libro que le presté. To-me returned María the book that to-her (I) lent, “María returned to me the book that I lent her.” Se comieron los niños todo el pastel. Ate up the boys all the cake, “The boys ate up all the cake.” Celtic languages In Welsh, some tenses use simple verbs, which are found at the beginning of the sentence and are followed by the subject and any objects. An example is the preterite: Other tenses may use compound verbs in which the conjugated form of usually bod (to be) precedes the subject and other verb-nouns come after the subject. Objects then follow the final verb-noun. Here is the usual method of forming the present tense: In Irish, phrases also use VSO: In Irish, in forming a question, the same order is used (with an interrogative particle in front): The typological classification of Breton syntax is problematic. It has been claimed that Breton has an underlying VSO character, but it appears at first sight that V2 is the most frequent pattern. That arises as a result of a process usually involving the subject noun phrase being fronted. It has been suggested that the fronting has arisen from a development in which clefting and fronting, which are very common in Celtic languages, became completely pervasive. A very similar development is seen in literary Middle Welsh but did not continue into Modern Welsh. Inversion to VSO There is some tendency in many languages to switch constructions for emphasis. Particularly, sentences in English poetry are sometimes written in VSO, and Early Modern English explicitly reflects the tacit VSO order that is found in Modern English by suppressing the imperative's now-understood subject. For example, "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may" contrasts with modern "Gather rosebuds while you may". Arabic sentences use either SVO or VSO, depending on whether the subject or the verb is more important. Sociolinguistic factors also influence sentence structure especially since colloquial varieties of Arabic generally prefer SVO, but VSO is more common in Standard Arabic. Non-VSO languages that use VSO in questions include English and many other Germanic languages such as German and Dutch, as well as French, Finnish, Maká, and Emilian. In languages with V2 word order, such as most Germanic languages except for Modern English, as well as Ingush and Oʼodham, the verb is always the second element in a main clause. the subject precedes the