. This comment is entirely based on opinion and intuition. It must not be understood as even remotely academic, scientific, or authoritative in any way shape or form.
I do not read in linear fashion. When I look at words, sentences, paragraphs, and pages, I start by scanning for keywords, verbs, repeated patterns, and formatting such as title, emphasis, quotes, sub headings, etc. That will guide my interpretation of the text.
Afterwards, I actually do a somewhat linear processing of the text, which is informed by the broader mental model that I constructed beforehand. However, that second pass only has the illusion of linearity, as I am merely repeating the scanning and hypothesis forming process on a smaller scale, down to the sentences and the particles that constitute them.
Reading, to me, is largely a process of continously scanning, hypothesis creation and hypothesis verification. I get the impression that that is true for all reading, but some languages make those mechanics more apparent than others depending on the languages the observer is familiar with.
To answer your question more precisely, it seems to me that languages are recorded and expressed by systems which are sequential in nature. That is the case of writing and speech. However, the ways in which we interact with those systems, while sequential themselves, do not necessary follow the same linearity they suggest.
I do not think that all speakers experience their language in a linear way. Sometimes we can anticipate what a sentence is going to say, and fill in blanks, but sometimes you have to read a whole sentence - or paragraph, or other structure - to understand the true meaning of it.
For example, in English, you can create sentences that are very difficult to read from beginning to end. Consider any of these grammatically correct sentences:
They are difficult to parse on first reading because we are filling in a linearity that doesn't exist and because words can be ambiguous. These are called "garden path sentences" by the way, if you want to look for other examples.
More generally, some languages have more of a tendency to be linear, and some have less tendency to be linear. English does tend to be quite linear, to the point that the order of the words is important in revealing the meaning:
I think the concept you are looking for is probably Word Order?
Interesting, I wonder if this is why English has a lot of punctuation? I have not considered the language bias of punctuation.
If you encode your language spatially instead of in audio, like in American Sign Language, it actually becomes possible to perform morphemes simultaneously, a phenomenon called synchronicity of syntax. In ASL a lot of the times to express adjectives and adverbs you can make a facial expression at the same time as you’re making the sign for the thing you’re describing. These are called “non-manual markers”
That's fascinating that in ASL one could literally layer meanings simultaneously. Kind of like how spoken language is stuck on one audio track while ASL can playback in stereo.
But the spoken language both have tone and facial expressions too to do the same thing?
Facial expressions in sign languages are often used to express more explicit aspects of meaning than in spoken languages, in which they're just an indicator of the speaker's mood. They're even used for grammatical purposes -- for instance, in ASL different facial expressions mark different types of questions. They're much more central to the actual linguistic portion of what a speaker is expressing rather than being an extraneous feature that provides context at most.
As for "tone of voice", my understanding is that it's not hard to reflect similar things as what it expresses in English through the way you sign something. We use the tools we have at our disposal, after all.
Fascinating thanks. I did not know that. I’ve always been enthralled by simple words or expressions that encapsulates a very complex emotion or meaning but imagine if we had a language that took advantage of all these nuances at the same time. Not just hints here and there but fully incorporated body movements, facial expressions, words, tone and so on. I know there’s an argument to be made that we already do this to a certain extent but still.
That leads me to another wondering. Are we even ready to understand each other that much?
Honestly, I think there's a reason languages tend to have ways to be vague about information -- doing that is useful. While sometimes we wish we could communicate everything we possibly could like it's telepathy, that's only sometimes. Language is a tool for communication. Just like you might want a valve on a pipe, you might not want to wholly communicate every little thing.
There's so many unique things like that to love about sign languages. I've heard about signs related to speed/frequency, where you can vary how quickly you perform the sign to more precisely show how fast you mean.
In some slavic languages word order does not matter, so it is less crucial to have the next word. You obviously still need the subject object and verb to understand what is going on, but subject, object and verb all get an ending that makes it clear what is happening and what to expect next.
I have noticed that because I am speaking more German and English than Polish nowadays, I sometimes impose the foreign word order when I speak Polish.
Interestingly, the above describes what Japanese do in the reading of Literary Chinese (kanbun). There is even a whole system of written aids which, among other things, ‘grammatically transforms Literary Chinese into Japanese word order’ [1].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanbun
That was a fascinating read, amazing
There’s nothing inherently linear or not about a particular order of words. Each word unveils more information, the order is arbitrary.
