The CBB

Salmoneus wrote: ↑05 Oct 2020 15:38 I might put it the other way around: the idea of fixed word order is too simplistic. I think there are languages with free or virtually free word order (at least once 'word' has been adequately defined for the purpose). [...]

I agree that languages that have been described as having a fixed word order often have a surprising amount of word order alternations. Standard Indonesian (no case markimg btw) has been described as having a rigidly fixed word order, but actual speaker front topics, etc.
I don't think there is a language with truly free word order in the sense that all word order is optionally variable independently of semantic, pragmatic and lexical context. But maybe there is, who knows.

Creyeditor wrote: ↑05 Oct 2020 17:51 I agree that languages that have been described as having a fixed word order often have a surprising amount of word order alternations. Standard Indonesian (no case markimg btw) has been described as having a rigidly fixed word order, but actual speaker front topics, etc.
I don't think there is a language with truly free word order in the sense that all word order is optionally variable independently of semantic, pragmatic and lexical context. But maybe there is, who knows.

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=7029&p=292827&hilit=FWO+SVC#p292827

The Wambaya Australian non-Pama-Nyungan language in the above-linked post is called “Pragmatic Word Order” by the author and her advisor.
It’s in a linguistic area with a lot of pragmatic-word-order languages.

....

I think it was in a WALS.info article? Anyway, somewhere, I read that word-order always means something; whether pragmatic or semantic or syntactic or some combination thereof.
“Free Word Order” just means that an unusually high majority of possible word-orders are grammatical.
In a so-called “FWO” language word-orders don’t carry any syntactic or even much semantic weight.
But they may, and I take it usually do, carry a great deal of “pragmatic weight”.

Anyway it looks like academics who publish on these language prefer the term “pragmatic word order” rather than “free word order”.

....

FWO either requires an awful lot of head-marking or an awful lot of dependent-marking; one can use WALS to see which languages in their sample have which or how many word-orders and cross-correlate that with which and how many of them have what kind of marking; head-marking or dependent-marking or double-marking or no marking.

https://wals.info/combinations/23A_81A#2/39.1/153.3
shows
14 of the “no dominant order” languages are double-marking
11 of the “no dominant order” languages are head-marking
7 of the “no dominant order” languages are dependent-marking
1 of the “no dominant order” languages has other marking.

4 of the “no dominant order” languages have no marking


That makes it appear marking the head is more important for freeing up word-order than marking the dependent is.
But although 25 of the 37 NDO languages in this list do mark the head, still 21 of them do mark the dependent.
So to free up word-order it’s important the language mark something. That’s a bigger deal than it is to mark the head.

.....

Of course case-marking is a kind of dependent-marking.

https://wals.info/combinations/49A_81A#2/80.2/141.7
Shows
11 NDO languages without cases
5 NDO languages with “exclusively borderline case-marking”, whatever the heck that means
1 NDO language with 2 cases
3 NDO languages with 3 cases
2 NDO languages with 4 cases
2 NDO languages with 5 cases
4 NDO languages with 6 or 7 cases
3 NDO languages (including Wambaya) with 8 or 9 cases
6 NDO languages with 10 or more cases

So of the 36 NDO languages here, 16 have no cases or “exclusively borderline case”, while the other 20 have cases.
Among the 20 that have cases, the median number of cases is about 6 or 7, I guess.
This is not sufficient data from which to draw a conclusion. I, or we, would also have to see whether knowing the number of cases helps us predict the word-order; or, at least, whether the presence of cases (or of more than three cases) helps us predict whether there is or isn’t a dominant order.
My battery is getting low, and it’s getting late, so I won’t do that now.

according to WALS, 100 out of 261(38.3%) languages don't have noun cases, that is, nearly 2 out of every 5 languages don't have noun cases:

https://wals.info/chapter/49

also 98 out of 190(51.6%) languages have a neutral alignment on nouns, that is, more than half of all languages distinguish the subject from the direct object by the word order, or by the combination of the word order and the use of corresponding verbal agreements:

https://wals.info/chapter/98

Besides, the function of the distinction between location and destination can be achieved by combining adpositions i.e. English into, onto, etc., so yeah it is not that necessary to have them, and it is actually not uncommon for natural languages to not have them at all.

Some might think that it is because they have SVO as the basic word order, but considering the fact that some SVO languages still have nominal cases(like Slavic languages), and the percentage of languages without nominal cases around the world, I think this is not the reason.

But on the other hand, nominal cases can be useful, and you can take a look at what others have said above, but in my opinion, nominal cases simply are not a necessity.

k1234567890y wrote: ↑09 Oct 2020 16:47 ....
But on the other hand, nominal cases can be useful, and you can take a look at what others have said above, but in my opinion, nominal cases simply are not a necessity.

