Sentence structure in the following sentences

Question

I was given these sentences here so they can show me how flexible the sentence structure in the Russian language is (these sentences are supposedly similar):

1. Кошка поймала мышь.

2. Мышь поймала кошка.

3. Поймала кошка мышь.

4. Кошка мышь поймала.

5. Мышь кошка поймала.

6. Поймала мышь кошка.

For sentence number 2. it sounds more like the mouse caught the cat, even when I put it in Google Translate, Yandex translate, it says that the mouse caught the cat, and also I tried to make out sentences 3-6 but they just don't make sense.

Out of those sentences what is the first one you think of as a russian? i was told the most common was Subject-Verb-Object, which would be 1)

Answer 1

For sentence number 2) it sounds more like the mouse caught the cat

No. A question chain here is:

         what has
  whom?   done?   
 ┌────┐  ┌────┐
 ▼    │  ▼    │ who?
Мышь поймала кошка
             ─────

thus, мышь is an object and кошка is a subject. Now I will explain why I decided so.

See, here are three noun categories called declensions; each one has its own set of per-case and per-gender endings. The table below briefly explains the matter:

What can we take from the table?

• мышь is 3rd declension where nominative and accusative have the same ending;
• кошка is 1st declension with clear inter-case difference.

As a result, we skip мышь as an ambiguous word and rely solely on кошка that clearly is nominative, hence a subject. And by exclusion method мышь becomes an object.

So if Google Translate and Yandex turned the meaning inside out, it means they do not use such deep exclusion-based analysis, just caught the first ending and customized the rest of a sentence.

Side note: question chains is a great deal to mark up sentences. It allows you to easily associate six pairs of hint questions in English with a small bunch of endings, associated with individual genders and declensions. The endings though may be learned not directly but via sample words.

Answer 2

1,3,4 are the best to my mind. The first is neutral. The third introduces a story. The fourth is the most expressive way to underline the object. But all sentences are valid and can be used in certain situations.In numbers 4,5,6 мышь is stressed.

3)Поймала кошка мышь.(once upon a time a cat caught a mouse)

4) Кошка мышь поймала.(It was a mouse this time that a cat caught)mouse is stressed.

Answer 3

2 is a tough case to understand straight, I don't think it's ever used. I can propose a context that can make it somewhat plausible:

"Ну что там поймала кошка?"

"Мышь! Мышь поймала кошка."

Answer 4

All the sentences mean the same, the choice depends on many things, like context, rhythm, style, etc..

In English just somebody eats somebody, and it's the word order which defines the subject and the object. But in Russian the subject is expressed by a noun or a pronoun in the Nominative case, whereas the object requires any other case but Nominative. And that case is defined by the verb. So, we can see, that in Russian the syntactic relations between words are not necessarily expressed by the word order.