Comments by "Laurence Fraser" (@laurencefraser) on "OSV: Why is this word order so rare in languages?" video.

  1. This isn't quite the case (at least in most dialects). You can absolutely get "the green one I have, but..." but the rest of it will be SVO (usually). Because English absolutely can do topic fronting (Pretty sure that's what's going on with it's questions, actually), and it can leave bits out, such as "I" or "You" as the subject when context makes it obvious, at least in casual speech, or definite articles, and of course English imperatives typically leave out the subject even in more formal speech too (unless imparting heavy emphasis or differentiating instructions to one party from instructions to another party). Heck, it could even use a passive in the second part or otherwise rejigger what is being said (it's not rare to hear '... but the red one is still hiding from me', for example)... (and edit: I just realised my understanding of the specifics breaks down just far enough at this point that I can't clearly explain why reordering the second half of that sentence doesn't work, even though reordering the first half does <_<) Of course, English being English, (and humans being humans) there's almost certainly a dialect or three that absolutely does this all the time just to make things difficult :P
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  2. The entire point of passive voice is that it flips which entity is the subject and which entity is the object so the sentence is still SVO, to my understanding. And so far as I can tell, English does topic-comment too, just not all the time as the default. ('that it is' is, to my understanding "(topic) (subject) (verb)", and the subject may well even be a dummy subject, depending, because English really does't like not having a subject (despite the fact that you can drop 'I' and 'You' in the subject slot in casual speech, or at least casual writing, in many sentences without any great issue).
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  3. I know English word order is as rigid as it is (not unchanging, but the changes are goverened by fairly strict rules) precisely because it used to have a lot of affixes indicating case and verb/subject agreement and such, then lost most of them and compensated for that by using the word order to impart that information instead.
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