Case Marking

Perhaps Antiques Roadshow would have made for a more interesting post . . .

Nerdy post.  Just came across a sentence in the news that shows how case marking (explicit endings for different grammatical roles) can result in lax word order in Japanese (though not in English, because talk like this don't if what I'm talking about I you know).

Aside: Japanese is a Subject-Object-Verb, or SOV, language.  Most of the world's languages, including some of its most stylish and coquettish ones, are of this type: Turkish, Hindi, Burmese, Quechua, and German (depending on who you ask).  The next most common one is SVO (English, Mandarin, Luganda, Guaraní, etc.).  Classical Arabic and Irish are VSO. There are a few oddballs here and there, like VOS (Malagasy, spoken in Madagascar) and even OSV (American Sign Language and Sardinian Italian)

Anyway, Japanese, like most languages, has its preferred word order.  But, Japanese subjects and objects are case-marked: subjects end in "ga," direct objects in "o," indirect objects (recipients, etc.) in "ni," etc.*  This allows the usual order of Subject-Object-Verb to flip around to Object-Subject-Verb, as in this sentence:

細長い巨大な物体が運ばれている動きを偵察衛星がとらえたという。

The movement of enormous slender things (Obj) a surveillance satellite (SUBJ!) captured.

This is probably given in this order because the object (the movement of enormous slender things) is more important that the subject (the satellite).  You can sometimes see this in English article (and especially news flash) headlines

I know what you're thinking.  What about orders where the verb is before the subject and/or the verb?  Well, ironically, relative clauses in Japanese don't have the marker that they do in English (the everything bagel that I saw you wolf down, the Queen Mother who taught me how to windglide).  You just tack on the relative clause onto its antecedent (or "gap" it, Wikipedia is telling me).  Thus, a Verb-Subject-Object order would be identical to the same verb modifying the subject rather than acting as its predicate.  In the example above, you'd get

Captured (Verb) a surveillance satellite (Subj) the movement of enormous slender things (Obj)

which would sound like "The surveillance satellite that (I, or someone else) captured)" bafflingly juxtaposed with "the movement of enormous slender things."  You might counter with the fact that the verb couldn't act as a relative clause on its own, since it has no subject of its own (i.e., it's not "I captured a surveillance satellite").  To which I would reply that Japanese is a subject-drop language, in which you can insouciantly drop any subject you like, even (and, in my experience, especially) when it makes the resulting sentence ambiguous and awkward.  To which you might reply that if Japanese allows such ambiguous subject-less sentences, it ought to be fine with an ambiguous verb phrase here or there.  To which I say . . . touché.  I'll bring it up at the next meeting.

*Compare this to, say, English, which is "impoverished," morphosyntactically.  Though Old English used to have case-markings (similar to German and Russian), these only survive in pronouns (object ME is "me," subject ME is "I").  This explains why English has a very rigid word order--there's nothing to indicate what grammatical role anything is playing otherwise.  (Although, it is interesting that the very few exceptions to the SVO word order, à la "Her I like, but him I find malodorous," tend to involve case-inflected pronouns, suggesting a trade-off between rigidity of word order and explicit case-marking . . .)