As a (sort of) native chinese reader, yes I do not have to “look back” at the beginning of the sentence to understand them.
My first language is Russian, which according to Wikipedia, is one of the few languages that can have words in basically any order without changing the meaning or the validity of the sentence. And yes, even though, this may sound complicated or confusing to someone who's learning the language, to a native speaker, even this somehow sounds like the sentence is always in the correct order. And when I'm speaking English, the order of the words sometimes differs from Russian, but it still feels in order - even though it would feel weird when translated literally to Russian.
It's actually surprisingly common for languages to have free word order like Russian! But each such language is going to have its own subtleties when it comes to how different word orders get used in practice. So the way Russian does it is still going to be different from even how related languages do it.
Maybe that's the case, I don't really know any languages besides Russian and English so I'm not sure, what I said was based purely on the Wikipedia page I linked which only lists a few languages as having free word order
Understandable, wikipedia pages on language and linguistics are sometimes pretty weak, and they tend to be biased towards western European languages as a rule.
As long as we all agree that ISO 8601 is the only sane way to officially record dates, I don't care what order the rest of the descriptors are in. 😂
Joking aside, I think that what we consider linear is often attributable to our expectation of the order of things. Sorry if like the grammatical "rule" of ablaut reduplication. Outside of specific technical domains that might have an objective linearity or order of descriptors, I think mostly it is our linguistic and cultural expectations that drive what makes sense in word order.
But I barely squeak by with my second language, so not an expert.
Agree that large-medium-small is the way that makes most sense. If the prevailing convention were small medium large, that would be okay too.
However, the tyranny of the mm/dd/yy in America (I am from the US) persists. If I am worried about ambiguity, I stick with the rational order (be the change you want to see in the world) but use an abbreviated word for the month to make sure the meaning is clear. So 2024-09-30 is okay because there is no 30th month, but 2024-Sep-10 because 9-10 goes either way.
The tyranny of mm/dd/yyyy is rough, but I find it's easier to get people who use it on board with yyyy-mm-dd because it also uses month before day. As long as you write out four digits for the year, it can't be confused with a month or day, and Americans will then assume day follows month. East asia already writes dates in this order, and I've found even Europeans tend to be receptive to it in at least some contexts when you bring up arguments about sorting (which are the reason large-medium-small is better than small-medium-large).
I think when only humans are your target audience, abbreviating the month as a word is better due to its ambiguity, but if you're naming something that will be sorted by a computer (like file names), there's really no superior alternative to numerical yyyy-mm-dd order.
Word order matters a lot in English. However, there are (and have been) many languages that use a different word order (see SVO vs SOV, etc.); and there are languages that use affixation and/or inflection to convey grammatical meaning, which allows their speakers/writers to use arbitrary word order, as they see fit, for emphasis or artistic (poetic) purposes.
So, I don't think language in general is linear.
Related anecdote: about English sentences of the form "[X happened], so [I did Y]". Where the word "so" implies a causal relationship. The most common equivalent in Irish (in my experience) is something like "[rinne mé Y], toisc gur [tharla X]", which reverses the order of X and Y. The order is arbitrary, but if you have English as a first language you're used to thinking of the concepts in that order (X then Y) and it's hard to catch yourself mid-sentence without backtracking. And because so many Irish speakers learn it as a second language, the result has been the word "so" being adopted as a common loan word and that X then Y order with it. I personally do my best not to do that, but even when I'm deliberately looking for it it's hard not to slip up occasionally.
Is this Irish expression used solely for causal relationships? I'm curious because the English "so" construction is also used for drawing conclusions from evidence, which may not be causal, and I'm curious if this Irish equivalent also expresses that. Could you use this Irish expression for something like "His light is on, so he must be home already"?
As far as I can think of, it's just causal relationships.
hm I'm curious what expressions Irish uses for that other subset of meanings now!
Interesting, so...Interesting. The structure in Irish is more akin to saying " B is the case " due to the fact that "A is the case" ?
If the English is X, so Y, the Irish equivalent is Y, since X.
I hasten to add, there is a phrasing in Irish with the same order as English, it's just not as common in my experience. Maybe because instead of one word (so) it uses 3 (agus mar sin).