Re: Verb order in Montreiano

Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
>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?>

Kash phonology and word structure have barely changed since Day One.
Likewise the noun and verb inflections.  Word order is still a little
flexible, basically SVO, with OVS translating the Engl. passive-- though I'm
finding as I translate things and ponder grammatical points, there's a
tendency to go VOS.  I think this stems from the fact that subjects are
marked on the verb, and pronoun subjects are deleted (as in Spanish), so
even SVO comes out just VO much of the time. Then *real* noun subjects tend
to get tacked onto the end, sort of an afterthought.

Stress is 99% penultimate; most -CV suffixes shift stress but a few don't,
so there are occasional antepen. stresses; and quite a few final stresses in
the compound numbers.  Though the word base is mostly 2 syllables, affixed,
derived and compounded forms make for lots of 3, 4 even 5 syll. words, with
various secondary stresses.  It would be a syllable-times lang., but AFAICT
isn't monotonous.  Poetry tends to be dactylic with occasional trochees,
which does get a little DA-da-da-DA-da-da...DA-da at times.

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