# Languages without Word Order and Inflection



## Meyer Wolfsheim

Hello everyone,
                     I understand that two common schemes for creating syntax and meaning for a group of elements (words) are either using an arrangement of the elements to create meaning or attaching some kind of marker (a case for example).  Many languages use a mix of this, don't they? and I understand that some languages may no longer have any systems of inflection but rely on a word order entirely.  But, are there or have there been any languages which use *neither* word order nor inflection to form syntax (to create meaning for a group of elements)?  Many thanks for your help in advance.  

example of word order:
The dog bites the man.  
The man bites the dog.  
(also the -s for the third person singular is inflection, also see the German example to see how the order of ''the man'' and ''the dog'' does not matter in terms of bare diction, as long as the case markers are appropriate)

example of inflection:
Who helped you?
Whom did you help?
(also the -ed for the preterite marker and a null marker on ''did'' for ''you'')


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## Frank78

I doubt there are any language which neither have a word order nor cases.
How should you know "who/what does something" (subject) and who/what is the recipient (object)?

The man bites the dog.  - If you would have no word order telling you the sense then also the "The dog bites the man" is a possible interpretation for this sentence.


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## Meyer Wolfsheim

Frank78 said:


> I doubt there are any language which neither have a word order nor cases.
> How should you know "who/what does something" (subject) and who/what is the recipient (object)?
> 
> The man bites the dog. - If you would have no word order telling you the sense then also the "The dog bites the man" is a possible interpretation for this sentence.


 
Yes my mistake, the intention was "The dog bites the man" but reversing the two nouns changes the meaning, hence proving the point about word order.  

If no languages exist where both word order and inflection do not exist as factors determining syntax, that would suggest there is a limitation in human language , because perhaps we cannot imagine creating syntax any other way.  I understand that it may seem impossible to have word order not influence diction (nor connotation, which is a form of diction).  

But, what if we could consider using the natural properties of human language to change syntax of a string of elements?  As in using innotation of a sentence (but no particular element because that would just be the same as inflection), changing the loudness of the sentence, or rhythm, etc.?  

Innotation is in fact a way to create syntax, as in asking questions, where the whole sentence in English changes its pronounciation; this is how we can tell we are being asked a question.  Or even in the word "sure"; depending how it is said, it can be sarcastic (as in doubt) or signify agreement, but we don't need any marker to tell us this.


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## Kevin Beach

Meyer Wolfsheim said:
			
		

> .... that would suggest there is a limitation in human language ...


Meyer, _everything_ human is limited, because infinity has not been granted us. 

Do you mean in_ton_ation rather than in_not_ation? The Chinese use intonation to distinguish meaning, as I understand it, but they tend to use it only as a vocabulary marker.

I'm trying to work out how it might be done as you suggest, though. I suppose if we take a simple octave of pitch, then the subject could be the lower tonic, the finite verb could be a major third ..... but even as I type that I begin to wonder how we would distinguish verb tenses, moods and persons .... given that the maximum human range of the best-trained voice is rarely more than three octaves and often not much more than two, even the twelve-tone scale would give us only about 30 different pitches. We'd use them all up in verbs, wouldn't we?

Mind you, your name suggests that you come from a people who have already made delightful use of intonation and emphasis to distinguish meanings. The joke about Trotsky's telegram comes to mind.

Welcome to the WordReference Forums, by the way.


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## Meyer Wolfsheim

Kevin Beach said:


> Meyer, _everything_ human is limited, because infinity has not been granted us.
> 
> Do you mean in_ton_ation rather than in_not_ation? The Chinese use intonation to distinguish meaning, as I understand it, but they tend to use it only as a vocabulary marker.
> 
> I'm trying to work out how it might be done as you suggest, though. I suppose if we take a simple octave of pitch, then the subject could be the lower tonic, the finite verb could be a major third ..... but even as I type that I begin to wonder how we would distinguish verb tenses, moods and persons .... given that the maximum human range of the best-trained voice is rarely more than three octaves and often not much more than two, even the twelve-tone scale would give us only about 30 different pitches. We'd use them all up in verbs, wouldn't we?
> 
> Mind you, your name suggests that you come from a people who have already made delightful use of intonation and emphasis to distinguish meanings. The joke about Trotsky's telegram comes to mind.
> 
> Welcome to the WordReference Forums, by the way.


