Re: Word order (Was: Conlangs of mischief (Which in turn was: Re: I'm back!)

On Thursday, September 23, 2004, at 09:19 , Robert Hill wrote:

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> On Friday 24 September 2004 00:09, David Peterson wrote:
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>> But, yes, having no word order is no problem.
It is a problem - it's an impossibility if we are producing sounds
serially or writing in any way that is recognized as writing. The sounds
(and characters) come one after another, i.e. there is an order.

I remember being told half a century ago that Latin has no word order,
because it relies on endings to show relations between words. It was not
long before I realized that is nonsense. What Latin has is fairly _free_
word order - but there certainly are criteria at work determining the
order in which words are actually placed.

>> My first conlang
>> had no word order, and there's *allegedly* a language in a Australia
>> that doesn't even have a preferential word order.
"Doesn't even have a preferential word order" seems to me that you expect
a language to have preferential orderings even if it allows a high degree
of freedom in the ordering of words. I would agree with that.

>> What matters is
>> whether or not all the arguments are marked.
Indeed - if all arguments are unambiguously marked, then free word order
is possible. But even then we would not, I think, allow all the words in a
multi-clausal to disregard clause boundaries, would we?

Also when a person speaks or writes s/he will have to put the words in
some order or other. Do we really believe that a person is going to have
all the words in his/her head and then apply a randomizing function to
determine how they will fall out? There must surely be some criteria
governing the order even if these criteria are largely or wholly
extra-linguistic.

> I am curious as to how many people actually have conlangs with no word
> order.
Indeed - how do they determine the order in which they actually write
their words & morphemes? Do they really just use a randomizing function?
How would they imagine the language actually being used.

> I tooled around with it for a while and eventually it got too stupid for
> me
> to follow ;).
        :-)

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On Friday, September 24, 2004, at 01:09 , David Peterson wrote:

> Teoh wrote:
>
> <<Keep 'em comin'! ;-)>>
>
> How about this: Metes appears to have no grammar or parts
> of speech of any kind whatsoever.  I was the one who had to
> try to decipher the text.  It also appears that all utterances are
> just one long word (if I understood the hyphens right).  Take
> a look at the Metes text, and how I translated it:
>
> Metes:
> http://steen.free.fr/relay10/metes.html
I have looked - the letters come serially. There is order.

Even if Metes makes single utterances one word, the words are ordered,
unless everyone is speaking at the same time. The single-utterance words
are obviously composed of morphemes - they are surely ordered, or did
Rolox simply get all his morphemes and then apply a randomizing function
before writing them down.

I can understand that a language does not have a fixed word order (not
uncommon) because arguments are highly marked. But but _no_ word order has
no meaning as far as I can see. Words have to be in some sort of order to
be uttered or written. How far that word order is determined by
consideration of syntax and how far by extra-linguistic considerations is
a different matter.

Ray
===============================================
http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown
ray.brown@freeuk.com
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"They are evidently confusing science with technology."
UMBERTO ECO				September, 2004

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