Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Meat Eats Dogs


Forget Klingon for a minute. Can you think of an ethnic group of people who literally speak backwards? This was thought to be a myth before missionary/linguist Desmond Derbyshire stumbled upon the Hixkaryana tribe in Guyana.
The Hixkaryana are a relatively small group even today, and what so amazed Derbyshire, and soon the entire linguistic community, was that these people followed an OVS version of syntax, that being object/verb/subject. Before the Hixkaryana's language was documented, this particular order was thought to be nonexistent in human communication, in stark contrast to the English language's SVO order: John (the subject) grabbed (verb) the ball (object). The Hixkaryana would say roughly an analog of "The ball grabbed John", but of course would mean the opposite to our ears.
This object-initial form of language is still quite rare, and most of the handful of tongues that share this peculiar sentence structure reside in the Amazon. Derbyshire proved though, that they weren't just a fictional academic antithesis, and he spent a good part of his life working with the Hixkaryana and other Carib tribes. He passed away in 2007.

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