Re: THEORY Ideal system of writing

On Thu, 12 Aug 2004 19:47:35 +0100, Keith Gaughan <kmgaughan@...> wrote:
> Roger Mills wrote:
>
> > (1) Well, almost every.... I believe reference has been made to a S.American
> > language with free word-order and no case marking, so that { John + love +
> > Mary } out of context means J loves M or M loves J.  (I could be wrong.)
>
> I heard myself that such an Iranian language exists. It has cases, but
> uses one in transitive sentences, and another in intransitive.
Ah, the "monster raving loony candidate (some Iranian sightings)"
which marks transitive subject and object with the same case?

See also http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0307c&L=conlang&F=&S=&P=20327
and http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/r.html (where Justin B.
Rye says that this method of case marking "combines all the drawbacks
of [two others]." -- one of which is "the clairvoyant's option (less
rare; much use of context): cases not distinguished even by wordorder
rules," which might include the S. American language mentioned.

JBR's page is part of a rant against Esperanto, but you can ignore
that; I find that this particular page is interesting in its own right
and stands on its own rather well.

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>

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