Re: Standard Average European

Very interesting.  This pretty much agrees with some stuff I've read
elsewhere, but it's good to see it confirmed by a native speaker.  But I
do wonder about one thing: with a transitive verb, how do you tell the
subject from the object, if they aren't distinguished by word order as
in written French (assuming that both arguments are third person, and
have the same gender and number, so the agreement prefixes (or proclitic
pronouns, or whatever you choose to call them) won't disambiguate them)?
  I realize that in the majority of cases, the context and/or the
semantics of the nouns themselves will be such that only one of the two
grammatically possible interpretations makes sense, but I would think
that there must be a fairly large residuum of situations where that
doesn't work.

- Tim

Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets wrote:
> Selon Campbell Nilsen :
>> I think that French word order works like this:
>>
>> If the object is a regular noun, then there is SVO word order.
>> If it's a pronoun, Latin word order comes in, and you have SOV.
>>
>>
>
> Hey, I'm French. I don't think you can teach me French word order.
>
> Moreover, what you wrote is only true of Written French. Spoken French
> doesn't have object pronouns (they are personal affixes, which are used
> when the object is definite, whether it's expressed or not. Indefinite
> objects don't have verbal agreement). And word order is topic-comment,
> regardless of the function of the topic.
>
> e.g.: /sga'la ZlE'vy i'jER/: It's that guy that I saw yesterday
> /ga/: guy
> /s- -'la/: that
> /Z/: personal prefix, first person singular subject
> /l/: personal prefix, third person singular object
> /E/: conjugated form, third person singular, marks past when used with a
> past participle (identical to, and derived from, the present tense of
> /a'vwaR/: to have)
> /vy/: past participle of /'vwaR/: to see
> /i'jER/: yesterday
>
> Written French for this sentence, without changing the vocabulary, would
> be:
> J'ai vu ce gars-là hier.
> Or, to emphasise the object:
> C'est ce gars-là que j'ai vu hier.
>
> The similarity is clear, but the Spoken French is still quite different.

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