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Hi! Introduction and OSV

From:Sharon <nutbuddy@...>
Date:Saturday, January 8, 2005, 8:50
Hi everyone! I've been a lurker of this mailing list on and off for
the past two years or so, and I guess I've found a reason now to
delurk (although there might not be a very noticeable difference; I'm
usually several days behind posts and you all usually say everything
worth saying anyway ;).

In any case, my name's Sharon Chu, and I'm a 16 year-old living in
Southern California. My parents immigrated from Taiwan in their
college years and so I'm semi-fluent in Mandarin Chinese. Of course, I
use English as my primary language, and I've been taking Spanish
classes at school as well.

I'd like to say that I was always interested in languages, but I'm
afraid that this is only partly true. While I was probably a little
bit more, um, "linguistically aware" than an average American child,
it wasn't until two years ago that I finally started to become
fascinated by languages. A friend and I started work on a conlang,
although the interest was short-lived and it was basically a clone of
Latin (my friend's language of choice).

Later on, while re-reading my copy of the Silmarillion, I developed a
sudden interest in Sindarin--not Quenya, which, to tell the truth, I
have never been that interested in--and began feverishly taking notes
from the Ardalambion. Sooner or later my interest in Sindarin
dwindled, and I tried to construct my own conlang--which is now
discarded, since it resembled a Spanish relex too much at first and
later on because I kept changing the verb conjugations to the point
where I got extremely confused and abandoned it out of frustration.

Lately, however, I've been inspired by posts of those who are creating
languages through McGuffey's Reader, and one day I took out one of the
beginning readers I received last year in my Spanish class and
sketched out the beginnings of a language (instead of listening to my
Chemistry teacher's lecture, alas).

I'm really, really excited about this yet unnamed language, for it's
getting more and more complex as I sit through more Chemistry classes
and so far it's *not a relex*!! (--although it's one of my greatest
fears that it might eventually degenerate to that).

Well, anyway, the point of all that was (a) to be a somewhat concise
history on my linguistic background and also (b) to bring me to my
question:

When I first began writing out this language, I decided on a whim to
give it an OSV syntax, and so far, with simple sentences and such, it
hasn't given me any problems so far. However, lately I've started
realizing that I know nothing about OSV languages in general _at all_,
and this information is rather hard to come by in the library and the
last time I checked Google it wasn't very much help.

Would anyone have any general information on OSV syntax which I could
use, then? :)

Thanks a lot in advance.

Somewhat embarassedly,
Sharon.

--
Matt: But yeah, Latin would be cool. Plus, when you say to people "I
can speak Latin, pitiful worm!" they'll be like "Omfg, he be learned!"
Matt: and they will cower before you.

Reply

Tim May <butsuri@...>