On 4/25/2012 8:01 PM, George Marques 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.
>

I believe you have two somewhat different things here. One is
a relative clause and the other is a finite clause. My conlang
(which is VOS) uses a different conjunction for each.

The child who was pretty read.
=> the child REL pretty was read.

The child read that she was pretty.
=> the child FIN she pretty was read.

where REL is the connector for a relative clause and FIN is the
connector for a finite clause.

I saw the man who robbed the bank.
=> I the man REL the bank robbed saw.

I read that the man robbed the bank.
=> I FIN the man the bank robbed read.

It's also possible to have different word order rules
in these cases, SOV in general, but with a finite clause
the word order is "SO <finite clause>", so

I saw the man who robbed the bank.
=> I saw FIN the man the bank robbed.

The child read that she was pretty.
=> the child read FIN she pretty was.

--Ph. D.