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Re: [glosalist] Heterodox (re: Kevin)

Eike Preuss (Eike Preuss <mail@...>) on August 6, 2006

Vasiliy wrote:

[…]

Also the phrase “What is it?” is another English pattern, because it has not a verb phrase marker and it has not a subject marker, and it has not an object marker too. It has no marker at all. But… draw your attention to the fact, that this phrase has the OVS-order (!!)

In SVO-order it would be “It is what?”, which is equally understandable if you restrict your language to SVO, so what is your point? From ‘Glosa Basic Reference, Questions’: “N.B. Question words which are the Object come after the verb.”

You ask: ‘Is there a strong reason to allow other patterns?’ But other orders (orders as patterns) are allowed in fact in all languages (in English and Glosa too).

Well, whether it should be allowed in Glosa, could/should be discussed here, right? :) But I agree that the original texts like Hedo Prince are very English-like.

For example, there is other pattern in your sentence above ;) The sentence ‘Is there a strong reason to allow other patterns?’ has VSO+O+O order!

In Glosa it would have SVO+O+O order, and be preceeded with ‘Qe’. Or split it up into “Qe there is strong reason; (that) other patterns should be allowed?”

Let’s place ~S~, ~V~ and ~O~ markers in’[]’: ‘[~V~] Is [~S~] there [a = ~O~] strong reason [to = ~O~] allow [~O~] other patterns?’

No one europian language has rigid order indeed.

That no european language has a rigid order might be an indication that there is a good reason for non-rigid order, but since I heard different things from asian languages, I don’t see it.

The rigid order is an illusion, cause usually people gut mix up an order with elision

in patterns and they can’t distinguish articles as homonyms of markers.

  1. Posibility of free order is not a cancellation of the priority order. Let it be the SVO-order, as it was and as it is in many Europian languages. Other orders must be seldom in use and optional. I guess that subject marker should be omitted, if it was a first word in sentence. As a result we might use mainly the SVO-sentence, you wrote: ‘as there is a clear marker between S and V, and another between V and O, it is easy to understand’ .

My opinion: If you allow a free order ‘optionally in seldom cases’, you must provide strict rules, when and in which form they are allowed. If you don’t provide these rules, you end up with people from different countries constantly using the word order they are used to from their native languages (which makes the language easier to write and a horror to read), and the SVO-order is no longer the ‘priority order’ if you read texts written by the different people. Most european languages also provide these rules btw. But I think restricting to SVO is not so much of a loss.

Ciao, Eike

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Re: [glosalist] Heterodox (re: Kevin) - Committee on language planning, FIAS. Coordination: Vergara & Hardy, PhDs.