Emaelivpar Christophe Grandsire
>As for whether the auxiliary can be separated from the verb, it is indeed
>language-dependent but very frequent. [SNIP]
>So in short, yes, it's an Englishism of your part to consider that it's
strange
>for an auxiliary to be separated from the main verb :)) .
Alrighty, so long as I know where my misconceptions come from. :P
>VSO languages like Irish Gaelic and Arabic which, when they have a
construction
>with an auxiliary verb, generally put the auxiliary first and the main verb
>after the subject, leading to a construction Aux-Subj-Verb-Obj.
Why is this feature more common in VSO languages than in others? Do _most_
VSO langs rearrange their word order when an auxilary is involved, or do
_more_ VSO (than non-VSO) langs? I ask because Asha'ille is VSO, but is
agglutinating and thus often uses a suffix or infix instead of a separate
auxilary verb. There are a few suffixes that also have a separate auxilary
form, and in those cases the word is placed before the verb but the
sentence remains VSO. For example:
|shav| = "to talk"
|-p-| = past tense
|pas| = past tense
|-i| = 1s
So "I talked" could be either |Shavpi| (the more common way of saying it)
or |Pas shavi|. Have I inadvertently made my language unnatural by doing this?
--
AA