To sum up.

Many features that are frequently quite useful are also frequently not strictly necessary, and occasionally deuced inconvenient.
In natural languages, a feature is retained if the frequency and degree of its usefulness overwhelms the frequency and degree of its peskiness, in that specific language.
That includes case and gender and agreement and obviation and numbers other than singular and plural and lots of other things.

For instance if a language doesn’t have hierarchical MorphoSyntactic alignment it probably has no use for direct-vs-indirect voice.
If a language doesn’t have embedded clauses it probably has no use for long-distance reflexives and reduced use for logophoric pronouns.
And so on.

.....

Is that about it?

eldin raigmore wrote: ↑09 Oct 2020 17:58

k1234567890y wrote: ↑09 Oct 2020 16:47 ....
But on the other hand, nominal cases can be useful, and you can take a look at what others have said above, but in my opinion, nominal cases simply are not a necessity.

To sum up.

Many features that are frequently quite useful are also frequently not strictly necessary, and occasionally deuced inconvenient.
In natural languages, a feature is retained if the frequency and degree of its usefulness overwhelms the frequency and degree of its peskiness, in that specific language.
That includes case and gender and agreement and obviation and numbers other than singular and plural and lots of other things.

For instance if a language doesn’t have hierarchical MorphoSyntactic alignment it probably has no use for direct-vs-indirect voice.
If a language doesn’t have embedded clauses it probably has no use for long-distance reflexives and reduced use for logophoric pronouns.
And so on.

.....

Is that about it?

yeah more or less

all languages have all possible cases, in the sense that you _can_ use the equivalent noun "cat" as an agent/subject/whatever of a verb (nominative), or to indicate the place where the cat is (locative) or to mean that the cat was used for some purpose (instrumental]), etcetera. similarly, all language has all possible tenses, becuase we do in fact speak about things of the past, present, future. same with aspect and all those other thingies. the question is how a language works to show it, and what does it care to show. spanish is like english, in that it inflects only pronouns for accusative case (though even less so), and it does so because of history: but you could have whatever other whimsically pointless oddity like that. maybe you only inflect animate nouns when you're angry, and never inflect inanimate nouns.

that being said, not using inflection to show case is totally normal and works fine. a big portion of languages do that.

Zamenhof insisted upon a distinction between the nominative case and the accusative case for nouns. He wanted things simple in Esperanto, but not so simple that they created ambiguity. Consider this sentence:

Jack loves music more than his cat.

Does this mean that Jack loves music more than he loves his cat or does he love music more than does his cat?

(Don't laugh; cats can appreciate classical music. There is no question from context that "Jack" is nominative and "music" is accusative from context. But what context is there for the cat?

Alternatively you could just repeat/not delete the verb in the second part.

... more than his cat does.
... more than he loves his cat.

pbrower2a wrote: ↑31 May 2021 19:06 Zamenhof insisted upon a distinction between the nominative case and the accusative case for nouns. He wanted things simple in Esperanto, but not so simple that they created ambiguity. Consider this sentence:

Jack loves music more than his cat.

Does this mean that Jack loves music more than he loves his cat or does he love music more than does his cat?

(Don't laugh; cats can appreciate classical music. There is no question from context that "Jack" is nominative and "music" is accusative from context. But what context is there for the cat?

Alternatively the lang could have two conjunctions for 'than'.
One for contrasting nouns: music than cat
One for [reduced] clauses: than [he loves] his cat.

Creyeditor wrote: ↑31 May 2021 21:21 Alternatively you could just repeat/not delete the verb in the second part.

... more than his cat does.
... more than he loves his cat.

That only works because in the English there, you're replacing one verb with a pro-verb. This is particularly easy in this case because of valency - you HAVE to replace 'love' with a pro-verb when you're not going to include the object. When both verbs are not replaced, or both are replaced (more than his cat does / more than he does his cat), then you're really just using case again, but marked by word order rather than a suffix.

However, a language could use deletion/retention alone to disambiguate: "he loves music more than loves cat" vs "he loves music more than cat". And of course you can also (as English partly does) use pronoun deletion: "he loves music more than HE loves cat" vs "he loves music more than cat". Or pronoun retention but gender or obviation marking: "he loves music more than he loves cat" vs "he loves music more than it loves cat".





Alternatively, you could use switch-reference marking: "he loves music more than SAME loves cat" vs "he loves music more than SWITCH loves cat".

That sounds sensible.

I was thinking of retaining everything or using a dummy verb, but retaining the object, which is not grammatical in English.

more than his cat loves music
... more than he loves his cat.

more than his cat does music
... more than he does his cat.

Of course, word order still marks case, but I took the OP and the comment on cats and music to be about morpologically marked casw.