 
Thank you for noticing my spelling error, one of my weaker points (perhaps because writing is entirely an artificial construct).  But, would you be suggesting that it would be impossible to have a feasible and functioning language without word order/inflection as ways of creating meaningful syntax?  If so, then either of those would have to be universal properties of any human language.  I guess it is like trying to visualize a fourth-dimensional object from the third dimension.


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## Kevin Beach

Meyer Wolfsheim said:


> Thank you for noticing my spelling error, one of my weaker points (perhaps because writing is entirely an artificial construct). But, would you be suggesting that it would be impossible to have a feasible and functioning language without word order/inflection as ways of creating meaningful syntax? If so, then either of those would have to be universal properties of any human language. I guess it is like trying to visualize a fourth-dimensional object from the third dimension.


I'm not saying it would be impossible, but it would have to be almost like singing to be comprehensible, I think. In its written form it would need pitch markers too.

I suspect the sticking point might be that word order in particular would rear its ugly head, simply because there would always be a word order. Our use of language becomes embedded in our neural pathways and tends to be repeated. Individuals, families and groups would become noticed for the order in which they use words.

Even in highly inflected languages, such as Latin and German, the order of words can change the meaning because the altered position creates a different emphasis. I think the same would happen in a modulated language.


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## Meyer Wolfsheim

Kevin Beach said:


> I'm not saying it would be impossible, but it would have to be almost like singing to be comprehensible, I think. In its written form it would need pitch markers too.
> 
> I suspect the sticking point might be that word order in particular would rear its ugly head, simply because there would always be a word order. Our use of language becomes embedded in our neural pathways and tends to be repeated. Individuals, families and groups would become noticed for the order in which they use words.
> 
> Even in highly inflected languages, such as Latin and German, the order of words can change the meaning because the altered position creates a different emphasis. I think the same would happen in a modulated language.


 
So the real problem here is eliminating the connotation which different word order creates even in a heavily inflected language.  True freedom from word order doesn't seem possible to me, as how could one be able to free up the positions of important connectors like "and, but, etc."?  But even so, by placing special sound changes on any specific element, you would be inflecting it in some way, the modification would need to occur to all elements, wouldn't it?  And really I think it comes down to the fact that the only real syntax is actually inflection, because word order is just another way of creating hidden markers/null markers, isn't it?  The mere arrangement of elements is just the creation of additional markers, right?   

However, when somebody says "sure" in either manner, sarcastic or serious, we don't need to have "sure-yes marker" or "sure-sarcastic marker" visible.


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## Kevin Beach

I think there is a possibility of over-dissecting the process to the point where the results give no help. I've spent half a century, more or less, watching my very formal training in English abrade against the language's common usages. It has taught me that in the end there is no more point in analysing why the human race generally uses langauge in particular ways than there is in trying to work out why the quadripeds who became bipeds chose to walk on their feet instead of on their hands. We do it because that's what comes naturally.

Intonation is very useful as an adjunct to other mechanisms. I can't help feeling though that, if it were possible to make a language solely out of varied intonations, it would have been done already.

I remember a TV sketch about 15 or 20 years ago by the British comedy duo Hale and Pace. They were touring Australia and in their act were making fun (very wittily) of some Australian mannerisms. They chose the word "mate" (which, for those not familiar with its BrE and AusE usage, means "pal", "chum" or "guy"). They used the word in about 10 or 15 different ways, always varied by intonation or drawl, to show various meanings, all typically Australian. It works for one word as an amusing aside, but I can't see it working as a sophisticated language.


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## Hulalessar

All languages must (surely?) be able to distinguish between

_The dog bites the man_

and 

_The man bites the dog_

whether marking it by word order, prefixes, suffixes, infixes, enclitics, particles, case endings, internal mutation or any combination of the foregoing. Whilst I believe some languages mark tense/aspect of the verb by tone, I have never heard of one that marks the function a noun plays in an utterance by tone.

Whilst no language can allow a soup of words that a speaker can put in any order he likes without marking leaving the listener to try and work out the meaning like some sort of a puzzle, I think it is entirely possible that a language could (and for all I know some languages may) in cases where ambiguity is not possible allow a degree of freeness in word order without resorting to marking. In fact colloquial Spanish allows it, although it is by no means a common feature of the language. Whilst it is unhelpful to refer to poetry since poets have a special license, the same thing may be observed in English poetry.


