I expect a comprehensive answer
from somebody like Piotr, but in case you're unpatient here's a
quick-n-dirty answer considering Balto-Slavic: the same as
Germanic.
As for Greek, the order A after
N survived only in constructions like ' he: stoa he: poikile:', cf. he: poikile:
stoa.
Sergei.
-----Original Message-----Hello,
From: Kraig Hausmann [mailto:hausmann@...]
Sent: Tuesday, April 11, 2000 7:35 PM
To: cybalist
Subject: [cybalist] Adjective FirstI'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.