Re: Isolating languages

Thanks for the thoughts, everyone.

I may have been a bit unclear. It seems people thought I was looking for
non-tonal, but mono-syllabic isolang. I'm not really planning on it being
monosyllabic. In fact, I was hoping there were very isolating langs that
weren't monosyllabic, because I don't know if monosyllabic can be done
without using tones, which I don't want to have. In retrospect, it seems
like a silly question to have asked, but at the time, I was looking at sites
that kept mentioning Chinese, etc.

>> My current ideas are:
>> Tentative name: G'nan
>> Morphology: Isolating
>> Typology: SOV/Po/GN/AN, with alternate SVO.
>> (Seriously consdiering making SVO the primary word
>> order)
>
>How strange! I was working on a conlang called Gi-nàin
>for a while, until it 'evolved' into my current one,
>Nèm. Both were isolating, SOV and, so some degree, tonal!
Interesting indeed! The idea for the name "G'nan" came from my trying to
remember the typology: GN/AN -> G'nan. At one point I was going to have it
be the opposite (NG/NA) and was tentatively calling it (you guessed it)
"Nigna". But NG/NA is so heavily associated with type I (VOS) natlangs, such
as Semitic and Celtic, that I decided to swap it around.

How do you handle keeping S and O straight? For me, one of the problems
arises because genitive constructs are consecutive nouns that have no case
marking. Other problems I haven't quite solved yet arise when I want to
treat a series of nouns as a list of items (without conjunctions) instead of
a genitive construct, and when I want to state equality of two items
(without a copula).

I've discovered that I have much less trouble if I introduce an ergativity
particle for transitive verbs, although this won't solve everything. I'll
probably have to either rely on context for disambiguation, or introduce
more particles.

~Caleb
"Prepositions are great things to end sentences with!"

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