Not of interest to most, but it's the sort of thing I spend way too much time on.
I asked myself, "I wonder which syntactical word-order is most common in human language?" Specifically, I was thinking about the "split" verb phrases implicit in e.g. VSO (verb-subject-object) in languages like Welsh, Irish, and various Mayan dialects (among many others of course). Was that order less common?
After only a little bit of googling, I found my answer, and much more. This map is a screenshot of a zoomable map-app that I found.
It's very cool if you're into that kind of thing. It seems to imply (to me, anyway) that SOV is a kind of substratum, which is interesting. I found an article (actually I think the article led me to the map, but I don't remember) that discusses this very idea, although it gets somewhat skeptical.
It’s strange that the Indo-European languages do not all have a common word-order.
By what process would a group of people shift their entire grammar structure from one to another? Assuming Proto-Indo-European was SVO, how would the ‘proto-Welsh’ have ever mananged to shift to VSO?
“I want an apple” [SVO] — statement.
“Want I an apple” [VSO] — seems to be a question. It doesn’t seem logical that this shift would occur.
Maybe the ‘proto-Welsh’ picked up the word-order from a pre-IE group who were in the British Isles, now long-extinct. Such speculations are fascinating, and there are more than a few, that have had me thinking for a long while now, in this paper:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/8670/Languages-in-prehistoric-Europe-north-of-the-Alps (Maybe you’ve come across this Dr.Vennemann before; I thoroughly enjoyed his educated-speculations)
…including the thesis that Pictish was the last survivor of a language family which Vennemann dubs the ‘Atlantic’ family. It arrived in Europe in the Neolithic and is related to the present-day ‘Hamito-Semitic’ family.
I see from the map that some of the Berbers [Hamito-Semitic] uses VSO. Another ‘Hamito-Semitic’ language is extinct Ancient-Egyptian. Sure enough, “[Ancient] Egyptian’s basic word order is verb–subject–object” (wiki).