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 -----
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")?