Re: OT: Another analytic question

On Tue, 11 Jan 2005 17:22:03 -0800, Gary Shannon <fiziwig@...> wrote:

>Another question regarding analytic or isolating
>languages. I know very little about them, but one of
>my current conlangs seems headed in that direction.
>
>What I'm wondering about is it seems like most
>analytic languages rely heavily on word order to mark
>roles, as in SVO, SOV, etc. What I have in mind is to
>always mark every part of the sentence with a particle
>so that word order is irrelevant to meaning and can be
>used to emphasize some part of what is being said.
>
>For example, suppose I used the particles "su", "ob",
>and "indo" in the sentence "Su John gave ob book indo
>(to) Mary." Now I can shuffle the pieces around
>without confusing the roles of the various players and
>write: "Indo Mary gave ob book su John." or "Ob book
>indo Mary gave su John." "su John" always tells us
>that John is the subject no matter where "su John"
>appears in the stream of words that makes up the
>sentence.
>
>Are there any analytic natlangs (or conlangs) that
>completely mark the roles of the participants so that
>word order is (relatively) free? Or am I venturing
>into unexplored (or unproductive) territory?
Well, I've done this in Chatiga :D
However, I have set a default word order where marking the functions of the
words is not neccessary. Only words that are deviating from this need to be
marked. So, if you don't see any particles marking the function, you know
that it is the default word order.
I've described it in detail here:
http://www.choton.org/chatiga/grammar.html

--
Pascal A. Kramm, author of:
Chatiga: http://www.choton.org/chatiga/
Choton: http://www.choton.org
Ichwara Prana: http://www.choton.org/ichwara/
Skälansk: http://www.choton.org/sk/
Advanced English: http://www.choton.org/ae/