Re: a grammar sketch...

On Thu, Oct 05, 2000 at 12:34:14AM +0100, daniel andreasson wrote:
[snip]
> Christophe replied:
>
> > I think I've spanned the whole range of possibilities. What can
> > you think of next? :)
>
> I've got two words for ya: pivotless languages! Langs with no
> sentence alignment or grammatical relations whatsoever. There
> is just no way of telling if in the sentence 'Dog bites man'
> it is the man or the dog that is bitten.
[snip]

Hmm, you got me thinking. Reminds me of Tamarian, where each sentence is
basically an allegorical reference to some event with a significance known
only by the culture. All you'll need in such a language are a lot of
names, and some simple nouns, etc.. Pushed to an extreme, you might even
get away with having *every* word derived from an allegorical name. Then
you won't even need a grammar, except perhaps a non-strict word order
about word governance.

To tell you the truth, I'm already beginning to form some ideas about a
conlang like this, where what a speaker says can mean almost anything; the
particular meaning is clear only from how the allegory chosen relates to
the situation at hand.


T