Language as Code: Why Word Order Feels Weird in Hindi (and What It Reveals About the Mind)
“To speak is to code the world. To listen is to decode it.”
When you start learning a new language — like Hindi — as a native English speaker, one of the first things that feels off is word order.
- English: I eat apples.
- Hindi: Main seb khaata hoon. → I apples eat.
It’s like the language is wired backwards — or is it?
This feeling — that another language’s structure is weird or reversed — is deeply human, but also deeply revealing. Because under the hood, language is a form of computation, and every natural language is a different programming model for the same hardware: the human brain.
Let’s explore.
Word Order Is Grammar, Not Preference
In linguistics, we talk about sentence structure in terms of Subject (S), Verb (V), and Object (O).
- English is SVO: I (S) eat (V) apples (O).
- Hindi is SOV: Main (S) seb (O) khaata hoon (V).
- Irish is VSO: Itheann (V) mé (S) úll (O).
- Japanese is also SOV
- Malagasy (from Madagascar): VOS
🌍 Every possible combination exists among the world’s languages — and all are grammatically valid in their own context. That’s not chaos — that’s diversity by design.
Just like programming languages, natural languages choose different defaults, and once you internalize them, they feel “natural” — and everything else feels “backwards.”
🧠 Languages as Cognitive Interfaces
Imagine languages as interfaces to reality. Each one abstracts the world differently.
- English front-loads actions. It emphasizes what’s happening.
- Hindi builds toward the action. It builds context first.
- Japanese uses particles to tag roles explicitly (not by position).
- Chinese often uses topic-comment structure, fronting what’s important.
Each structure shapes how you package your thoughts, like different syntax trees:
English: doer → does → thing done to
Hindi: doer → thing → does
Japanese: thing[accusative] doer[nominative] → does
These patterns don’t just encode grammar — they scaffold cognition.
💬 The Sapir-Whorf Glitch: Does Language Shape Thought?
You might’ve heard of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which says:
The language you speak affects how you think.
This comes in two forms:
- Strong Whorf: Language determines thought. ❌ Mostly rejected.
- Weak Whorf: Language influences thought. ✅ Increasingly supported.
Example:
- Russian has separate words for light blue and dark blue. Russians can distinguish shades faster than English speakers.
- Some Aboriginal languages use absolute directions (north/south) instead of left/right — and are naturally better at spatial orientation.
Learning a new sentence structure — like SOV in Hindi — doesn’t just change how you speak. It nudges how you frame action, causality, and importance.
It’s like shifting from imperative programming to functional — same output, different mental models.
🧑💻 Programming Languages: The Same Problem in Disguise
Programming languages are also syntactic abstractions with:
- Rules of order
- Constraints on expression
- Ways to think about problems and solutions
For example:
| Language | Structure Bias |
|---|---|
| C | Top-down, imperative, structure-first |
| Lisp | Code = data, prefix notation, recursion |
| Prolog | Logic-based, rule matching |
| Forth | Stack-based, reverse Polish (postfix) |
| Haskell | Purely functional, lazy evaluation |
Switching from C to Haskell can feel just as “weird” as English to Hindi — because the structure changes how you must think to express the same idea.
🤖 Bias in Structure: Who Gets to Be “Natural”?
Much like programming languages reflect the biases of their creators, natural languages encode cultural and historical values.
- English often leaves subjects implied in commands. Hindi usually keeps the subject.
- German puts the verb last in subordinate clauses — building tension until the end.
- French favors logical connectors that enforce cohesion.
What feels “natural” is actually internalized syntax trees and cultural defaults.
That’s why code and language can both feel like alien terrain when you switch systems.
🧭 Final Thoughts: Language Is Thought, Structured
“If you want to change how someone thinks, change the language they use.”
To understand Hindi — or any language — as an English speaker, you must recode your mental parser. Learn to delay the verb, tune into particles, and let meaning accumulate rather than cascade.
The good news? Every language is just a new interface to the same universe. The more you learn, the more syntaxes of thought you collect.
So yes — Hindi feels weird at first. But that weirdness is your brain learning to think in another order — and that’s a feature, not a bug.
🐯 TL;DR
- Languages are like code — they have syntax, structure, and mental models.
- Different word orders (like Hindi's SOV vs English's SVO) reflect different cognitive rhythms.
- Learning a new language shifts how you frame actions, causality, and meaning.
- Programming languages have the same diversity — and the same structural biases.
- What feels “natural” is just what you’ve internalized.
Switch languages, and you switch gears — in both code and thought. And that's GRRREAT!