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I get these kind of sentence structure too often from Czech people:

a past participle, followed by a to be verb, followed by the rest of the sentence.

For example, instead of saying

The information is written here

I hear

Written here is the information

It feels like there is a what is removed from the beginning of the sentence

[What is] written here is the information

Another example:

[Secondary keys are useful for fast access by other fields than primary key.] Declared are as SecondaryKey.

Instead of

[...] They are declared as SecondaryKey

Or another example:

Enumerated are always all items

instead of

All items are always enumerated

Are these correct or incorrect in English?

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  • Are these examples of real usage you've encountered?
    – xiota
    Commented Sep 2, 2019 at 15:29
  • @xiota yes, I hear the first one a lot, the two other examples are from a wiki page written by one of our experts
    – Bizhan
    Commented Sep 2, 2019 at 16:19
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    The first one seems fine to me. The other two are incomprehensible. Perhaps there's an underlying Czech structure they're trying to emulate.
    – xiota
    Commented Sep 2, 2019 at 16:21
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    The second two examples are very bizarre, even for Yoda. But while I can change the word order of the third example to make it normal, I can't even do that with the second example.
    – Jason Bassford
    Commented Sep 2, 2019 at 18:39
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    When using the verb "to be" in any form, you can always transpose the subjects or transpose the subject and the predicate adjective, so you can say, "Written here is the information," just as properly as you can say, "The information is written here," and you can say, "Always enumerated are all items," just as properly as you can say, "All items are always enumerated." I mean, when you put a predicate adjective first, you can come off as sounding like Yoda from Star Wars, but it's not improper, nor does it change the meaning.
    – Benjamin Harman
    Commented Sep 3, 2019 at 0:21

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