From: Manuel Rosario
Message: 2099
Date: 2000-04-12
>From: "Dennis Poulter" <dpoulter@...>______________________________________________________
>Reply-To: cybalist@egroups.com
>To: <cybalist@egroups.com>
>Subject: Re: [cybalist] Adjective First
>Date: Wed, 12 Apr 2000 20:22:47 +0800
>
>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.
>
>
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