Syntax
From Ial
That is the rules for combining words into grammatical sentences and recognise the ungrammatical ones, should be fully specified and as simple as possible, to ease the specification itself but also ease learning the language for humans first and, as a secondary objective, ease processing by computers. The latter is important for the World Wide Web, e.g. would power intelligent search engines to better locate information.
The order of elements in a simple phrase is strictly (that is always) Subject + Verb + Object (SVO). This has been chosen over other five possible order or no fix order at all, because of its several advantages:
- no need for inflections (e.g. nominative/accusative) or any other kind of marker words to tell the subject from the object: nominative and accusative have the same form, we take advantage of word order to distinguish them. Because a distinction must be made, this cannot be let ambiguous. We must make a sintactic distinction of any type, because there are some cases where semantics alone cannot disambiguate: the ball hit my foot, my foot hit the ball both make sense.
- the verb in the middle separates subject and object, making them more distinct than other orders like VSO, VOS, SOV and OSV, which put the object right after the subject or vice versa.
- Unlike OVS, we prefer the subject too be the first to be processed by listeners brain. The most used verbal form is the active form, where the subject is also the semantic agent or a topic (e.g. your book is interesting, your book is the topic). Given the necessity to have a convenient fixed structure, it makes sense to have always the subject in sentence-initial position.
Another option could be trying to get to a compromise between ease of processing by humans and syntactic simplicity, wee should adopt an VSO structure as described by Rich Morneau: Designing an artificial language - Syntax
TODO: This is the place to discuss pros and cons of each these two alternatives. We should make a definite choice soon in order to go on.
