Talk:Object–verb–agent

message: The article says that the passive voice in English is OVS, but it is not. The article sites the example "The oranges were eaten by Sam" as the passive voice form of "Sam eats the oranges, which is correct. However, if one uses pronouns for "Sam" and "oranges", we see that "He eats them" becomes "They are eaten by him"; if the passive voice were truely OVS, then the sentance would be "Them is eaten by he", or more correctly "them is eaten by him", since "Sam" is the object of a past-tense participial phrase with "eaten by". Please correct me if I am somehow mistaken. Phsyron 22:25, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: You are correct, roughly.  I've rewritten the passage to reflect the actual definitions of grammatical terms like subject, object, and agent. Craig Butz 06:17, 12 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: The passive voice is still SVO

message: In order to respond to the Oranges Example: The only reason why hapless Sam isn't devoured by that decidedly unfriendly bunch of oranges is the knack of the English language to use a minimum of flection, hence a maximum of context. For a German speaker the sentence would sound strange only because it conveys a certain insistance that it was oranges he ate and nothing else - but would be comprehensible and grammatically perfectly unconspicuous by the conjugation of the verb, something that only huge-*** inflecting languages are able to deliver:
Orangen asz Sam. (the sz is of course the ligature unbeknownst to American browsers, asz is the 3. Pers. Sg. of "essen" = to eat)
The rather funny version would be 
Orangen aszen Sam. (where aszen is the 3. Pers. Pl. (!) of "essen")
But OVS is often used in German, even apart from poetry, when the object must be stressed: 
"Dieses Wetter mag der Elefant nicht." (with the stress on "dieses" = this)
which translates word-by-word to
"This weather doesn't like the elephant."
but means:
"The elephant doesn't like this particular weather (but others)."
and this meaning is denoted by the use of "der Elefant" (nominative, ["subjective" if you like] case) instead of "den Elefanten" (accusative, [one of the "objective"] cases. So, had the sentence been
"Dieses Wetter mag den Elefanten nicht."
then indeed the sense would be:
"This weather doesn't like the elephant."
: I think the sentence is possible, but realatively uncommon. Actually, the more inflected, (and less analytic,) a language is, the more possibilities there are to use a creative word order...
:BTW, isn't the "Eszet" almost discarded from the german language, except for a few particular words?
::Yes and "ate" is one of the words that retained it :P -- KittySaturn 09:37, July 12, 2005 (UTC)
:::No, the ß is still in common use, the spelling has just been regularised so the rules for when to use it and when not to are consistent.
Latin also has the genitive case:
The wine Marci (Marcus' wine) is fine.
and finally the ablative case:
She is cleverer Marco. (than Marco, abl. comparationis, it's hard to find a reasonable example for this elusive case)
Maybe you should add those two to the entry!
Greetings
Max
::German is an incredibly complicated and unusual case.  Essentially, under Transformational grammar German is underlyingly SOV (you can see this in phrases such as Ich habe gedacht, dass der Mann den Jungen sah - I thought that the man saw the boy, where the second clause is SOV).  However, in most sentences, the verb moves to the place which would be occupied by a complementizer such as dass or weil. Following this, a word (usually the subject of the sentence, but not always, it can be an object, or even an adverb - for example, you can have Gestern sah der Mann den Jungen -Yesterday the man saw the boy) moves to the specifier of this position, creating the phenomenon you describe above. BovineBeast 18:36, 4 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: In German OVS is possible

message: Yakov Smirnov's "In Soviet Russia" jokes seem to be an example of OVS. For example, "We watch television" becomes "Television watches you," or more appropriately, "In Soviet Russia, television watches you." Scott Gall 12:48, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: In "Television watches you", television becomes the subject and you the object. It's still SVO. EldKatt (Talk) 13:52, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  In Soviet Russia 

message: I believe Esperanto is one of the most flexible languages regarding word order. Therefore it is possible to have all the combinations for "Vi estas bela" (which is the most common order anyway):
"Vi estas bela"
"Bela estas vi"
"Vi bela estas"
"Bela vi estas"
"Estas bela vi"
"Estas vi bela"
It's easier when the verb is not "esti" or there is no preposition in-between, as there is an accusative in the object:
"Mi manĝas la kukon"
"La kukon mi manĝas"
"Manĝas mi la kukon"
"Manĝas la kukon mi"
But as for me, being a Spanish-speaker, the most common order in Esperanto would be SVO, rather than OVS, yet I wouldn't fix Esperanto in any particular order.
: SVO being the most common word order in Esperanto, and the other words orders used for special emphasis, it makes sense to describe it as a SVO language.  The flexibility is less when you have a copular sentence with two nouns rather than a noun and adjective, or an active sentence with subject and object being two partitive noun phrases with "da" -- the fact that you pretty much have to use SVO in those sentences to be understood is further evidence that SVO is Esperanto's main order. --Jim Henry 14:17, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Jim is right. Esperanto is mainly SVO, but since this is a possible word order, it belongs here more than the faulty passive tense referance and the French example. I would suggest a simpler sentance, even using the "Sam eats oranges" example used throught the article, giving you "Samo manĝas oranĝojn," and "Oranĝojn manĝas Samo." Phsyron 22:42, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Esperanto 

message: I agree with the proposed merge. --Jim Henry 14:23, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merge