[gerdesj]

"Man dog walk. Boy biscuit eat. Girl throw ball." are held up as examples of incorrect english, which is largely fair.

However, none of those examples are actually ambiguous. I'm pretty sure that those examples translated word for word into any language would also be understandable.

[retrac]

You're cheating with your world knowledge to guide the parsing.

eat man lion. lion man eat. man eat lion. eat lion man.

Who is eating who? When formed according to English grammar it doesn't leave any ambiguity even if the phrase is improbable: "The biscuit has eaten the girl."

Linguistic topology is the study of patterns in languages according to structure. It's a niche topic which is unfortunate because certain patterns hint at something about the structure of human thought.

Such as with word order. Verb in the middle or at the start or at the end? Subject before verb or after verb? Object before verb or after verb? Every permutation does exist in some language.

But object before subject and verb is extremely rare. And in the few languages which do it that way they do not do consistently with it often only occurring in certain moods or certain conditions of syntactic alignment.

To the mind not natural Yoda's speech is.

[gerdesj]

Language cannot be decoupled from what it is trying to work with. It is a tool! We can manipulate the air in such a way with our mouths that ears can hear.

I don't think there is anything wrong with allowing a small amount of "world knowledge" to guide language parsing - the world caused language to "be" not the other way around.

Anyway whenever, outside of smoking crack, did a girl get eaten by a biscuit? Never, so that phase is unambiguous.

Object before subject: I'll grant you that - its a probable sign of madness or a green puppet.

Me, really? You screamed!

[readthenotes1]

The first 2 are following latin grammar (subject-object-verb).

The third one is technically incorrect because of subject-verb number disagreement -- but ignoring that is common in some vernaculars

[gerdesj]

I think we can agree that they are awful examples!

The problem is, that when you try to reduce an example of "bad" english to the bare bones (for clarity), you often end up with quite legitimate language.

Even in Latin the occasional transgression is sort of allowed: "Alea iacta est" - that is of course "idium". I studied Latin via "Civis Romanus", "mental" and "idiot" (Mentor and Idium).

An englander would of course say something far more erudite, than a course roman general, such as: "Fucking 'ave it, you twats".

[bryanrasmussen]

what course do the Romans generally run?

[gerdesj]

One that misses a "u", not that the buggers themselves had one!