华裔文：HWAYIH WOEN
CASE MARKERS
语法格
The reader may regard Hwayih Woen case markers as an obscure subcategory of courtesy notation for a variety of reasons. For starters, English lost its original case markers in the transition from Anglo-Saxon to Middle English. Consequently, the modern English speaker is typically unable to subdivide a generic sentence into its case parts, instead opting for distinctions of subject, direct object, and indirect object. Hwayih Woen provides the following case markers:
劜
主格
Nomative Case
丿
属格
Genitive Case
才
宾格
Accusative Case
亗
与格
Dative Case
亍
具格
Instrumental Case
使用原则
Usage Principles
Consider the following example:
English: Your friend handed me the greatest victory with the sword of the gods.
Hwayih Woen Translation: 你嘅 朋友~劜 手坔* 吾亗 本 伟大最^ 胜利~才 跟 本 剑~亍 之 本 神拶~丿。
From here, the reader may observe the following principles:
Hwayih Woen places case markers at the end of courtesy P.O.S. punctuation.
The modern distinction between direct objects and indirect objects is not perfectly congruent with what ought to be in the dative case versus the accusative case (i.e. “me” versus “to me”).
Like punctuation marks, Hwayih Woen case markers are silent, and serve to indicate the function of a word independent of its position within the sentence. This facilitates two things. First, it enables non-English speakers with a characters based education (i.e. Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc.) to readily access the meaning of a Hwayih Woen sentence because, at the very least, they can immediately determine the interrelationships between the words. Second, it allows non-English speakers to use characters to scramble words into a non-SVO (eg. subject-object-verb) syntax and still be comprehensible to the English speaking reader. Using the same example from above, consider the following variations:
你嘅 朋友~劜 跟 本 剑~亍 之 本 神拶~丿 吾亗 本 伟大最^ 胜利~才 手坔*。
Your friend with the sword of the gods me the greatest victory handed.
跟 本 剑~亍 之 本 神拶~丿 吾亗 你嘅 朋友~劜 手坔* 本 伟大最^ 胜利~才。
With the sword of the gods me your friend handed the greatest victory.
本 伟大最^ 胜利~才 吾亗 你嘅 朋友~劜 手坔* 跟 本 剑~亍 之 本 神拶~丿。
The greatest victory me your friend handed with the sword of the gods.
吾亗 跟 本 剑~亍 之 本 神拶~丿 本 伟大最^ 胜利~才 手坔* 你嘅 朋友~劜。
Me with the sword of the gods the greatest victory handed your friend.
The incomprehensibility of speaking any of these sentences out loud in English is patently obvious. However, because of the case markers, the meaning of the text is still clear to the English reader even if he cannot technically recite the text out loud. Although case markers do not render word order entirely irrelevant, they nevertheless provide a large degree of word order flexibility that isn’t usually available to standard written English, creating a situation helpful to the input and output of non-native English speakers who want to use Hwayih Woen by easing the learning curve.