Re: Results of Poll by Email No. 27

From Peter Clark:

>         25 people responded to last week's poll, which asked, "What's your
favorite
> word order?" VSO was declared the sexiest word order, closely followed by
> free word order. Here are the results:
>         A. SVO (3 responses, 12%)
>         B. SOV (3 responses, 12%)
>         C. VOS (1 response, 4%)
>         D. VSO (9 responses, 36%)
>         E. OSV (0 responses, 0%
>         F. OVS (0 responses, 0%)
>         G. Free word order (6 responses, 24%)
>         H. Other (Not originally part of the poll) (3 responses, 12%)

More than one-third voted for VSO? DAMN THOSE TECHIANS!! I mean, it does
seem like a logical word order, with the verb first. I voted for free word
order (VSO a close second), because I like flexibility, and the ability to
put emphasis on an element. I want that for Tech: where Russian emphasis the
last part of the sentence, Tech will put most weight on the first. So some
examples of different verb orders, for "the dog eats meat":

VSO is standard: He eats, the dog, meat. (no commas in the actual language,
I just put it there to set the subject apart)
SVO: The dog, he eats meat. (Emphasis on S)
OVS: Meat he eats, the dog. (Emphasis on O)
Verb-final sentences are possible in Tech, but pretty rare.

One of the issues I'm working with is when the subject pronoun is a prefix
and when ti is a suffix. In Semitic languages, it's suffixes for past tense
and prefixes (plus a suffix for feminines and plurals) for present tense.
Could this be evidence of an active phase of Proto-Afrasian or something?

Trollish is strictly SVO. Being a native English speaker, that seems the
most "basic" to me -- and it's also the word order of Mandarin, the number
one language in the world.

Esperanto is a strange IAL, being free word order... a Pole invented the
language, remember.

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