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<html><head><title>Language evolution and the icëlani</title></head>
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<p>Posted by <b><!--poster-->Hans-Werner Hatting</b>
on <!--date-->15:38 7/16/02
<p>In reply to: <a href="462.html">Language evolution and the icëlani</a> posted by Luca Mangiat</b> on 22:12 7/9/02
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Mark wrote:
<blockquote>
"at least, I've never heard of a natural language with completely free
morpheme order. I'd want to know what stylistic or semantic effect the
variious orders have, though."
</blockquote>
<p>I also don't know about such a language. What we can find is movable
morphemes, which can attach themselves to different elements of the
sentence. An example is the Polish conjuctive marker "-by-", which can be
attached either to the verb, or to a sentence-initial element (mostly a
conjunction):
<br>/(a) jezelibym wiedzial = (b) jezeli wiedzialbym/ " if I had known"
<br>(Polish readers, please excuse my omission of diacritics). Both (a) and (b)
are wide-spread in contemporary Polish.
<p>Russian "by" works in a similar way, of course without personal endings.
Another case are the personal endings of the past tense, which also can be
attached to sentence-initial conjunctions (from a poem):
<br>(a) /gdys szeptala mi slowa tesknoty/ = (b)/gdy szeptalas mi slowa tesknoty/
"when you whispered to me words of longing"
<p>In this case, (b) is the normal case in temporary Polish, while (a) is
archaic and today is used mostly only in poetry.
<p>The reason for the movability of these elements is that they originally were
enclitic forms of the verb "to be", which compbined with the perfect
participle in -l- to form the past tense and the conjunctive respectively.
<p>I don't know whether this really is on topic, but maybe some "Boardists"
will want to use something like this in a conlang?
<p>Best regards,
<br>Hans-Werner
<hr><i>Mark responds:
<p>Quechua has moveable elements too, such as the interrogative <b>-chu</b>,
the topic particle <b>-qa</b>, and the evidential particles.
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<b>Hans-Werner Hatting</b>
<i>15:38 7/16/02</i>
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