Re: [cybalist] Adjective First

Kraig,

From what I've read, adjective before noun is typical of languages with an O(bject) V(erb) (verb final) syntactic structure. In these languages, not only adjectives, but all noun modifiers, including relative clauses or the possessor of the noun in question preceded the head noun. Other typical structures are postpositions rather than prepositions, while verbs are marked for tense, aspect, person etc. by suffixes. Turkish is an example of this type. In VO languages, on the other hand, all modifiers follow their head noun, as in Arabic.

It appears that IndoEuropean was originally OV in structure, which is evidenced by the position of adjectival relative clauses in early Sanskrit and Greek, but many of the descendant languages have changed to VO structure. The result is that most of the modern IE languages show a mixture of structures, such as English with preceding adjectives but following adjectival relative clauses, and the relatively recent introduction of "thing possessed + of + possessor" with the retention of the older structure (John's hat) when the possessor is animate.

So, all in all, it appears that the Germanic order of adjective before noun is a reflection of the original IE system, while the Romance structure of noun before adjective is the innovation.

Cheers

Dennis

----- Original Message -----

From: Kraig Hausmann

To: cybalist

Sent: Wednesday, 12 April, 2000 1:34 AM

Subject: [cybalist] Adjective First

Hello,
I'm a non-linguist who's very much interested in IE languages. I'm actually more of a polyglott. I have always found the adjective first word order of Germanic languages to be quite an interesting anomaly, since as you know all the other IE languages typically have the adjective after the noun it modifies. I'm not sure, but classical Greek's default order may have been adjective first also. I know that Chinese has the modifier first also. I'm intrigued as to why Germanic does this. Do the Slavic and Baltic languages do this? Does Finnish? Is it possible that this word order came about when the Proto-Germanic language made contact with a non-IE that had adjective word order first? Thanks. Kraig.