Interior Dissonance

Well, I keep running into a sort of mental block as I go about the construction of this fantasy language.

As I review some of the sample sentences I posted in my last blog, I hear two conflicting voices in my head. One says something like, "you can just drop an bunch of nouns together in any old order you want! That makes no sense!" The other voice replies, "Why couldn't you? Assuming that, in fact, they're not in 'any old order' but rather their order—along with particle markers—lends meaning to the sentence?"

In short, my own predilection to "think" in terms of grammar that I already know (to wit: English grammar) is playing some games with my mind. Especially when I try to conceive how a more complex sentence would translate in Draddrikan. Take, for example, something like this:

John, the short-tempered, stout-hearted blacksmith, left his usual occupation of ironworking in order to plow Mary the schoolteacher's field—the one where she grows cucumbers and okra, the primary vegetables used when making her famous pickles, which are quickly becoming well-loved in these parts, having won the blue ribbon at last year's county fair pickle-contest.

Obviously, that is a cumbersome monster of a sentence—albeit perfectly "legal" and more-or-less intelligible. Certainly, though, it could be broken down into smaller pieces. But then, wouldn't it lose some of its punch and zazz?

But that's getting off topic. The main point would be, how to keep track of all the particle markers that might be necessary in a sentence like this to relate subjects and objects (direct and indirect), as well as the adjectives and adverbs along with the nouns or pronouns or verbs they modify?

Problems to be worked out. Luckily, there's no ETA on this project; I'll play around for a while in my hand notebook (it's easier to think these things through when I can scribble and cross out) and see what comes.