Word Order In Old English

Word order in Old English was much freer and flexible than it is in Modern English because of the use of declension, as it can be seen in the following examples given by Hogg and Alcorn (2012, p. 15):

If we change the word order in Modern English, it is obvious that the subject of the sentence is different in (1) and (2). In other words, the meaning of the sentence completely changes. However, in Old English, the subject of (1) is guma and the object is wyrm, but in sentence (2) the subject is wyrm and guman the object. Since these words are declined on the nominative (subject) and accusative (direct object) cases, word movement is possible without changing the meaning.

Also, the equivalents of ‘the’ are se and pone, each associated respectively

Like Old English, they also have a more flexible word order than Modern English does. Some of those languages are Hungarian, Russian, Greek and Basque, and the latter will be used as another example of how declension allows for a language to have a freer word order.

Basque declension is high, and it applies to nouns, pronouns and adjectives. They are inflected on case and number and there are variations in proper nouns and animates in the local case (Trask, 1997 and 2003; Euskaltzaindia, 1985). Basque generally has an SOV structure, but it can be modified depending on where the speaker wants to add emphasis. To explain this, the sentence ‘the mother took her son to the doctor by car’ would be translated into Basque in (8). In this situation the word order is maintained as SOV, but since English has a different structure it would make no sense if we wrote it like that.

However, if the Basque sentence was rewritten following the correct English order as in (9), it would still be correct in Basque. In this case, there would be an emphasis on ‘the mother’, as in ‘it was the mother who took the son to the doctor by

More analysis should be made in order to discover why this loss happened because this would allow to consider if it makes English usage easier or not. It is true that languages that have declension favor a freer word order, but they also require for all required words to be marked. Therefore, without further investigation into why declension changed in English, it is not possible to state if it is better to have declension and a free word order, or lack of declension and a strict word order; or even if none of them is better than the