Re: [tied] IndoTyrrhenian, French and avoidance of N+N non-dvandva

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 5378
Date: 2001-01-09

No, the order of elements in a compound need not agree with the typical phrase order. In Slavic, for example, N+N compounds are head-final as in English, though in phrases the genitive follows the noun it qualifies (zabójstwo brata = bratobójstwo 'fratricide'). In Old English the genitive could either precede or follow the noun but the compound order was fixed. It has to do with naturalness: an ordinary compound contains two stems, and if it's treated like a single word for the purpose of inflection, inflectional endings should be attached to the final element. For psychological reasons the inflected element should be the head, not the qualifier. Perhaps oe of the reasons why French allows something like "roombed" (though -de- is nearly always present, so that a "compound" like that is hardly distinguishable from a phrase: salle de bain) is that French inflection in such items is by and large purely orthographic (chevaux-vapeur is admittedly a special case).
 
Piotr
 
----- Original Message -----
From: Glen Gordon
To: cybalist@egroups.com
Sent: Monday, January 08, 2001 6:48 PM
Subject: [tied] IndoTyrrhenian, French and avoidance of N+N non-dvandva compounding


However, there must be some reason why *roombed is not allowed in English while similar compounds exist in French. Does it relate to the differences in expressing the genitive (English /-'s/ but French /de/="of")?