Verified answer

For the record, in the particular case of French and 'We are going to the park' the word order is practically identical: "Nous allons au parc."

It is not 'sequential' to put subject, then verb, then prepositional phrase. There is only one verb here, so there is no sequence. Only one action happens in this sentence. The order that 'makes sense' to you is that way because you speak English. It looks as weird to someone speaking German to put things in English order as it does for you to put things to German order.

In Japanese, 'Watashitachi wa koen e ikimasu' literally translates as 'We to the park go' but means 'We are going to the park'. Everything is in exactly the order that makes sense... if you ask a Japanese speaker what order makes sense.

The action is "go". That's the only thing happening, regardless of whether it is in English or in a language using a different order. You then fill in the details based on the grammatical rules of the language. Is it 'out of sequence' to say the verb last? Why? "Go" is the only thing happening here. Everything else is explaining what is going and where it is going.

It would be certainly 'out of sequence' if some language required a series of occurences to be listed in reverse order, with the last thing that happened always stated first and the first thing stated last. The Bible translated into such a language would start with 'Amen' and end with 'In the beginning'. I'm going to guess that no real language actually does this.

I think the problem is that you don't understand the concept of syntax. French neutral word order is the same as that which is found in English (subject-verb-object), though there are some specific instances in which the syntax may change along given lines. For example, when the direct object of a sentence is a pronoun (ex. je le regrette) the syntax changes to SOV.

Amongst languages with fixed syntax, SVO, and SOV are the most common forms. Some languages in which the neutral word order is SOV include Turkish, Korean, Hindi, and Farsi.

Other languages don't have fixed syntax. This means that you can place words in any order you want, and the sentence will still make sense. This works because these languages have systems of case-- when a word plays a certain grammatical role in a sentence, it is inflected (changed) to reflect that. Because of this, you can always tell whether something is a subject, direct object, indirect object, or playing another role entirely based on the way in which the word has been inflected.

Free syntax is uncommon in modern Indo-European languages, though Latvian, Lithuanian, and Polish all have similar systems. Even though these three languages do have an established neutral word order, it is not uncommon for speakers to change the syntax because of the extensive use of case in the languages. Latin, however, did not have fixed syntax, though, for the sake of ease, Latin students are often taught to use an SOV syntax. If you look in many great Latin works of literature, you'll find all manner of different syntaxes.

Estonian is a good example of a non-Indo-European language which lacks a fixed syntax-- a trait which is somewhat notorious amongst students.

very often they are quite correctly giving you the more important information first - if we said ' a white gate' or 'a gate white' which is the more important information? - if the second word was obliterated, it would be more important to have the noun but if you knew that some entity was 'white' it really wouldn't help you.

One of the problems of learning Hindi is that it is back to front relative to English.

The reason they appear confusing or out of whack is that they are foreign languages. Communication is the most important thing.

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