On 06/11/2010 21:36, Gary Shannon wrote:
> In my 30-day conlang something interesting is happening.
>
> It started out as VOS word order which had no provision
> for tense: "Be careless hunter." "Be angry bear." "Be
> dead hunter."
>
> Later it developed tense particles/auxiliaries from sort
> of adverb-like words: "Be careless then hunter." "Be
> angry now bear." "Be dead soon hunter." And the word
> order became VOAS where 'A' is the Aux/Adverb.
>
> Later still when the main verb was the copula it was
> dropped: "Careless then hunter." "Angry now bear." "Dead
> soon hunter."
>

[snip]
>
> Now what were three unrelated words with unrelated
> origins are being analyzed as irregular conjugations of
> the same verb "to be".

The main problem about any such reanalysis, it seems to me, 
is that altho the language is declared to be VOS, _we 
haven't had any examples of such a sentence to see how it 
works_.

All Gary's examples have so far been of 
complement-copula-subject.  This is not an uncommon word 
order in languages which, for transitive verbs, have SOV or 
SVO.  For example, ancient Greek had a preference for SOV, 
but in the opening verse of John's Gospel we have:
en arkhe:i e:n ho Logos, (compl-cop-subj),
kai ho Logos e:n pros ton Theon (subj-cop-compl),
kai Theos e:n ho Logos. ((compl-cop-subj).

The last line is interesting in that Greek marks the subject 
with the definite article and the complement by omitting it.

But having a complement-copula-subject order for sentences 
such as "Angry is the bear", "Dead is the hunter" tells us 
_nothing_ about the expected word order in a sentence such 
as "The bear kills the hunter" which, of course, in a VOS 
language will be "Kill hunter[obj] bear[subj]" (Interficit 
venatorem ursus - perfectly intelligible in Latin   :)

"Careless then hunter." "Angry now bear." "Dead soon hunter" 
could, of course, simply show that Gary's conlang is one of 
the very many languages - I guess more natlangs than 
conlangs - that have a zero copula.

What happens with sentences that actually have an _object_?
Kill hunter[obj] bear[subj].
Kill hunter[obj] now bear[subj].
Kill hunter[obj] soon bear[subj]
Kill hunter[obj] then bear[subj].

"Kill" surely can't be dropped!

> And while the principle word order
> is still VOS when the verb is the copula the word order
> has become OVS with an irregular copula,

No, I'm sorry, but when we have a copula we don't have VOS 
or OVS or, indeed, anything else involving O!

-- 
Ray
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