Re: Sketch of Germanech 4/4: Syntax

Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...> wrote:

> En réponse à Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg.rhiemeier@...>:
>
> > [...]
> >
> > _Il hom il can ne mordev, mas is mordev so catz._
> > `The dog did not bite the man, but it bit his cat.'
> >
>
> No V2 requirements like in German or Dutch? Too bad, it would have been
> quite a nice feature :))) .
You mean something like German "Den Hund biss der Mann nicht"?
German can do that because it has distinct nominative and accusative
articles in the masculine.  There is no such distinction in Germanech
(except in 1st and 2nd person pronouns), hence there can't be both SVO
and OVS.

Old Germanech had remnants of the Latin case system (like Old French).
Actually, I briefly considered whether Germanech should still have
cases,
I even considered an active case marking system after reading about
some 8th-century Latin texts from what is now Switzerland where
subjects of non-active intransitive verbs were in accusative case!
However, I ditched the idea because it seemed too bizarre to me
in a Romance language.

An OVS construction, however, could have prevented the loss of cases.

> >
> > The conjunction `that' (to use a clause as an object) is _que_.
> >
> > _Laura dichez que Paul amarassez Marje._
> > `Laura says that Paul loves Mary.'
> >
>
> Here again, no V-final requirements on subordinate clauses? I would have
> been a
> nice feature, and not implausible at all since Latin used to be verb-final
> too.
Yes, but early Romance strongly tended towards SVO, and when the cases
were lost, SVO became fixed.

> The influence of the Germanic substrate could have kept the verb in final
> position in subclauses.
Possible; but the alternative OSV order would have worked against it.
Sure, they don't really conflict; but a language that has SOV in
subclauses and allows OSV in main clauses seems too confusing to be
stable.

But actually, syntax is the least stable part of my design,
and I'll perhaps revise it later.

Jörg.
http://home.arcor.de/joerg.rhiemeier/
.

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