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on 4/4/02 1:22 PM, Mike Wright at darwin@hidden.email wrote: > > > Ah. But I see flexibility as a flaw--assuming that your goals include > ease of learning and ease of use. One of the problems I had with > Japanese is that once you've learned five ways to say the same thing, > some native speaker will stump you with a sixth. Well, I don't want _too_ many ways to say the same thing.... But I like the sa/hu alternatives. > > I would expect that, whenever possible, speakers would pick structures > that feel familiar to them, but listeners have to understand every > possible way of expressing any given idea. Point taken. > > In my personal language-learning experience, regularity and > consistency make things easy--no matter how alien the structure > appears. I'd hate to be a new student of English, where we can say > things like: > > John, who was just getting over breaking up with Mary, was getting up > to get off of the bus, when Bob turned to him and said, "I really got > off on the way you got over on the teacher yesterday." "Well," says > John, "he wouldn't get off my back. By the way, do you think we'll get > off on Friday for Teacher Training Day?" "I hope so. I need to get > over to the range and get off a few shots with my new antique AK-47." > "You're blocking the door, boys" pipes up the bus driver. "Off you > get. Go on...get along with you." > > Now *that* is flexibility. (For extra credit, translate the preceding > paragraph into Ceqli.) You got me there. > >>> Mandarin, too, has some oddities that appear to come from foreign >>> influences. >>> >>> This really struck me when I noticed that Ceqli has the word "gi" for >>> "during", which works as a progressive aspect particle before a verb. >>> I assume that this is intended to mean "during" when used before a >>> noun. If so, this is very much English word order, and very different >>> from Mandarin, but in other cases, we are using Mandarin word order. >>> Sometimes we seem to be using structures that don't match either >>> English or Mandarin. >> >> I'm generally placing modifiers in front of verbs, be they adverbs or >> whatever. Indeed, tense and aspect markers can be considered adverbs. >> >>> >>> My real preference would be to first define all word order in the >>> abstract, without any reference to translations into any language. >>> This should permit the development of a consistent internal logic, >>> with minimal influence from any natural language. Of course, we can >>> look at a language like Mandarin and decide on SOV and modifier-head >>> as basics, along with some others. But then the details should arise >>> from the basics, ignoring irregularities in any of the natural >>> languages that we know. >> >> I'll buy that. But I don't really see any real inconsistencies at this >> point. We're now SVO, VOS, OSV, and head-last. > > I can see OSV as a topicalization of O, but what is VOS for? At this point, only translating Yoda's talking. Seriously, it might emphasize the verb. Pa pojikaw da, go! Killed him, I did! > > -- >PLEASE NOTE MY NEW E-MAIL ADDRESS: rmay@hidden.email > Rex F. May (Baloo) > Daily cartoon at: http://www.cnsnews.com/cartoon/baloo.asp > Buy my book at: http://www.kiva.net/~jonabook/gdummy.htm > Language site at: http://www.geocities.com/ceqli/Uploadexp.htm >Discuss my auxiliary language at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/txeqli/