Hey Chris,
Yeah, I live in Seattle. I've only been here for the past five years, but I was in the Northgate and Central Seattle congregations. Know anyone from 'round those parts?
...explicit marker for grammatical function. Seems to me that would be very difficult, like the verb tense, mood, number and person markers in romance languages. In english we're used to using order to indicate the grammatical function.
I suppose at first it can seem strange that word order does not matter. It's almost like there's too much flexibility. You can arrange a sentence pretty much any way you like, as long as you mark the components correctly. The one hard and fast rule in Japanese is that the verb comes last (well, at the end of an independent clause). In the end, I think that it's a simple mechanism because the guesswork is removed. In an order-dependent language like English, there can still be ambiguity, but much of that is removed by explicitly marking the components.
Also, since verbs do not have complex endings and nouns are certainly not declined as in Latin, it's a pretty simple system. Here's an example sentence:
Michiko-[subject marker] school-[location marker] went.
Yesterday Ichiro-[subject marker] ramen-[direct object marker] ate.
So it's kind of cool. But, (I forgot to mention this in my earlier post) one thing I've been thinking is really cool about the agreement in other languages is that it is easier to reconstruct the original if you have fragmentary sources. For example, if you only hear part of a sentence, or if you have an ancient inscription with a couple words missing, you can more easily infer the missing part based on the agreement required by the parts you have. In Japanese, if a word got dropped out, it'd just be gone with a trace. (The larger context might help you, but that's the same in either language.) Kind of makes me wonder how often that has helped in ancient inscriptions.
SNG