Word Order in Alsoran Common: view article

Alsora Sector Common has free word order. Circumfixes denote the case and role of any word or phrase (except the verb) in proper Alsoran Common, so word order is not essential to understand the meaning of a sentence.

Apparently, in Latin, free word order gave rise to the use of different word orders to emphasize parts of the sentence or express nuance (wikipedia article). However, this is not the case in Alsoran Common.

Overwhelmingly, most Common speakers are not native speakers. Common is a language of the interstellar trade, transit, and politics between planetary systems. The population of Spaceborn - people raised aboard the way-stations, spacedocks, and long-haul ships of the galaxy, who grow up with Common as a mothertongue - is a small fraction of the number of planet- and moon-natives who have learnt Common as a work-language.

All these second-language Common speakers tend to replicate their native language's word order when they speak Common. Language classes focus on understanding other speakers regardless of word order, rather than producing a different order from their native language. Common's use in interstellar contracts and treaties means that, legally speaking, word order is officially immaterial to meaning, as agreed by all major governing bodies using it.

Among first-language Common speakers, when speaking informally, it's common to use extremely long compound verbs with the subject and object incorporated instead of using a "full sentence" with case-marked subject and object. These compounds do have a defined component order, which you can read more about here. However, since they are technically one long word, I wouldn't call it a word order per se. ✎ Edit Article ✖ Delete Article

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