[thaumasiotes]

> 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.

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.

[psychoslave]

This led me to read https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.... which was rather interesting

[gerdesj]

Not sure why I put Latin in as SVO, given that the second Latin lesson I received (aged 10), went into some detail about word order. The first was amo amas amat ... moneo monas monat.

However, all languages tend to be flexible, as required: "Gaul as a whole is divided into three parts" or as JC said: "Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres".