Re: Results of Poll by Email No. 27

Tristan McLeay wrote:

>And SVO seems like a logical word order, I mean: the subject *does
>something* to the object. How more logical can you get than that?
"Ki SOV mantiksoi orepni taban nisras'. Unyya: Wugic' objektot *dirkuin
hera*. Dla er kubie mantiksoiyan c'ek res'?"

>A causes B. Those diagrams for cause-and-affect one of our Psych lectures
>had had the symbol for cause in the middle, so A->B. *And* it keeps the
>two nouns apart.
There's definitely logic in putting a verb between the nouns, especially in
a language where "NOUN NOUN" might suggest a genitive construction. But
there are case markings, articles, all sorts of other things that can keep
nouns from running together.
As for A->B, this makes sense because there's a *chronological progression*
from A, through something happening (->) to B. But subjects and objects
often exist simultaneously, or in other chronological orders (like "A
follows B").

>(BTW: How is having the verb first particularly 'logical'? I can
>understand why someone might say SVO (or ever OVS) was logical, but I
>have trouble with understand any logicalness in VSO (or OSV ).
The verb is what happened, and then you introduce the players. Or, we could
come up with the logic behind SOV: introduce all the players... "and they
did THIS". This could fit chronology in a lot of situations too: "enter
dog, enter man... BITE!"
Or you could go ergative: do we want to introduce the agent first, or the
patient? Or the verb? Don't get me started on verbless Omurax...
Other logic behind putting the verb at one end or another: as in Japanese,
where the verb always comes last, you could make it so any verb *before* a
noun is then considered a relative clause.
dog-s man-o bites
"the dog bites the man"
man-o bites dog-s
"the dog WHO bites the man"
You could do this the exact other way around in a verb-inital language.

>I'm not sure that one word order is any more logical than another.
Maybe free word order is most logical: you can order things however they
seem "important" at the time.

M

... nah.

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