Exploring Syntax (Optional post)

Is syntax an important part of a language? If I was to say yes, I don’t think anybody would disagree with me. 

Is syntax the most important part of a language? If I was to say yes now, I might turn a few heads. 

Syntax can be defined very simply as the order in which words go to form grammatically understandable sentences. To a native english speaker, it might sound crazy to suggest that the order that the words appear isn't the most important part of a sentence. You might think so even if you just learned what syntax meant! “Timmy ate sushi” makes total sense, but “sushi Timmy ate” will make you sound like Yoda. 

Why is that? Well, English is a language that is actually dependent on word order to form coherent ideas. We follow a pretty strict set of word order rules in comparison to other languages, like 日本語 (Japanese), which is a lot less concerned with where the words go. 

For example, the sentence “Timmy sent a letter to his mom” is fine and grammatically correct. However, “Timmy to his mom letter sent.” is once again a garbled mess. However, this is actually the preferred word order in Japanese! And not only that, but it’s not the only way you can express this thought using Japanese either. 

“Timmy sent a letter to his mom”.

“チィッミはお母さんに手紙をあげた。”

“チィッミは手紙をお母さんにあげた。”

Without going too deep into it, here's how the two languages could word the exact same sentence.

For Japanese, the subject and verb have to be in the same places, but anything in between the two can be moved in whatever order and still be grammatically correct! Pretty cool huh? 

But why does this make sense to do in Japanese but not English?

English grammar is dependent on where it is in a sentence. Using a very simple SVO (subject, verb, object) structure we can automatically tell which word is filling which role. Going back to “Timmy ate sushi”, we can automatically tell “Timmy” is the subject (person or thing who “does” the verb) because it comes before the verb, and we can tell that “sushi” is the direct object (thing affected by the verb) because it comes after the verb. No other order would make sense to us.

In Japanese, word order isn’t important because the subject and object are marked by particles telling you which word is which. The subject will always be followed by は or が, and the object will always be followed by を, which you can see in the example sentences above.

Whether a language is SVO like English, or SOV like Japanese, or can use any combination of those three things like Russian, syntax is definitely something interesting worth exploring.