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## sokol

There is Bahasa Indonesia which has almost no inflected forms (no conjugation or declension, no tenses, no number, no genus) - there are only a very few derived forms (like a 'kind of passive' - example given by Jan Wohlgemuth, in German only, sorry for that: beli - membeli).

The same Jan Wohlgemuth gives an example on this site about how an Indonesian sentence could be interpreted, interpretation depends on context alone (English translations by me):

_harimau makan babi_ 
'tiger eat pig'


could mean:
- tigers eat pigs (general statement)
- the tiger eats a (one) pig (present tense, indicating a specific number or a specific pig)
- the tiger ate the pig (past tense, indicating a specific pig)
- the tigresses ate the boar (past tense and indicating gender)
(Those are the possibilities given by Wohlgemuth but I take it that there could be more.)

But in all those cases it was the *tiger *who eats or ate or likes to eat the/a pig(s) (or whatever).

So here the relevance of all this to the topic at hand: it seems that in Austronesian languages which don't have any inflection and very few morphological derivations there is just no way around of word order determinating meaning.
(Speakers of Austronesian languages pleaes correct me if I'm wrong; I only have some theoretical knowledge of them - I don't speak Bahasa Indonesia or any other one.)

Thus I too couldn't imagine how such languages devoid of inflection could work with free word order. *Probably *they could work with free word order if nonverbal communications (signs, nods etc.) would mark specific words as e. g. agens - but then those nonverbal signs indeed would be a 'kind of nonverbal inflection', and a nessessary element of such a (hypothetical) language.


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## Meyer Wolfsheim

Would you just then be suggesting that any sentient language, human or belonging to another sentient race (hypothetically of course), would have to contain elements of both word order and a system of markings? I understand that removing word order as a factor is very difficult, if not impossible, because even if diction stays the same no matter the order of elements in a line of syntax, the connotation will change and which in turn affects the diction, right? I often though of it like this; a language with no inflection is possible because you can arrange all of its elements in nearly infinite amounts of ways, but in order to have a language _sans_ word order, you would need to have an infinite amount of cases/inflections or some form of recursion within the pool of inflections to create new ones which would make the language very complicated, right? Are there any languages which don't use intonation to indicate a specific/hidden marker (like when you say 'sure' in English to indicate sarcasm or agreement, you would instead just put some marker on the 'sure', where 'sure-A' would indicate sarcasm and 'sure-B' would indicate agreement)?


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## sokol

Meyer Wolfsheim said:


> Would you just then be suggesting that any sentient language, human or belonging to another sentient race (hypothetically of course), would have to contain elements of both word order and a system of markings?


No I didn't - I didn't intend to indicate such a thing.
My point was, referring to the original question, that I can hardly imagine a language could work without either a fixed word order or inflection: the latter may make word order arbitrary but if it doesn't exist the former, that is word order, will be necessary to make communication possible.

There is no reason why one should believe that both a fixed word order and some inflection were necessary - in fact, Austronesian languages clearly show that the latter may be absent (almost) completely.


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## Tim~!

There must be some examples amongst the 6000+ languages that currently exist where there is free word-order and no inflection, subject and object being differentiated by something such as an identifying particle.

In English we can jumble the word-order in such an example as "To the winner go the spoils", the particle _to_ indicating the recipient.  Indeed, this is the usual way of structuring this particular phrase.  (124,000 Google hits compared to 37,900 for the usual SVO version.)

I'm pretty sure that Spanish also makes use of a similar particle _a_ to distinguish the (animate) object, even if this is direct, so I expect one could write "el hombre muerde al perro" and "al perro muerde el hombre" to clearly mean "the man bites the dog", even if the second example is not the usual order.


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## zimri-lim

Well, this post is really interesant. I just add that in Spanish, in spite of a word order, we can rearrange the words and the sentence make sense as well.
Manzana como yo
Como yo manzana
Yo como manzana
The three mean "I eat apple"


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## sokol

Tim~! said:


> There must be some examples amongst the 6000+ languages that currently exist where there is free word-order and no inflection, subject and object being differentiated by something such as an identifying particle.


Well there might, but then an identifying particle would "belong" to the word it is identifying grammatically and thus be something similar to a subject- and object-marker, thus "something like" inflection: this wouldn't be an isolating language anymore, at least not exactly.

