I personally think Achmed and the Wang Basket with his hand up it's ass, are shit.

I still knew who they were though.

came to post this

Came to this post.

Ah, sweet word order typology - i.e. in Polish the meaning of the sentence would stay the same no matter how much you switched things around. ^^
All of Isolating languages' base are belong to Synthetic Fusional languages!

That's a moot point though since you could then say this works with every language.

Ehm - no.

It doesn't work in English. Like I explained in my first post English is an isolating language with a Subject-Verb-Object order. You're using a bad example to illustrate this and don't correctly switch the words around to change the meaning of the sentence.

i.e. "I came here to post this"
"I came to this post here"

Two 100% grammatically correct English sentences, not a single word or letter was changed and yet two completely different meanings,

Let's analyze another simpler sentence in which changing the word order doesn't actually make words change the respective lexical categories, which is another hilarious feature of the English language - "to post" and "the post", anyways:

"The boy gave the girl drugs."
boy -drugs-> girl

Now let's change the word order:

"The girl gave the boy drugs."
girl -drugs-> boy

These sentences have opposite meanings.

However, in German or Polish they would still retain their original meaning if you switched the word order around:

"Der Junge hat dem Mädchen Drogen gegeben"
Junge -Drogen-> Mädchen

Of course we have to move the nouns with the articles as one entity since articles don't have a meaning on their own and are part of the German grammatical case system - a thing English lacks and the sole reason why word order matters. We get:

"Dem Mädchen hat der Junge Drogen gegeben"
Junge -Drogen-> Mädchen

Exactly the same operation we performed in English, so switching the position of the Subject and Object in the sentence and yet the meaning remains the same.

In Polish too:

"Chłopak dał dziewczynie narkotyki."
chłopak -narkotyki-> dziewczyna (the nominative form)

"Dziewczynie dał chłopak narkotyki."
chłopak -narkotyki-> dziewczyna

This is all due to the fact that English doesn't have grammatical cases except for a possessive case stub retained in the so-called Saxon Genitive.

It's amazing how misinformed and non-reflective people are about linguistics, mostly because many of them think that being able to speak/write a given language automatically turns them into linguists, which it does not.

can someone summarize the above few posts in 2 or 3 lines of text for me? :mrgreen:

SILENCE! I kill you ;-D

everything means the same, you just sound more and more like Yoda the more you switch things around

How about one: English is funny, because switching the position of words in a sentence can completely change its meaning.

I think that goes for all Germanic languages. The same is in Dutch and German. I bet it also counts for countries such as Denmark etc.

No, you truly haven't been reading my posts. It is NOT the same in German. If you're talking about Germanic languages then you're talking about a diachronic (historical) classification, not the synchronic one. There's a distinct line between historical linguistics and other branches of linguistics, you see.

English is a Germanic isolating language.
German is a Germanic fusional (subset of synthetic) language.
Polish is a Slavic fusional (subset of synthetic) language.

Families of languages usually share a pool of common vocabulary while languages classified in the same group morphologically or morphosyntactically will more closely resemble each other from a grammatical perspective.
Hence, while it might sound funny to you, German is actually closer to Polish than English in certain aspects as I outlined in the posts you didn't read. ^^

I admit i haven't read your post, hence the request for a summarized version

Technobabble ftw

or; Thread successfully hi-jacked. To the base, heroes! *da da da DA*

*snip*