Re: Branching typologies [was: Re: "easiest" languages, SE Asian word-order typologies]

On Wed, 26 Sep 2001 14:42:35 -0500, "Thomas R. Wier"
<trwier@...> wrote:

>I'm curious: what is the most common branching typology for our
>conlangs? Phaleran is very left-branching: SOV word order, relative
>clauses before the noun they modify, adjectival particles before
>the noun they modify.  Degaspregos was/is more right branching:
>although it has mainly SOV word order, relative clauses and
>adjectives usually come after the modified noun.
>
>You know what -- we should compile a brief synopsis of all types
>of conlinguistic typologies.  It would shed some light not so much
>on language, but rather more likely, on the conlanger population.
Tirehlat is pretty boring -- SVO, adjectives before nouns, relative clauses
after nouns. Too much like English! But after Gjarrda, with its VSO,
typical right-branching order, I needed to do something different, and
Tirehlat was originally intended to be easy for an English-speaker to
learn. I've used both VSO and SVO in my languages, but I can't think of any
examples of SOV (except in early versions of Eklektu). Zarkhând and
Kazvarad have OSV. I've also used both orders of adjective-noun and
noun-adjective (Olaetyan for instance uses noun-adjective order for the
most part, probably inspired by French and Spanish.) Most of my languages
have prepositions, although a few do have postpositions. I doubt if there's
any correlation between postpositions and left-branching order in general
in my languages, but it would be interesting if there is.

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