The thing is, as long as you do not introduce object into grammar I *think *a language could or should work with free word order and no inflection; problems only begin when you use objects - in this case *I* think a hypothetical language with completely free word order and no subject/object markers or any kind of inflection would depend very much on context and/or signs articulated simultanuously while speaking to make communication efficient.
(Or other disambiguation strategies. To give an example what this could be - repetition of the subject could be one such, the repeted word would clarify which is subject and which is object, like hypothetical:
_"Tom eat lion, Tom." = "Lion eat Tom, Tom." = "Eat lion Tom, Tom." (etc. ad infinitum) = "Tom is eating a lion."_
(vs.)_
"Eat lion Tom, lion." = "The lion is eating Tom."_
But this is only a thought experiment.  I have no idea wether this exists in any natural language.)

This however is only my opinion (and my thought experiment might sound surreal). It is of course possible that I am wrong and that such a language exists where even disambiguation strategies aren't necessary.


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## Mons_17

zimri-lim said:


> Well, this post is really interesant. I just add that in Spanish, in spite of a word order, we can rearrange the words and the sentence make sense as well.
> Manzana como yo
> Como yo manzana
> Yo como manzana
> The three mean "I eat apple"



Depending upon inflection, "manzana como yo" could mean "(an) apple, like me".


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## Hulalessar

zimri-lim said:


> Well, this post is really interesant. I just add that in Spanish, in spite of a word order, we can rearrange the words and the sentence make sense as well.
> Manzana como yo
> Como yo manzana
> Yo como manzana
> The three mean "I eat apple"


 
But in this case "como" (without or without the "yo") can only mean "I eat" and so the meaning is determined by inflection.

_Los peces comen las aves_ can only mean "The fish eat the birds".

However, where there is no possibilty of ambiguity Spanish, particularly colloquially, will allow subject and object to be reversed to emphasise the object: _Mucha sabiduría contiene este libro_ can really only mean that it is the book that contains the wisdom and not the wisdom that contains the book.


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## J.F. de TROYES

Meyer Wolfsheim said:


> I understand that two common schemes for creating syntax and meaning for a group of elements (words) are either using an arrangement of the elements to create meaning or attaching some kind of marker (a case for example).


 
I am sorry to be so late giving my opinion, but the thread is exciting enough for me to give me a time to think about.The word order is indeed paramount to make any utterance understandable and any language abides by its own inside noun phrases, clauses and sentences, these patterns being different between languages ( position of adjectives, verbs, relative clauses, prepositions or postpositions and so on ). Any language needs an order and otherwise it would be meaningless. On the other hand I wonder if word order is a key player in preventing misunderstanding ; yes, it's partly right when subject vs. object (or agent vs. patient ) is concerned, partly because there's no possible misunderstanding with animate vs. inanimate nouns as in "the dog eat the meat" where subjects and objects could be inverted without impinging the meaning and it's hardly likely that "this dog bit a child" be equivocal ; anyhow, if it would mean unlikely : " A child bit this dog", I suppose the context would clear it up. Moreover some sentences are not based on the S.V.O ( or S.OV. and so on ). So that structure and emphasizing processes being left over , I am a bit doubtful if the meaning of a sentence depends on how words are arranged .
So I'd prefer to focus on both features of languages, grammatical tools vs. lexicon, for example inflections or suffixes vs. modal verbs. Future is expressed with modal verbs in English and by inflections in Roman languages. Modality can be conveyed with words ( can, pouvoir...) or a suffix ( Turkish : _gel*iyor*_ = he's coming, _gel*ebilir*_= he can come ) ; Arabic can use an action noun instead of a subordinate clause. Numerous examples could be given to show that languages choose either to grammaticalise or to lexicalise. That's the reason why it's very surprising to come across a grammatical tool where we are used to expresing the same with words ; by using one or another suffix Quechua can differanciate between an assertion an an hearsay : _alqu*n* aychata mikhun_ ( a dog ate meat), but _alqu*s* aychata mikhun_ ( people say that a dog ate meat ).


sokol said:


> _harimau makan babi_
> 'tiger eat pig'
> 
> could mean:
> - tigers eat pigs (general statement)
> - the tiger eats a (one) pig (present tense, indicating a specific number or a specific pig)
> - the tiger ate the pig (past tense, indicating a specific pig)
> - the tigresses ate the boar (past tense and indicating gender)
> (Those are the possibilities given by Wohlgemuth but I take it that there could be more.).


