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Russian word order

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duome

Russian word order

Post by duome »

I really enjoyed this analogy by aceofbase_in_ur_mind @ reddit:

Think of it as musical chords.

You have the basic major and minor triads that create a firm sense of harmony. That's a "standard" Russian sentence which gets the word order right, with newer information towards the end. «До конца месяца утренние совещания будут проводиться только два раза в неделю».

You have the unstable four-note ones; sixth-chords, seventh-chords, etc. They sound like they want to go somewhere, to have a resolution. Or, when the music is mostly those chords, they give it this jazzy feel. That's colloquial Russian with its SOV tendencies, adjectives after nouns, aversion to long stretches of phrase without tonal inflection or breaks, etc. There's a logic and a harmony to it too; it's just unorthodox and more intuitive, with inflection doing a lot of the work so it's easier to parse in spoken form than written. «Совещания утренние, они до конца месяца два раза в неделю только будут проводиться».

You have the weird atonal stuff that isn't straight-up dissonant, but is just odd, not very expressive, and hard to follow. That can happen when a sentence is grammatically correct but its word order, while not breaking any rules, is thoughtless—due to it being "translationese", "officialese", or just not very eloquent. «Утренние совещания будут проводиться только два раза в неделю до конца месяца».

And finally, you have cacophony. Seconds and diminished fifths everywhere. That's when your word order is so random you manage to break the few syntactic rules there are, or else test the limits of the possible for no apparent reason. «Совещания будут утренние до месяца конца два в неделю проводиться раза».

These are the tiers you can think in terms of, at least if we exclude poetic inversions that would really strain this musical analogy.

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskARussian/comments/vbzk6g/comment/icbbpal/

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