[citation needed] Such separable verbs are also part of the normal grammatical usage of some modern languages, such as Dutch and German.
Tmesis is found as a poetic or rhetorical device in classical Latin poetry, such as Ovid's Metamorphoses[citation needed].
In the work of the poet Ennius, the literal splitting of the word cerebrum creates a vivid image: saxo cere comminuit brum "he shattered his brain with a rock.
Old Irish verbs are found at the beginning of clauses (in a VSO word order) and often possess prepositional pre-verbal particles, e.g. ad-midethar (ad- prefix) "evaluates, estimates".
This results in an abnormal word order, e.g. ad- cruth caín -cichither "[the] fair form will be seen" (where ad-chichither is the future third-person singular passive of ad-cí "sees").