 
It's quite right, but i'd like to add that Indonesian can express plural ( only if necessary ) for the meaning by duplicating a noun ( pigs = _babi-babi_ ), the feminine of animals with_ bebina_ ( female ) : _harimau bebina_ is tigress as _harimau hutan_ is a pig of the forest, i.e. a boar.
Undoubtdly Indonesian has less grammatical markers, but it does have and could'nt work without these. More examples may be added to the passive form, showing that this language uses other tools than word order which is not so fixed by the way that it can be said ( See here 4-11-1 Emphasis ). Prepositions are used, prefixes as well to differenciate between transitive and intransitive verbs or between the act of doing and what has been done, to make causative verbs or to create honorific forms ; the _se-_ prefix is linked to the noun when an adjective or a possesive phrase is added ( _piring_= the/a plate ; _sepiring nasi_ = a plate of rice ).
Here is a site about bahasa Indonesia .







> It seems that in Austronesian languages which don't have any inflection and very few morphological derivations there is just no way around of word order determinating meaning.


Right, but they are very rich in prefixes, infixes, suffixes and I think we can consider them grammatical tools.This is an example given by the French linguist , Claude Hagège in his " Dictionnaire amoureux des Langues" :
Tagalog can say either :

_b-um-ili ka nang damit para sa bata_ (*you* have bought a cloth for the child ) 

or :
_i-b-in-ili mo nang damit ang bata_ ( *The child* is the one whom you have bought a cloth for ).

The verb in Tagalog , here _bili_ ( to buy) , has to be put in front of the sentence ; in the first one the subject is emphasized : by putting the infix _-um-_ inside, the verb focuses on the subject _ka_ (you) ; _nang_ in front of damit (the cloth) points out the object ; _para sa bata_ = for the child_ ._
In the second sentence the prefix_ i-_ plus the infix _in-_ focus on the beneficiary, the child ; _mo _is also you ; _nang_ points out the object and _ang_ is in front of the subject. 
So it seems that in this Austanesian language the meaning does'nt depend on a word order.










.


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## sokol

J.F. de TROYES said:


> _b-um-ili ka nang damit para sa bata_ (*you* have bought a cloth for the child )
> 
> or :
> _i-b-in-ili mo nang damit ang bata_ ( *The child* is the one whom you have bought a cloth for ).
> 
> The verb in Tagalog , here _bili_ ( to buy) , has to be put in front of the sentence ; in the first one the subject is emphasized : by putting the infix _-um-_ inside, the verb focuses on the subject _ka_ (you) ; _nang_ in front of damit (the cloth) points out the object ; _para sa bata_ = for the child_ ._
> In the second sentence the prefix_ i-_ plus the infix _in-_ focus on the beneficiary, the child ; _mo _is also you ; _nang_ points out the object and _ang_ is in front of the subject.
> So it seems that in this Austanesian language the meaning does'nt depend on a word order.


Very interesting!

The example I gave above was from that other site I linked to; I don't speak any Austronesian language and only have browsed their grammars.
Those of course all are grammatical markers which work just like inflectional endings - the only difference is that they are applied differently.

But could one change word order in those sentences, or if this were possible, would this mean that meaning changes?
As we all know meaning changes in many languages, English included, while those who have inflection may change word order without any change of meaning (change of word order only may result in a change of emphasis).

So could you change word order in Tagalog for emphasis too? As it seems the grammatical markers would be sufficient - in theory at least - to not change meaning if you change order.


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## entangledbank

Context could probably work for most subject/object combinations, but certain human situations such as 'John hit Bill' need marking. I cannot imagine a _human_ language where this can be said in several orders and you _need_ to know whether John or Bill is a bully to interpret it. (On the other hand, I believe ape/human communications such as 'Koko hit Jane' do precisely lack this information.)

The repetition method ('John, John hit Bill') is interesting, but resembles the non-configurational structure of actual languages like Warlbiri and contemporary colloquial French. In French there is still marking on the verb, in Warlbiri on the nouns and adjectives.


