> Ok, let's see if I can define some simple and unconvoluted
sentences that
>communicate, "A horse distrubs me."
> 1. Horse disturb I.
English-style.
> 2. Horse wa disturb I o.
Japanese-style.
>Ok, the first sentence depends upon sentence ordering in order to make it
>clear that the horse, not I, am the one doing the disturbing.
> The second
>sentence, by marking actor/patient, topic/focus, (however you want to do
it),
>allows you freer word order. Implicitly encoded into "disturb" is the
notion
>that disruption is being imposed upon me by the horse. (Which takes care of
>your usage of "by" and "upon".)
> You may be asking yourself, what's the difference between sentence
2 and
>your example? Well, using "by" and "upon" is extrenuous; it's not that they
>are wrong to use, but that it tells too much information for a simple
>sentence.
To a Japanese-speaker, explicitly marking them is as
essential as explicitly marking the indirect object
or the place where the action occurs. In English, you
say "Go home", but in Spanish we say "Vete A casa" and
not just "Vete casa", which would sound unintelligible
even taking into account semantics (a Spanish speaker
would at most understand it this way: that you're a bit
nuts and are asking your home to go).
> More complex sentences, of course, will need these words, but at a
>base level for an auxlang, simplicity reigns supreme. The first sentence is
>dead simple; all one needs to know is that word order is significant and
>three words. The second is slightly more complex, but not significantly so:
>the speaker only needs to know that the actor/topic/whatever is _always_
>followed by "wa," and that the patient/focus/whatever is _always_ followed
by
>"o."
No, the focus in Japanese is not marked by "wo" but by "ga".
> Then upon that foundation, you can start building more complex rules.
And why having several rules when you can solve it all with
just one that covers the whole lot of possibilities?
>For example, involving word order:
> 1. Horse wa disturb I o.
> 2. I o disturb (horse wa).
>The first could be glossed as "A horse disturbs me," while the second (here
>I've chosen to emphasize agentivity) as "I am disturbed (by a horse)."
> Now, let's contrast that with "By a horse pred. disturb I upon."
For one,
>you've got an article, which a significant portion of the world has trouble
>with. Next, there's nothing that indicates what preposition should be used;
>prepositions are notoriously language-specific and their usage varies. For
>instance, one language might say "I fly ON a plane" while another might say
>"I fly IN a plane."
I think there's a significant difference between flying IN
a plane and flying ON it (most sincerely I think you
wouldn't have many chances to survive if you dared do the
second).
> Finally, as I already pointed out, prepositions are not
>necessary in such a simple sentence. Hence, it is excessively convoluted.
As the English/Spanish comparison I've just offered should
show you, you can't say that something is "not necessary"
that easily. Maybe it seems unnecessary to you, but that's
because that's what you're native language does.
>> > I'm also wondering why it is necessary to express "upon", since
>>
>> you already
>>
>> >have marked the actor with "by". My guess is that this is some form of
>> >accusative marking.
>> > If such is the case, what prompts you to dictate both
>> >articles and accusative particles for an auxlang?
>>
>> Because that frees word order from the task of determining
>> those grammatical relationships.
> Then why are you using prepositions, instead of something along
the lines of
>what I proposed above?
Because prepositions are what would determine grammatical
relationships. And I don't see what are those lines you've
proposed that do not mean relying grammatical relationships
upon word order.
>> About the articles, the "problem" with them is not that
>> there's something "difficult" about its conceptual part
>> but that the use natural languages make of them is fully
>> idiomatic and thus illogic and unpredictable. Articles
>> can be very useful, and even make THE difference in some
>> contexts, if they're used consistently according to their
>> exact meaning.
> Ok, care to enlighten us as to how you are going to make articles
>predictable? You seem to be assuming that we should instinctively know all
>the stuff you've been telling us. I agree that articles can be useful, but
I
>am also aware that sometimes they are overused. Indirect articles
expecially
>could be ditched to no great loss.
-"la" (the): that one you already know which one I'm talking
about and thus don't require from me any further specification
to know which one it is
-"na" (a): an unspecified but concrete occurrence of the
meaning of what follows
-absence of article: the meaning of the word at its most
abstract, without any reference to any particular
occurrence of it
Cheers,
Javier