Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2025 September 24

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September 24

English word order

In English, are the following word orders correct? Can the be ever used?

1. Football played the children before school.
2. Before school the children played football.
3. In school learned Jack about animals.
4. "It is good", said he.
5. Book has he not read.
6. Eats Lee apples.

--40bus (talk) 08:59, 24 September 2025 (UTC)

2 is fine. 4 is grammatically correct but sounds pompous and literary. The rest are not used. --Viennese Waltz 09:10, 24 September 2025 (UTC)

My dialect would require a comma in 2. "Before school, the children played football." Is that not required in all dialects? --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 11:43, 24 September 2025 (UTC)

1 sounds like football is playing the children somehow. 6 sounds like there's a variety of apples called Lee. 3 and 5 sound like Yoda talking. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 09:38, 24 September 2025 (UTC)

You mean "Like Yoda talking 3 and 5 sound." --Viennese Waltz 10:34, 24 September 2025 (UTC)

No. 6 sounds like a Gaelic-speaker mixing their language's grammar into English. -- 2A02:8424:6281:D401:95E3:ED56:3A74:4334 (talk) 12:20, 24 September 2025 (UTC)

"Before school the children played football" is fine, no comma needed (British English). "It is good", said he" is OK, but does sound rather old-fashioned. The problem with using hash-signs to make a numbered list is that when people enter the editing window the numbers disappear. DuncanHill (talk) 12:07, 24 September 2025 (UTC)

Fronting focused elements is rarer in English than in some other languages, and when it does happen, the subject remains before the verb (unlike German). Therefore, if we want to front football to focus on it, we have to say Football, the children played before school. However even though that's grammatical, it still sounds unusual and a cleft sentence would be more natural: Football is what the children played before school. More natural still would be to do it with emphasizing intonation: The children played football before school. Again in sentence 3, the subject remains before the verb (unlike German): In school, Jack learned about animals. Sentence 5 not only has the wrong order, but a singular count noun like book requires some sort of determiner, e.g. That book, he has not read. In sentence 6, if we're wanting to put focus on eating, we have to say something like What Lee does to apples is eat them, but again intonation is the most natural sounding way: Lee eats apples; [he doesn't lob them at his sister's head]. —Mahāgaja · talk 12:31, 24 September 2025 (UTC)

I think I've seen phrasing similar to (1) used when referring to someone playing music, although it would be poetic or archaic. (And I can't think of any specific examples now). I don't think I've ever seen it used for sport or games though. Iapetus (talk) 12:38, 24 September 2025 (UTC)

4 kind of reminds me of a song from Iolanthe, in which the singer repeatedly sings, "Said I to myself, said I". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 13:09, 24 September 2025 (UTC)

• 2 and 4 are fine.
• 1 does not readily communicate its sense (assuming it should mean the same as 2), but the structure is the same as "Hooray!" shouted the children before school, which is perfectly acceptable.
• 3 has echoes of In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree:, but in that case the auxiliary verb comes before the subject, and the main verb after as usual. 3 is not normally acceptable.
• 5 and 6 are not normally acceptable.

-- Verbarson  ^talk_edits 13:56, 24 September 2025 (UTC)

4 is the standard word order in the other Germanic languages, which use V2 word order. English remained V2 here longer than in other contexts, so people consider it fine or old-fashioned instead of wrong. 1, 3 and 5 are also in V2 order (and fine in the other Germanic languages, except for the missing determiner in 5), but not acceptable in contemporary English.

6 is question order, but most verbs in English now require do-support for this. It's fine in Early Modern English, if you add a question mark. PiusImpavidus (talk) 18:05, 24 September 2025 (UTC)

Good point. The "do" is so built in now that I didn't even perceive the question order until you pointed it out. Matt Deres (talk) 14:11, 29 September 2025 (UTC)

In my dialect (Canadian English), 1, 3, 5, and 6 are all incorrect. 2 would require a comma after "school". 4 would be acceptable, but marked as old-fashioned or pompous. Matt Deres (talk) 17:13, 27 September 2025 (UTC)