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## xjm

Just a quick remark, many people seem to keep repeating the notion that word order is necessarily tied up with subject/object distinctions; keep in mind that there are _many_ other ways of indicating the subject/object relationship--inflections like case being the most familiar, of course.

I'm not saying that in this hypothetical language word order has no importance; rather, I'm saying that it need not carry _semantic _importance.


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## eafkuor

_L'uomo viene morso dal cane.
Dal cane l'uomo viene morso._
_Dal cane viene morso l'uomo._

These 3 Italian sentences mean the exact same thing, so yes, there are languages in wich sometimes you can change the order of words. For example if you say:
_Il cane morde l'uomo_
and
_L'uomo morde il cane_
They're different (the subject is changed)


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## sokol

xjm said:


> I'm not saying that in this hypothetical language word order has no importance; rather, I'm saying that it need not carry _semantic _importance.


Yes, you're right of course: word order _may _have semantic significance but there are languages where a change of word order does not carry any semantic importance (or where word order change only changes emphasis but not semantics). And of course there are plenty of means to mark a word or nominal phrase as "subject" or "object" as was shown by J.F. de TROYES' Tagalog example.



eafkuor said:


> _L'uomo viene morso dal cane.
> Dal cane l'uomo viene morso._
> _Dal cane viene morso l'uomo._


Well, it isn't inflection that marks subject and object unmistakably here but rather "dal = da + il", so still a grammatical marker - which is the point exactly: if you mark words and phrases grammatically (be it with inflectional endings or other means: prepositions, infixes, particles put before or after the word, etc.) you can change word order theoretically*) without changing meaning.

*) With that I mean: in theory it should be possible to change word order; however languages may have rules preventing this, that is sentences could be considered ungrammatical with changed word order - the fact that "theoretically" word order could be changed does not mean automatically that a language will allow it.


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## J.F. de TROYES

sokol said:


> Very interesting!





sokol said:


> So could you change word order in Tagalog for emphasis too? As it seems the grammatical markers would be sufficient - in theory at least - to not change meaning if you change order.



 
I  knew next to nothing about Tagalog when I came across these sentences, what made me curious to learn more. So the following remarks are based on data that I've found here, and they prompt me to correct what I've read in Cl.Hagège's book.
The _ang _particle is'nt specific to the subject, but points out every noun or noun phrase that is in focus, be it subject , object or even other complements. As to the _ng_ ( written so, but pronounced _nang_ ), generally it points out a word related to another word of the sentence and, among various uses, it indicates that the word is not the focus.
These are two sentences with the same meaning :  
 
Pumatay                       ng tigre ang      tao
killed+focus actor/doer         tiger    (focus) man
" it's the man who killed the tiger"
Pinatay                       ng tao      ang tigre
killed+focus object,                     (focus) tiger     
receiving  the action
" it's the tiger that the man killed"
 
Switching the verb affixes is something like turning an active pattern into a passive one. The verb is in front, but the word order of noun phrases can be changed without changing the meaning or adding anything. So focusless words and focus words can be inverted.
 
 



> Context could probably work for most subject/object combinations, but certain human situations such as 'John hit Bill' need marking. I cannot imagine a _human_ language where this can be said in several orders and you _need_ to know whether John or Bill is a bully to interpret it. (On the other hand, I believe ape/human communications such as 'Koko hit Jane' do precisely lack this information.)



 
Yes, switching subject and object in languages without declensions or markers inverts the meaning, when subjects and objects belong to the same lexical category ( let's say either animate beings or things and abstractions ). It only works for a few structures, also for passive ones and phrases made of determiners and determinata ( In phrases like  _the house of the keeper_ vs. _the keeper of the house_ ,  putting the determinatum after the determiner is compulsory in Indonesian for lack of a preposition)



> The repetition method ('John, John hit Bill') is interesting, but resembles the non-configurational structure of actual languages like Warlbiri and contemporary colloquial French. In French there is still marking on the verb, in Warlbiri on the nouns and adjectives.


Could you give an example ?  As for French do you mean something like " Lui, il viendra " ?


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## entangledbank

That's right: the verb satisfies all its valency with clitics on itself, and there are also coreferential noun phrases, which aren't in a fixed order. I believe they can also say _Il viendra, lui_. Colloquial French is said to be using this more and more, and some have called it non-configurational. In Warlbiri the adjectives and their nouns can be at opposite ends of the sentence, but they're all case-marked.


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