Postby xBlackHeartx » 2017-02-24, 23:44
I was wanting a vso language for quite some time. But I was always annoyed by things like copular sentences, since this would require you to place the whole predicate before the subject. I decided recently to just give up on it and go for something I'm actually familiar with, aka an order used by a language I know.
I have thought about sov. I was making a conlang for a while that was sov, with direct-inverse alignment and configurational grammar, and yes, that can work in practice, surprising as it may be.
All nouns belong to one of three cateogories: proper nouns, pronouns/people (their third person singular pronoun is actually the word for person), animates, and inanimates. Simply if there were two nouns, the one higher on the heirarchy was the subject. If they were on the same level (which in practice is surprisingly rare), then word order determined the difference. There is no inverse marker though. To have a subject that's lower on the heirarchy than the object, you simply indicate the lower noun as a topic and indicate its role in the sentence with an appropriate pronoun.
I chose the sov order mostly because its so common and I wanted to explore it more (I'm already somewhat familiar with it through Japanese).
Though I'm thinking I would prefer a svo order. Honestly, you can't make your conlang different from English in every way possible, especially since English has many features that are quite common (such as tense, grammatical number, definiteness). Really, its better to just make the language odd in a few ways and leave the rest more or less normal. And only work with what you're familiar with. I was completely unable to do a vso language simple because I couldn't find much detail on vso languages (especcialy since most languages commonly billed as 'vso' actually aren't, such as the Celtic languages). For now, I'm thinking I'm going to go with something I actually have experience with. Of course, the thing won't be a clone of English, honestly I'm more tempted to add in loglan features than English ones. Besides, SVO isn't exactly uniquely English anyway. I mean, the Chinese languages are all SVO. I actually would prefer a free-er word-order though, but honestly the word-order of English and Chinese are free-er than many people assume.