Word Order: Subject-Object-Verb (SOV)
English
has a Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) word order. What this means is that the
subject of the sentence will always come first, will always be followed
by the verb and finally, the object comes last.
An example of this would be:
The girl saw the cat.
"The girl" is the subject, "saw" is the verb, and "cat" is the object.
In Sinhala, the word order is Subject-Object-Verb. The above sentence would be structured:
කෙල්ල පූසව දැක්කාය.
[kella puusawa daekkaaya]
The girl the cat saw.Sinhala is what's called a "head-final" language. Essentially this means that the nouns, verbs, prepositions (referred to in Sinhala as postpositions) appear after their compliments. Thus, the verb follows the object, the postposition ends the postposition phrase, and so on.
