Re: A Conlang, created by the group?

-----Original Message-----
From: Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
To: Multiple recipients of list CONLANG <CONLANG@...>
Date: Friday, October 09, 1998 3:08 AM
Subject: Re: A Conlang, created by the group?


>Mathias M. Lassailly wrote:
>
>> > I prefer a free word order, made possible by the cases.
>>
>> Then please realize you need a HEAVY case system, sometime even 'doubled'
(on adjectives for example). Are you ready for it ? Yeah ? Ok !
>
>Well, though, a case system makes the word order freer for eachcase, or
rather affix, it adds.  For example, the use of adverbs in
>English is more or less entirely free, because almost all adjectives
>can be made into adverbs simply by using the mostly optional
>affix -ly.  That makes that aspect of English's syntax "free".  So,
>what you call "freedom" is not so much a fixed point as rather more
>like a continuum of freedom -- the more affixes, the more syntactic
>freedom. But with more syntactic freedom also comes more morphological
>constriction of freedom, so it's really, more or less, a zero-sum gain.
>
The Czech language is so fully loaded with affixes that you can scamble a
sentence's word order any way you please and still have the sentence be
perfectly understood, but the way the language is ordinarily spoken follows
rather rigid word-order rules.

The reason for that, is that it lets the Czechs emphasize different words in
a sentence by simply displacing them from the standard word order.  In
spoken English, we have to say certain words louder or slower to emphasize
them (and we can't do the equivalent in written English without using
boldface or underlines or italics).

Czech is an extreme example, but I think most languages that use many
affixes also use a standardized word order (and deviate from their standard
word order to emphasis different words).

-- Tommie