I am new to Conlanging as well.  And it has lead me to start getting a
firmer grasp on grammar so, please, feel free to correct me.

The first this is that I would write your English sentence like this:

The child, who was pretty, read.

The commas separate the subordinate clause.  Also, German is SOV, and I
think that it would be like this:

Das Kind, das war schön, hat  gelesen.
The child, that was pretty, read.

Das Kind gelesen dass sie schön war.
The child read that she pretty was.

Casey Borders




On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 8:01 PM, George Marques <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
>
> I’m new to this conlanging stuff and there’s many things I don’t know yet.
> Also, I only know (fluently) Portuguese and English so it’s a hard time
for
> me to find different examples. Well, I’m not used to write in English, I’m
> more of a listener/reader, so forgive me if I make mistakes.
>
>
>
> In developing my first new language motivated by a book I’m writing and I
> wanted, naturally, to make it different from the languages that I already
> know. One of these things was to change from the SVO order to SOV. I like
> how it sounds, but I’m having trouble with subordinate clauses. It seems
to
> me that long sentences will fall into a big verb group in the end and
it’ll
> be hard to know which argument go to which verb.
>
>
>
> I think I must say that Mihousapeja (my language) is head-first, so
> adjectives go after nouns and adverbs may go after the verb (does it makes
> difference?). Also, I use postpositioned particles to denote case. It’s a
> fluid language and it have particle for the absolutive and may or may not
> have one for the nominative (there are other cases too).
>
>
>
> Now a simple example that confuses me. Take this sentence:
>
> PT: A criança, que era linda, leu
>
> EN:  The child who was pretty read
>
>
>
> And compare to this one:
>
> PT: A criança leu que era linda
>
> EN: The child read that she was pretty
>
>
>
> In Portuguese there’s just an order change (besides the commas), so to put
> it in SOV the two sentences would be the same. In English I can state a
> clear difference because of the pronoun changes (while I was writing this,
> something came to my mind: would the sentence “The child that was pretty
> read” be right?). Anyway, I could use the same distinction as English,
> putting or changing pronouns, but would some sentences become ambiguous?
And
> what would be the consequence in longer sentences? I can’t picture it
> clearer now because I have only a few words in the lexical atm.