# VO Word Order and Monotheism VO 語順と一神教

EHARA Terumasa
江原 暉将
Ehara NLP Research Laboratory
江原 NLP 研究室
eharate @ gmail.com
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\begin{abstract}
The relationship between monotheism and the word order of verb $(\mathrm{V})$ and object $(\mathrm{O})$ in declarative sentences of its practiced language is analyzed. The oldest monotheistic religion is the Aten belief of ancient Egypt, which was practiced in the ancient Egyptian language. Abrahamic religions, which are typical monotheistic religions are practiced in the following languages: Judaism was in Aramaic and biblical Hebrew; Christianity was in Aramaic, ancient Hebrew, and Koine Greek; and Islam was in Arabic. The word order of these languages are all verb object (VO). Moreover, I have investigated the relationship between the world's ethnic religions and the word order of their practiced languages. For 284 data points, monotheism is practiced in VO vs. OV as 20 vs. 8. On the other hand, polytheism is practiced in VO vs. OV as 111 vs. 145. From these findings, I conclude that monotheism is more frequently practiced in the VO language than in the OV language.
\end{abstract
## 1 Introduction

I have quantitatively investigated the relationship between the word order of language and the thinking patterns of its speakers. I used the following quantitative measures to express the human thinking patterns: suicide rate and homicide rate (Ehara 2015), distribution of Ychromosome DNA haplogroups (Ehara 2018), distribution of mitochondrial DNA haplogroups (Ehara 2019), and relative frequency of the short allele of the serotonin transporter gene (5-HTTLPR) (Ehara 2021).

In this paper, I will analyze the relationship between monotheism and word order. The relationship between monotheism and word order was partly treated in Ehara (2017). However, it only distinguished Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) from other religions. In this paper, I will moreover consider monotheisms other than Abrahamic religions.

I will consider only the word order of verb $(\mathrm{V})$ and object (O) in declarative sentences. This word order feature is the most significant in the word order typology. In this paper, this feature or feature values (VO or OV) will be simply called "word order". Word order data are mainly obtained from Yamamoto (2003) and Dryer and Haspelmath (2013).

My conjecture is that "monotheism is more frequently practiced in the VO language than in the OV language".

## 2 Monotheism and polytheism

What is monotheism? What is the criterion to distinguish monotheism from polytheism? It is difficult to answer these questions. In this paper, I set the distinction shown in Table 1.

Table 1. The distinction between monotheism (mono) and polytheism (poly)

## 3 Ancient Egypt

Most of the ancient Egyptian religions are polytheisms.

Exceptionally, during the reign of Akhenaten (BC 13641347), he introduced monotheism that worships only the Aten (god of the sun). Aten belief is considered the oldest monotheism (Motomura, 2005, pp. 62-74). Aten belief is practiced in the ancient Egyptian language (in the AfroAsiatic family), which has VO word order.

## 4 Abrahamic religions

Typical monotheisms are Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). Languages related to these religions and their word orders are listed in Table 2. The word order of Greek (Koine) is obtained from Kirk (1981). The word order of languages in Table 2 are all VO. Only Greek (Koine) belongs to the Indo-European family. Other languages in Table 2 belong to the Afro-Asiatic family.

Table 2. Abrahamic religions and the word order of the related languages

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## 5 Change to monotheism in Greece

## and Rome

Ancient Greece and Rome were both in polytheistic cultures. The period that these areas changed to monotheistic culture is considered AD 311 when Roman Emperor Constantine I sanctioned Christianity.

Word order changes in Greek and Latin are listed in Table 3 and Table 4. In Table 4, VO-ratio means the ratio of the number of VO word order sentences in the total
^{i}$ The religious data in Appendix 1 are obtained mainly from the following Wikipedia pages: List of ethnic religions, Traditional African religions, Native American religions, Australian Aboriginal religion and mythology, and Traditional religions in Papua New Guinea.
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number of VO or OV word order sentences in the document or writer. During the period of changing to monotheism (AD 311), the word orders of Greek and Latin moved from OV predominant to VO predominant (except for Mycenaean Greek).

