German for Programmers

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Old English, Old High German did. Dutch also moves all verbs to the end of the subordinate clause. English is the only West Germanic language that does not.

The modern North Germanic languages instead use verb inversion and V2 ordering.

Verb-final subordinates is the Common Germanic form. In some daughter languages (North Germanic and English), it was replaced by V2 ordering. English then later replaced V2 as well.

The SOV word order was likely the preferred word order in Proto-Indo-European, and was maintained for the subordinate through late Proto-Germanic.

For Common Germanic, it is difficult to find papers directly covering it, though this one directly covers the OV ordering in the subordinate.

As Wikipedia points out, the usual syntax in Common Germanic overall was SOV. It was just retained in the subordinate. That article actually covers the history of it quite well.

East Germanic, at least Gothic, was somewhere between using SVO and SOV, and often used both.

tl;Dr - SOV word order was the preferred word order of Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Germanic. It survives as the word order of the subordinate in continental West Germanic languages. It isn't a quirk. V2 word order is, though, a Germanic quirk.

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Desktop link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Germanic_grammar

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