[OJFord]

In English, sure. Not in Hindi for example (मैं खाना खाता हूँ - 'I food eat') or in .. object-oriented methods of many programming languages.

I don't think there's anything special about that mapping, whichever way around. I'm not inclined to think I'd perceive things or act any differently if my main way of describing things (English) had a different grammar - a rose would smell just as sweet.

I can see some value, especially for beginners, in 'highlight while object selecting, then act' (which you can do in vim with visual select and then action, e.g. instead of c2w do v2wc - or v2w -wait no that's not what I want-).

I do prefer it as it is though, probably just because I'm used to it, but I think of it as 'up to' rather than 'define the object', since it is always anchored (at least, without any plugins doing differently like is being discussed with Treesitter here, adding context awareness) by the cursor position. So I'm thinking 'change from here to..'. I suppose if one wants to think about 'object first' you could argue vim already is that anyway - you move to the object before typing any of the command.

[dsego]

Some languages use both orders, and the difference is more of a stylistic choice.

[javier10e6]

Indeed, in Spanish we say "lava la ropa" do the laundry. I am pretty sure that is what my brain wants, action object. Once in object-oriented training I was told that In Cantonese the person does not act on objects but the objects act on themselves: "The deck of cards shuffles itself"

[claudiawerner]

Latin has an extremely flexible word order (some of which Old English had too) which allows all kinds of fun stuff for style and communicating status/education. Japanese with its particle system also allows some good flexibility.