Pain in the English
Pain in the English

Unpacking English, Bit by Bit

A community for questioning, nitpicking, and debating the quirks and rules of the English language.

Pain in the English
Pain in the English

Unpacking English, Bit by Bit

A community for questioning, nitpicking, and debating the quirks and rules of the English language.

Username

pain.3.lexus77

Member Since

December 16, 2006

Total number of comments

1

Total number of votes received

1

Bio

Latest Comments

Only then can we know

  • December 16, 2006, 9:06pm

Interesting. Although I speak English as a second language, I have always taken pride in the fact that I I speak it quite well, to my own opinion. The strange thuing is that I construct these sentences in the same way in English, but had never thought of the reason. Now, thinking about it, I guess it must be some underlying V2 rule in English. In Dutch we alsay invert the verb and the object of an independent clause, when the verb isn't in first place, because of the v-2 rule in our SVO word order.
Since English is also a Germanic language, it isn't very surprising that, although the word order in English is much simpler than in Dutch, it shares some of the same characteristics.