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

In a message dated 1/23/2005 6:44:35 AM Eastern Standard Time,
ray.brown@FREEUK.COM writes:

>> 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.
I would think that if a language is changing from preposition to
postpositional, then, instead of prepositions moving to become postpositions, it might be
more common for newly-formed postpositions to come into existence gradually as
the older prepositions gradually drop out of use.  Then the profile of the
language would change without any individual word actually chaning from
preposition to postposition.

But I have no data to back up this impression.

Doug