Table 3 Word order change in Greek

(Matsumoto 1975, Kirk 1981)

Table 4 Word order change in Latin (Matsumoto 1975, Bauer 2009)

## 6 Ethnic religions

Several ethnic religions are monotheistic. I investigated 135 ethnic religions. The number of populations believing these religions is 295, and the number of languages is 294. Combining these data, 320 data points are obtained. 284 data points among them have a word order of VO or OV. In these 284 data points, the number of monotheisms is 28 and the number of polytheisms is 256 . Part of the detailed data is listed in Appendix 1, , ii.

The frequency of word orders for monotheism and polytheism is shown in Table 5. In this table, 1417 languages in WALS (all) (Dryer and Haspelmath 2013) are also shown.

Table 5 Number of languages classified by word order and monotheism / polytheism and WALS data

ii The full data (Excel file) is downloadable from the author's website:

http://www.ne.jp/asahi/eharate/eharate/ronbun.files/NLP 2022.xlsx.

The relative frequencies of the VO word order languages (VO-ratio) are shown in Figure 1. The VO-ratio of the languages for monotheism is higher compared with polytheism and WALS data (all).

Figure 1 Relative frequency of VO languages (VOratio)

The $\chi 2$ tests to the data in Table 5 are executed. The results are shown in Table 6. The difference between monotheism and polytheism is significant at $1 \%$ level, and the difference between monotheism and WALS data (all) is also significant at $5 \%$ level. However, the difference between polytheism and WALS data (all) is nonsignificant.

Table 6 The results of the $\chi 2$ test

## 7 Conclusion

The relationship between word order and monotheism is analyzed. The oldest monotheism or Aten belief was practiced in Ancient Egyptian. Typical monotheisms or Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) were practiced in Egyptian, Aramaic, Hebrew, Koine Greek, or Arabic. These languages all have VO word order. Moreover, an analysis of 135 ethnic religions showed that monotheistic ethnic religions are more frequently practiced in the $\mathrm{VO}$ languages than in the $\mathrm{OV}$ languages.
One of the future works is to clarify the reason why monotheism is more frequently practiced in the VO language than in the OV language.

## References

Bauer, Brigitte L. M. 2009. Word order. In New perspectives on historical Latin syntax : syntax of the sentence / edited by Philip Baldi, Pierluigi Cuzzolin. Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.

Dryer, Matthew S. and Martin Haspelmath. 2013. The World Atlas of Language Structures Online, https://wals.info.

Ehara, Terumasa. 2015. Relation between Word Order Parameters and Suicide / Homicide Rates. Jounal of Yamanashi Eiwa College, 13:9-29.

Ehara, Terumasa. 2017. Relation between Word Order Characteristics and Suicide / Homicide Rates (6) Adding a Religious Feature -, In Proceedings of The 23rd Annual Meeting of The Association for Natural Language Processing: 190-193.

Ehara, Terumasa. 2018. Relation between Word Order of Languages and the Entropy of Y-chromosome Haplogroup Distribution of the Speakers' Population. In Proceedings of The 24th Annual Meeting of The Association for Natural Language Processing: 10191022.

Ehara, Terumasa. 2019. Relation between Word Order of Languages and the Entropy of Mitochondrial DNA Haplogroups Distribution of the Speakers' Population. Proceedings of The 25th Annual Meeting of The Association for Natural Language Processing:490493.

Ehara, Terumasa. 2021. Relation between Word Order of Languages and Serotonin Transporter Gene. Proceedings of The 27th Annual Meeting of The Association for Natural Language Processing:579584.

Kirk, Allison. 1981. Word order and information structure in New Testament Greek, Doctoral Thesis of Faculty of Humanities, Leiden University.

Matsumoto, Katsumi. 1975. Developments of the Syntactic Patterns in the Indo-European Languages -A comparative and typological study-, Gengo Kenkyu, Vol. 68, 15-43 (in Japanese).

Motomura, Ryoji. 2005. Polytheism and Monotheism, Iwanami Shinsho 967, Iwanami Shoten (in Japanese).

Yamamoto, Hideki. 2003. Survey and Historical Study of Geographical and Genealogical Distribution of Word Order around the World. Tansuisha (in Japanese).

## Appendix 1 Monotheism(M) and polytheism $(P)$ for ethnic religions and

## the word order (OV I VO) of the practiced languages

} & \multirow{2}{*}{} & \multirow{2}{*}{} & \multirow{2}{*}{} & \multirow{2}{*}{} & \multirow{2}{*}{} \\

 & China (Yunnan) & Bai & Sino-Tibetan & VO \\

 & Indo-European & VO \\