Re: Verb order in Montreiano

Yoon Ha Lee sikayal:

> But seeing this made me want to ask: In what order do people like to
> settle on grammatical features (whether or not said features are later
> revised)?  I confess I've gone roughly from _Describing Morphosyntax_ and
> Rosenfeld's Language Construction Kit: deciding on
> agglutinating/isolating/whatever, basic word order, deciding whether
> adjectives are verblike or nounlike or both or neither, etc.  (Which is
> why I double-took when I saw your message, because word order is
> something I decide on really early.)  But my eyes have been opened to the
> possibility of other ways of doing things.  :-)  Enlighten me?
>
> YHL
The very first germs of a language are almost always a vague idea for me:
"I'd like to make an active lang," or "How about something with
German-like vowel ablaut?"  But once I actually make the language, I
always start with phonology, then do inflectional morphology.  The
morphology obviously depends a little bit on the syntax (is this nom/acc
or erg/abs or agt/pat?), but I start out with very little syntax.  I
usually do verbs first, but that varies.  Once I have the morphology I
work on nailing down the syntax, and then vocabulary comes last.  But once
I get really involved w/ the vocabulary, etc, any of the previous things
can change if I feel like I need it; Praçí in particular has changed cases
and word orders and syntax many times.


Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu

"If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are
perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in
frightful danger of seeing it for the first time."
--G.K. Chesterton

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