One Giant Leap for Khayng

This week, I've been spending a lot of thought on Khayng (my constructed language in process).
Every time I approach Khayng to work on it, I feel like I'm coming back to a 10,000 piece jigsaw puzzle with just a few of the pieces tentatively put together.

The last major step in the evolution of Khayng came about a year ago, when it went from a postposition language to a preposition language. (This is because I decided that it's nice to know how a word or phrase is going to function before hearing the word or phrase.)

With that decision having been made last year, I was able to make a bigger decision: SENTENCE STRUCTURE! Subject-Verb-Object (like English)? SOV (like Japanese)? VSO, rare but tempting? Free word order?

My ideal was to make it Free Word order (I guess like Latin). But it seemed impossible to make that ideal fit with another of my ideals: being able to drop subjects or objects that are already understood. I almost gave up my free-word-order ideal and went with a strict V-S-O word order (which is actually quite convenient for preposition languages. why aren't more languages V-S-O?). But as I neared the giving up point and VSO looked very tempting, through lots of careful thought and a little inspiration, the solution came.

If you've read this far, you have an amazing attention span.

Here's how free word order works. Just mark the subject as a subject with some kind of preposition, same for the object, and VOILA! now you can rearrange them without losing meaning. So all of these would mean the same: "He saw me; Me he saw; Saw he me; Me saw he; Saw me he; He me saw." Fine for simple sentences, but not so fine for complex sentences with subordinate clauses (I use { and } to show clauses): "I can't believe {that it doesn't annoy you {that he hates reading!}}" With totally free ordering of subject, object, and verb, nightmarish arrangements are possible: "I {you {he reading hates} doesn't annoy} can't believe!" Also, it gets impossible to parse without clause-beginning AND clause-ending markers, which may be fine for computers, but no person wants that kind of system.

So after I wrote that sample sentence in English and proto-free-order-Khayng, I realized Free Order is no good! What I want is Flexible Order! In other words, keep the free order system of marking the S and O with prepositions, but put in some much needed restrictions, namely "You may eat of any fruit of the word-order garden, but you must not put a subordinate clause anywhere but at the end." This sounds complicated, but it's not; we do it in English without thinking:
Simple sentence: "You annoy me."
Sentence with clause: "It annoys me that you always walk in front of me."
Usually you don't say: "That you always walk in front of me annoys me."
See? You put the subject, which is a clause, at the back automatically (and this requires a perverse maneuver that entails highjacking an "it", sticking it where the clause should be, then ungrammatically tacking the clause onto the end of the sentence. At least in Khayng, it's grammatical).

Anyway, I'm happy to announce that Khayng is now officially a Flexible Word Order language, and that I have finally figured out how to implement this while not sacrificing my other ideals or making it unparsable.

Seriously, if you read all this...I should give you an award.