German-Italian Bilingual Students' Acquisition of English Word Order in a German Educational Context Word Order Transfer in Third Language Acquisition.

For instance, it may not have been an accident that Plato and Aristotle wrote in Greek, while Kant wrote in German. The grammatical particles of those two languages, plus their ease in forming compound words, may have helped make them the pre-eminent languages of Western philosophy. Another example, familiar to all of us who studied Latin, is that highly inflected languages (ones in which word endings suffice to indicate sentence structure) can use variations of word order to convey nuances impossible with English. Our English word order is severely constrained by having to serve as the main clue to sentence structure. If English becomes a world language, that would not be because English was necessarily the best language for diplomacy. The range of cultural practices in New Guinea also eclipses that within equivalent areas elsewhere in the modern world, because isolated tribes were able to live out social experiments that others would find utterly unacceptable. Forms of self-mutilation and cannibalism varied from tribe to tribe ...»