shout-out to the time I was putting together a rant about how tone policing of sensitive/inclusive language makes assumptions about what things mean in language that are not consistently true even across English

like. assumptions about what difference it makes to the meaning whether you capitalize a word, or whether it’s one compound word or a hyphenated word or two separate words, or what order the words are in

and how if you look at established examples throughout the language, there is usually absolutely no consistent rule about what such a thing does to the meaning. Because English doesn’t have consistent rules, it’s made of a dozen different languages and doesn’t follow the rules of any of them

and on that last note i was looking at arguments over word order, and going “why are we always assuming the most important word has to go first, and fighting all these identity wars over what to consider most important. bluish-green is more green than bluish… a tabby cat is more importantly a cat than a tabby… yeah sometimes the most important word goes first, but not always, there is no language where it’s always. I don’t think that would even be possible, to make up a language with ‘most important to least important’ word order, linguistically that would be just nonsense, practically a paradox, I mean….”

…and then i suddenly got inspired, and came up with an entire conlang idea

turns out actually you just have to give each word clear prefixes or suffixes to indicate whether it’s the subject, verb, object, etc… and then the normal requirements for word order (subject-verb-object, subject-object-verb, etc) go out the window and the order of the words means nothing to that

And then you can reorder the sentence however you like, to communicate different pieces of meaning, like what word is most important

you know that analysis of the sentence “I didn’t steal your wallet,” where the meaning is a little different depending on which word you emphasize? …yeah, it’s like that. except instead of vocal stress or italics, it’s word order. So yeah I was wrong, it is totally possible to make up a language with most-to-least-important word order

…by which time I’d forgotten about the original rant. So, I am officially too nerdy for Discourse.