Indeed, in Spanish we say "lava la ropa" do the laundry. I am pretty sure that is what my brain wants, action object. Once in object-oriented training I was told that In Cantonese the person does not act on objects but the objects act on themselves: "The deck of cards shuffles itself"

Latin has an extremely flexible word order (some of which Old English had too) which allows all kinds of fun stuff for style and communicating status/education. Japanese with its particle system also allows some good flexibility.