This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
"...the adjective before the subject?" I just have to change it. It's just completely, horrifically wrong in many ways. I can't even grasp what the writer was attempting to say with it, as it's mixing two terms from two completely different classifications.
Fifth Element The language used by Leeloo in The Fifth Element was actually Volapuk, an artificial language like Esperanto created in the 1880s. It's actually based on English with some German and French This was discussed in numerous articles in magazines and newspapers at the time the movie came out. The only confirmation I can find online of this fact is on Japanese and Phillipine websites but google for "volapuk leeloo" and you'll find them. ~~~~ Half Elven
Looney Toons: Removed the natter
- Actually the language is a mishmash of ancient Norwegian and Swedish.
- Isn't that just Old Norse?
- Actually the language is a mishmash of ancient Norwegian and Swedish.
from the Inheritance Trilogy entry and edited it a little to reflect the change the first poster here should have made instead of writing twice as much to tell someone else to change it.
Drow Lord: Minor correction made. French uses the same word order as English (SVO). I'm nitpicky, I know. For the mildly curious, of the other examples, Hindi and Japanese both use SOV, and Arabic uses VSO.
ozy: I'm going to remove a whole bunch of examples from this page soon if nobody comes up with a better idea. There's a huge amount of overlap in the examples on this and other linguistics-related articles, several of which I mentioned in my edit a little while ago. The descriptions of these other articles imply that they're each supposed to be somewhat narrower in scope than "any cypher or conlang," and I'm of the opinion that as long as we're all having fun, it's not exactly harmful to make the articles clearer and more informative.
Getty Le Fou: Removed this:
Except a few rare examples of this can be found in Norwegian, a language very fond of messing with word orders in order to alter connotations, or even face-value meanings. Somebody Did Not Do The Research on that one.
Lots of languages can produce sentences with OVS order - you would be understood by a Russian if you were to say mashinu vidal ja, and by a Roman if you were to say petrum capit paulus, even by an English-speaker if you say the car see I - but that doesn't mean that such-and-such a language has that as their primary word order. Latin's primary word order is SOV, regardless of the fact that it is possible to produce sentences outside of that word order; similarly, English has SVO as its primary word order, regardless of the fact that (archaic) questions are formed in VSO, as in "Art thou a villain?" Klingon is therefore unusual in that it has OVS as its primary word order. Research was, in fact, done.
tkdb: What exactly is the difference between this and Conlang? Reading the descriptions I can't find anything significant.
Fluffyskunk: As the articles now stand, there doesn't appear to be any difference. My suggestion would be to reserve this for cypher languages (such as Dinosaurian) and grammar-less word lists (such as Lapine) and only apply the term Conlang to complete fictional languages, such as Klingon or Quenya or Na'vi. It's a legitimate subtrope.
