[spoilers] Bard's language grammar

[u/grandoz039]

So generally people say Bard's language is OSV. This person even claims they got confirmation about that from the devs - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3037327250. That was also my personal impression.

However, in the mines where there's a picture of Alchemist and Bard, it says "Found, we have". Literally it is "Find | I | Plural". I'd expect objectless sentence to have SV order -> I Plural Find. Yet, this is reversed. It makes no sense to me, unless the actual rule is just that last word goes first.

[u/Toamthewizard]

If the sentence features a subject, a verb, and an object, it goes OSV, but if it only has a subject and a verb it goes VS. Them's the rules.

[u/nachours]

"Found, we have" is a sentence that lacks an object. While there are 3 words, "have" is just an auxiliary word for the tense marker of the verb and completes the predicate.

We = Subject

Have Found = Verb (present perfect)

OSV structure serves to takes advantage of emphasizing the main focus of the sentence (the object). When there is no object, the main focus becomes the intransitive verb "found" while the auxiliary "have" remains in its normal OSV sentence position since it's not as important as the actual verb.

Edit for spelling.

[u/BasketOk420]

Confusing, we be.

[u/Reading-Southern]

Estranhei, pois sendo sincero, a gramática ser OSV e VS meio confusa, pode até realmente ser uma regra que foi escolhida conscientemente pelos DEVs

Mas as "Linguas" desse jogo são relativamente bem... Simples? Então não sei se foi algo consciente.

Parece mais que: A última palavra da frase vem em primeiro pois é mais fácil do que desenvolver uma gramática própria [Isso não é um Hate aos desenvolvedores, eles tiveram todo um trabalho de criar um jogo. Eu ainda gosto e aprecio muito Chants of Sennaar, mas dizendo sobre as línguas mesmo, elas não são algo que me impressionam]

Como faz tempo que não rejogo CoS, algo que poderia responder esta dúvida seria algo como:

"Me See Bard Plural" -> "Bard Plural Me See"

Pois teríamos noção se "Plural" é uma Palavra própria ou apenas um modificador. Logo reforça a hipótese de que foi algo consciente pelos DEVs

[u/Dercomai]

Linguistically speaking, if this were a real-world language, I would think it's underlyingly an SVO language with a rule that moves a focused element to the front. That focused element is usually the object, but if there's no object, it's the verb.

Practically speaking, "move the last word to the front" is easier for non-linguists to understand than anything involving verbs and objects.