Syntaxy-Turvy (long, crazy)

Hi, all.

This is the beginning of a new conlang idea, called Syntaxy-Turvy, or Taxy for
short.  There's a lot still to work out about it, and some points even in the
present presentation that I'm not sure about (like OVS order), but I'd still
love to hear comments.

SYNTAXY-TURVY

I have recently come into contact with a most remarkable language
called Taxy.  I shall spare the reader the details of its phonology
and morphology (which, while interesting in themselves, are by far the
least remarkable things about it) by presenting it entirely in terms
of English glosses.   I shall also keep the presentation of
inflectional morphology down to the minimum necessary.

Intransitive sentences, in Taxy, are at first glance very easy to
comprehend.  For example:

English:

        The dog runs.

Taxy:

        Dog run.
        (again, I'm minimalizing morphological details here,
        so the Taxy sentences may seem a bit broken compared with their
        English counterparts.)

In an intransitive sentence, in both English and Taxy, a single noun
is accompanied by a single verb, and the relationship between the noun
and the verb is that of agent to action.

Alas, there the similarity ends.  Behold transitive sentences in
English and in Taxy:

English transitive:

        The man calls the dog.

Taxy transitive:

        Call dog run.

As you can see, an English transitive sentence has a verbal core, with
two arguments, a subject (which usually indicates agent) and an object
(which usually indicates patient).  The basic order is SVO.

A Taxy transitive sentence, however, has a nominal core, with two
arguments, an object (which usually indicates passion, that is, action
suffered or undergone by the main noun), and a subject (which usually
indicates action undertaken by the noun).  The basic order is OVS.

There is no way to translate a simple English transitive with a simple
Taxy transitive; the parts of the sentence do not match up.  Each
language's simple transitives require more than one sentence, a
compound or complex sentence, or other tricks to make a simple
translation.

English to Taxy:

        The man calls the dog.
        Man call. Call dog do.

Taxy to English:

        Call dog run.
        Somebody calls the dog.  The dog runs.

Note that in both cases, a place-filler was needed to fill an empty
subject.  Subjects are obligatory in both English (where they are
nouns) and Taxy (where they are verbs).

When we translated English to Taxy, we lacked information on what the
dog was doing, so we had to fill the gap with the generic word "do."

When we translated from taxy to English, we lacked information on who
was calling the dog, so we had to fill the gap with the generic word
"somebody."

In English, we have another way to solve the problem: passivization.
The sentence "Somebody calls the dog" is more or less equivalent to
the sentence "The dog is called."  By Passivizing the verb, the
subject comes to represent the patient of the verb rather than the
agent of the verb, and the object (which formerly represented the
patient) disappears.

There is a counterpart in Taxy, called "patientization."  The sentence
"call dog do" is more or less equivalent to the sentence "dog-ed
call." ("-ed" here is an English gloss for the Taxy patientization
morpheme, which attaches to the main noun of the sentence.)  By
Patientizing the noun, the subject comes to represent the passion of
the noun rather than the action of the noun, and the object (which
formerly represented the passion) disappears.

So let's try those sentences again:

English to Taxy:

        The man calls the dog.
        Man call. dog-ed call.

Taxy to English:

        Call dog run.
        The dog is called.  The dog runs.

The useful thing about this is that we now have identical subjects in
both sentences, and can translate them with coordinated predicates
(recall that a Taxy predicate consists of a noun phrase, that is a
noun and possible preceding verb object.)

Coordinated Translations:

        The man calls the dog.
        Man and dog-ed call.

        Call dog run.
        The dog is called and dog runs.

However, in both cases, there is some degree of awkwardness in
the coordination -- in the one case, coordinating an agent and a
patient noun, in the other, an active with a passive verb.


How about relative clauses?

Well, in English this is the procedure for making a relative clause:
You take one of your sentences, change one of the nouns to a relative
pronoun like "which", and use the whole clause as a modifier to a noun
in the other sentence, which is now your main clause.

In Taxy, however, you take one of your sentences, change one of the
verbs to a relative proverb (I'll also translate relative proverbs as
"which," since Taxy has no relative pronouns), and use the whole
clause as a modifier to a verb in the other sentence, which is now
your main clause.

English:

        The dog is called. The dog runs.
        The dog (which is called) runs.

Taxy:

        Man call.  Dog-ed call.
        Man (dog-ed which) call.

And just to provide some examples which don't involve mixing voice:

Taxy:    Dog (man which) run.
         ("The dog is running, which the man is also doing.")



What about participles?

In English, we can reduce a verb to being a noun modifier by throwing
-ing on the end of it (if it is to have an agent-action relation to
the noun) or -ed on the end of it (if it is to have a patient-passion
relation to the noun).

Hence, you could say, "The dog, called, runs."  How handy a way to
translate the Taxy sentence "Call dog run"!

There is a Taxy equivalent: you can reduce a noun to being a verb
modifier by throwing -ing on the end of it (if it is to be the agent
of a verb) or -ed on the end of it (if it is to be the patient of the
verb).

So to translate the sentence, "The man calls the dog" into Taxy, you
could say, "Man call dog-ed."  Here "call" is the subject of "man,"
and "dog-ed" is a participial modifier to "call" -- it specifies that
the dog is the patient of the call.

Many difficult translation problems between English and Taxy can be
solved by means of participles -- in both directions.

(that's all I've got for now!)

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