Re: Question words and word order

From: John Swindle (jcswindle_at_msn.deletethispart.com)
Date: 03/03/05 

Date: Thu, 03 Mar 2005 18:47:34 GMT

"Aslan Kral" <aslanski2002@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:38oe4vF5pc93rU1@individual.net...
> Take an example with many elements in it.
>
> I saw some people walking by talking in the park yesterday.
>
> In English you need to change the order to query the various elements.
>
> What did I do to some people...? I saw.
> Who(m) did I see walking...) Some people.
> "Doing what"/How did I see some people in the park yesterday? Walking by
> talking.
> Where did I see some people walking by talking yesterday? In the park.
> When did I see some people walking by talking in the park? Yesterday.
>
> Who saw some people ...? I did.
>
>
> Except for the last one you need to modify word order. How many languages
> you know of use this technique? (I think IE languages all use this one
> right?)
>
> Another techique is used by Turkish in which the word order stays the same
> but the question word replaces the queried element.
>
> Is there any other languages using this technique? I wouldn't be surprised
> if it is the same in Uralic languages, I don't know for sure but naturally
> other Altaic ones also.
>
> I think the technique used by Turkish is easier and more logical. So I am
> especially curious about artificial languages. Which technique is used in
> Esperanto for example?
>

Mandarin Chinese is an example of a language that does not change
the word order when making questions of the who/where/when type.

Apparently Esperanto is Indo-European. It replaces the queried
element with the appropriate k- word and tends to move it to the
beginning of the sentence to emphasize the question.. The move
isn't obligatory.

Nor is it in English, by the way. You can perfectly well say "I did
_what_? I saw _whom_?" and so on. This is however a slightly
different kind of question: the other person has said something, and
you're repeating and questioning it, perhaps to see if you've heard
correctly.

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