As a native speaker of English, I'd like to chip in to say that I find the Japanese structure, which is similar to the Turkish (la .suzyn. fu le karce fi la .berlin. fe la .paris. klama), to be much more natural and flow much easier than the English. I don't know how it goes in Turkish, but people in free-order languages often mix up the order of their sentences, for emphasis or other reasons: the Romans didn't seem to have any trouble, and the word order of writings in Latin is all over the place.la suzyn. fu le karce fi la berlin. fe la paris. klama (Turkish
structure)
You can imagine how hard it is for native English speakers to get used
to Turkish sentence structure, in fact my parents never quite did. At
least in Turkish when you change the structure of a sentence you do it
for a reason, like emphasis. But Lojban expects me to be able to adapt
mid-paragraph for somebody who uses any and all possible sentence
structures on a whim! My brain would flip!
That said, the use of a limited set of cases for semantic rôles instead of arbitrary place tags is not a new idea either; I suggest you take a look at Ilákš (<URL:http://www.ithkuil.net/Ilaksh/Ilaksh_intro.html>) which tries (though fails, in my opinion) to do just this.
-- Twey
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