How fascinating!🙂
I wish I could speak some Chinese, but don’t know more that „I love you“ and the well known „Mother is scolding the horse“.
And in German, yes, most sentences use the SVO word order, but this is not mandatory, since, thank to the inflectional endings of German nouns, you can always know which one it the subject and which one is the object - that’s the strong point of synthetic languages.
It seems to me that Old English and modern German are closer to each other in grammar as well as phonetics than modern English and German are.
Old English: „Tham kynge licodon peran“
Modern German: „Dem Könige schmeckten die Birnen“, but:
Modern English: „The King liked the pears“
As a former student of Old English, I also found the resemblance between Old English and Old High German particularly striking.
Just great to be able to have this discussion with you, and with others, here on FR😀