Re: conlang survey part 1

En réponse à Balazs Sudar <conlang@...>:

>
> LOL! I was thinking a lot, how would a language work without tenses or
> noun cases or so. Could someone who has a language like this, explain
> shortly how it works?
>
Well, a language without cases nor tenses can work very easily. Look at
Mandarin for instance! (or English when it's about cases)

To replace cases, word order and appositions are the rule. Look at English "I
give the man a book" which manages to make a complete unambiguous ditransitive
sentence without any noun case, just word order. Of course, it makes word order
rigid, but there's a price to everything. To replace tenses, it's even easier.
Use verbs without tenses at all (nor aspects for that matter, they are also
unnecessary), and if you really need to mark tense, use an adverb or a noun
phrase ("yesterday", "tomorrow", "right now", "later", "for the time
being", "in 586 AD", etc...). As long as you talk about the same timeframe, you
don't need to repeat the time mark.

Cases help keep a flexible word order. Tenses provide some redundancy, not
necessary but still mostly welcome. In both cases you can easily do without
them. You just have to mark the semantics they show in some other way (word
order, adverbs and/or noun phrases, unbound appositions, etc...).

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.