Comments by "Laurence Fraser" (@laurencefraser) on "SOV: Why is this the most popular word order across languages?" video.

@ryalloric1088 On the other hand, they also tend to avoid conjugation and declension as much as possible, including case marking and the like, to keep the individual words simple to learn and easy to understand. Without such marking, SVO is actually a fairly logical order to fall into, as the verbis a fairly clear and distinct marker indicating where the subject ends and the object begins. (actually, English settled into it's rigid SVO order at least in part due to a similar issue, where many of it's case markings (and verb forms indicating agreement with the subject) were lost due to interacting with the (norse?) spoken by the danes in the danelaw, where the markings caused problems, as the same things were marked in both langauges, but with different sounds. It's why we still have an distinct verb form for third person singular subjects: It was the only one that was indicated by the same sound in both langauges! (the specific sound used changed later, but it was the only one not filed off because it was the only one that didn't cause confusion). ... Actually, there may have been other factors in the loss of case marking, but that was definitely the origin of the odd subject-verb agreement in English, and the loss of those markings is why English is so rigid in it's word orders and favours SVO so strongly.
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I'd probably indicate me, the food, then eating... unless I was specifically trying to ask permission to eat that particular item, rather than just indicating hunger or a desire to eat, in which case I can easily see myself indicating the food, then eating, then me (with questioning expression).
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That's 'garden path', not garden pass, it comes from an idiom where you 'lead someone up the garden path'. I have no idea quite how that ideom came to be, but it broadly means to mislead someone. In linguistics, it means to construct a sentence such that the listener or reader has to completely reanalyse the sentence with every word or clause, because each new piece of information invalidates the default reading of the sentence up to that point. It's a thing you can do in English with a bit of work, and doing it accidentally is generally considered to amount to being a very poor writer or speaker (Newspaper headlines are particularly prone to Very Unfortuante misunderstandings when this is done unintentionally... and clever jokes when done deliberately). It should be noted that the classic English question-and-answer joke that so confuses Japanese people is in part taking advantage of this sort of trick (a question is asked, an answer given. In no sensible context does the answer given as a punchline actually impart a meaningful answer to the question as initially presented, except that by way of the use of some sort of word play (usually a pun) the punchline itself retroactively changes the meaning of the Question such that it is none the less a valid answer). A 'garden path' leaves you essentially getting hit by that sort of nonsense multiple times in the course of trying to follow the meaning of a single sentence.
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