| I think you have it right and OP doesn't. For example: "Exotic-sounding grammar features like the subject-object-verb sentence structure" There is nothing exotic about SOV vs any other order. Latin (and all Romance languages French, Italian int al): SVO, German: SOV. English: SVO. All of them are complex enough that word order can be re-arranged and the meaning remains and often enhanced. All human spoken languages are Turing complete (not enough room in this column for a wonderful proof I came across tomorrow). All humans have the same set of hardware and software (I hate the term wetware) and facilities. There are some variations in how they are used but in the end I refuse to allow for concepts that are "untranslatable". I do allow that some people have, say, four colour vision instead of three and so they can experience a colour spectrum beyond the norm. My Mum had better than normal visual acuity - she could see much further than the rest of the family. Regardless of sensors, we all have largely the same set of equipment to process and convey our ideas and notions. Creative use of that equipment and deployment of the same should be applauded and encouraged. However, don't get yourself hung up on the idea that your ideas are somehow different or unique or even worse: better, due to some sort of racial alignment or language. I'm a massive fan of vive la differance but I also like to see vive la meme. |
Latin is definitely not SVO. Those roles are marked explicitly enough that they can occur in any order without really causing any problems (and in poetry, they do), but to the extent that an order applies to Latin, it is SOV.
This is one of the features that is felt to result from simplification. As you note, Romance languages tend to be SVO. It's also true that Mandarin is SVO where other Chinese languages tend to be SOV. And that creoles tend to be SVO even when every source language uses some other order.
So the theory does float around that SVO order is in some sense more intuitive than the others, and that's the reason for its appearance in Romance, Mandarin, and creoles.