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

From:Herman Miller <hmiller@...>
Date:Thursday, September 27, 2001, 2:54
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. -- languages of Azir------> ---<http://www.io.com/~hmiller/lang/index.html>--- hmiller (Herman Miller) "If all Printers were determin'd not to print any @io.com email password: thing till they were sure it would offend no body, \ "Subject: teamouse" / there would be very little printed." -Ben Franklin