Re: CHAT: I saw it! I saw it! I saw it!

I wrote:

> > In Chip Delaney's _Nova_, it is asserted that people from the
> > Pleiades Cluster (one of three areas of human settlement) speak
> > in SOV fashion.  Well and good, until the narrator throws away
> > the information that this is true in *all* languages!  What
> > about the ones that are already SOV?
Based on the private and public responses, understanding this
paragraph people are not.  It has nothing to do with Yoda except
by implication; _Nova_ is a novel by Samuel R. ("Chip") Delaney
which uses an SOV (subject-object-verb) condialect.

My point was that it's plausible, if stretching the envelope a bit,
for Delaney to postulate that people from certain planets speak
an SOV dialect of the common-language-rendered-as-English, and
that this is odd enough that his dialogue needs to express it
directly.

But then the book's narrator happens to mention in an off-hand
manner that this feature is true in the local dialect of *all*
languages.  Preposterous!  Every local language became dialectalized
in exactly the same way, and affecting a basic typological feature?

So we are left with the idea that a *region of space* causes its
inhabitants to render their native language, whatever it may be,
in SOV order!  Nothing is said about languages that are already
SOV....

--
John Cowan      http://www.ccil.org/~cowan              cowan@ccil.org
        You tollerday donsk?  N.  You tolkatiff scowegian?  Nn.
        You spigotty anglease?  Nnn.  You phonio saxo?  Nnnn.
                Clear all so!  'Tis a Jute.... (Finnegans Wake 16.5)