Re: The Shift of Antecedent Prepositions to Suffixes ????

On Saturday, January 22, 2005, at 12:39 , Nicolas Walker wrote:

> Dear All,
>
> A question for the assembled knowledg of the list (of which I am
> constantly in awe!).
>
> Is it all possible that a preposition may (with time) affix iself to the
> END of the word it acts upon, even if its former position was at its head?
> E.g. could 'or (loc.prep.) mar (=house)' become 'maror'? If so, is such a
> change likely?
The change could only come about, it seems to me, if at some stage the
adpositions for some reason habitually became postposited rather than
preposited, i.e. _or_ habitually got place _after_ the noun phrase. But
why that should happen, I don't know.

> Surely 'ormar' is infinately more probable!
It is.

> A small follow uo question: can anybody furnish me with some examples of
> languages (preferably natural)in which prepositions do indeed follow the
> noun ?
When they follow the noun or noun phrase, they are called _postpositions_.
They are quite common; for example:
Hungarian
Turkish
Hindi/Urdu and, I believe most (all?) Indic languages.

_prepositions_ by definition must be place in front of the noun or noun
phrase. The common term for both prepositions and postpositions is
_adposition_.


Ray
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"If /ni/ can change into /A/, then practically anything
can change into anything"
          Yuen Ren Chao, 'Language and Symbolic Systems"