Why do verbs sometimes come after their subject instead of before, like in English??
Sometimes I hear or read sentences that are backwords. I'll try to make one for an example, though I don't know if it's correct.
Comió el chico una galleta muy deliciosa.
(El chico comió una galleta muy deliciosa.)
This confuses and interests me and I would like to know when to do it and when not to.
4 Answers
Just to piggy-back on Pesta's excellent post, in Spanish there are generally three accepted word orders:
subject - verb - remainder - "El chico comió la galleta."
verb- subject -remainder - "Comió el chico la galleta."
verb - remainder -subject. - "Comió la galleta el chico"
If you ask a native speaker regarding preference for word order usage, you will get a variety of answers. Some say that it sheds a different emphasis on the parts of the sentence and others say that it is strictly a matter of personal or regional preference.
In short, it may be one of those "just because that's the way Spanish is" sorts of deals. I know that it can be frustrating, but sometimes it helps to go with the flow in language study.
Great question.
Spanish is a bit more flexible than English in this way. You choose based on what you want to emphasize. This is because verb conjugations in Spanish provides more information about who's doing what to whom, unlike English that depends so much on word order for this.
My Chilean friend teased us gringos if anyone mentioned thisSpanish is backwards idea with regards to placing the adjective after the noun, as in thedog black. She very sensibly pointed that the most important thing is the animal (el perro) and not the color (negro), and laughingly concluded that English word order here is "backwards".
Can't the third order you said get confused? It can mean, "The cookie ate the boy." lol
That would be "al chico". Since Spanish doesn't rely on word order, it uses other grammatical devices to distinguish between subjects and various objects.
People seem to forget that Spanish wasn't invented by Spanish teachers and grammarians: it was developed by people trying to communicate, just like English was. Ambiguous statements can be made in any language, and when the possibility of confusion is of concern, there are ways to avoid it.
Does "the light green striped umbrella" mean:
1) the umbrella didn't weigh much, was predominantly green, and had stripes in one or more other colors
2) the umbrella didn't weigh much, was predominantly not green, but had green stripes
3) the umbrella wa predominantly not green, but had stripes that were light green in color
4) the umbrella was predominantly light green in color, but had stripes in one or more other colors
5) this is all just an adjectival phrase modifying the noun that follows the word "shaped" that was left out of the quote
Perhaps the total inability to communicate unambiguously in English is the root of the world's problems.
