Language/Standard-arabic/Grammar/Word-order
Word order refers to the orders in which words are structured to from a sentence in a given language.
Consider the English sentence: "I ate an apple".
First let's remove the article AN for simplicity. We are just left with "I ate apple".
The basic word order for English is SVO (Subject-Verb-Object).
If we break down the English sentence "I ate apple", we can see that the Subject "I" is presented first followed by the Verb "ate" and finally the Object "apple".
The Arabic is VSO language (Verb-Subject-Object).
Let's see the same sentence.
The Arabic is written from right to left.
The same sentence in Arabic reads: "Ate I apple".
The Verb comes first, then the Subject and finally the Object.
If we combine the VSO structure and the fact that Arabic is written from right to left, we get the following sentence:
Object | Subject | Verb |
---|---|---|
تفاحة | انا | اكلت |
apple | I | ate |