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 Posted: Tue Feb 19, 2008 4:26 pm
I'm having a bit of trouble with my SOV conlang, Nazeiyan (Naze-iyo), because it's an SOV word order. Now, the languages I am most familiar with are English, French, Mandarin, and Japanese. As you can see, only one of them really qualifies as a full-time SOV language, and I'm still a beginner at Japanese. Thus, I haven't had a lot of experience with SOV, and am having some troubles with applying it to Nazei-speak. : )
For instance, it is confusing for me when I try to translate complex English sentences to Naze-iyo such as:
"I saw a sign that said 'Enter Here' last Thursday."
How would that work in an SOV language? It seems like all the verbs would just pile on top of each other at the end. D:
"Last Thursday, I a sign 'Enter Here' said saw."??!??
I understand that different SOV languages will operate differently, but I really can't "think in SOV" - any SOV - so to speak. Help please. :]
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Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2008 7:25 pm
Verbs don't have to pile up at the end of the sentence unless you design your conlang to work that way.
In a normal SOV language, your English example sentence...
"I saw a sign that said 'Enter Here' last Thursday."
...Would work more like this:
"I a sign saw 'Enter Here' said last Thursday."
But that's not a great example. In English, phrases like "last Thursday" can be put in a variety of different positions for different emphasis, although the most "correct" way is to have it follow the verb or begin the phrase, as in "Last Thursday, I saw..." BUT You don't have to take that phrase into account when placing a verb.
Try this instead:
"I gave a dollar to my son, and my brother drove into town to buy some feed to give to his cattle."
Becomes more like...
(I) (to my son/a dollar) (gave) // (and) (my brother) (into town) (drove) (some feed) (to buy) (to his cattle) (to give)
Blues are subjects, greens are objects, and reds are verbs. Noncolored stuff is other junk like prepositional phrases and conjunctions. But that should show how the whole sentence isn't S, O, V, but its broken down into smaller SOV chunks.
Now, it doesn't have to be this concrete, and from what I've seen, most SOV languages either decline their nouns, or have particles. That way the subjects, direct objects and indirect objects are always clearly labeled.
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Posted: Thu Feb 21, 2008 4:12 pm
Oh! That definitely helps quite a bit. :3 I still need to look more into SOV languages though - they're still a little confusing.
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Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2008 5:42 pm
In German, verbs do pile up at the end, but you get used to it after a while. (Although, if I were you, I'd devise a specific order for the verbs to go in... it still confuses me in German sometimes trying to figure out what verb goes where. xD)
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