Re:The Day You Became a Better Writer (2007)
by mackeye on Tuesday July 08, 2025 @08:09PM
(#44505147)
arabic can be VSO or SVO. i'm rather new to the langauge but tend to prefer VSO when writing, even as a native english speaker, which gets me to wonder if theres a correlation somewhere between arabic proficiency, other known languages, and VSO/SVO preference. my preference might come from the relative conciseness of VSO in arabic though; often placing the subject before the verb is a bit redundant given context. i'm sure theres a correlation to programming language typing schema somewhere there :)
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Re:The Day You Became a Better Writer (2007)
by senkora on Tuesday July 08, 2025 @08:41PM
(#44505298)
VSO is kinda like AT&T-syntax x86 assembly, if you identify subject with source and object with destination:
add %rdi, %rax
Re:The Day You Became a Better Writer (2007)
by skrueger on Tuesday July 08, 2025 @10:13PM
(#44505757)
It's good to combined both to form a sort of palindrome to chain ideas together. This is explained in more detail in Style: Toward Clarity and Grace by Joseph M. Williams.
Or, in "Intel Latin" (machine code),
01001000 00000001 11111000
Re:The Day You Became a Better Writer (2007)
by kofta on Wednesday July 09, 2025 @07:40PM
(#44515835)
adding to this, besides VSO and SVO. Arabic can also write in OSV and OVS, not very popular in day-to-day use, but is often found in more traditional contexts.
What is more interesting is: Diacritical marks (aka vowels) in Arabic can completely alter what is subject and object!
They are a bit similar to strong types in programming, you can have one sentence, and by changing its marks/diacritics (specifically called short vowels), you change what gets to be subject or object.
This is why Arabic poetry (especially Pre-Isalmic) is very interesting in its expressivenss and structural complexity even in the shortest poems (reminds me of code-golfing).