Re: Question about a grammatical term

On Wed, Oct 02, 2002 at 12:44:12PM -0400, Roger Mills wrote:
> Indonesian (and many other languages, such as Kash) does it just the other
> way around:
> IN. rumah makan (house eat) 'restaurant'
> kaca mata (glass eye) 'eyeglasses'
> (probably mata kaca would be 'an artificial/glass eye')
> mata air (eye water) 'a natural spring' (mata often fig. 'the main part of
> s.t.')
> air mata 'tears'
[snip]

I believe this is because in Indonesian and Malay, adjectives *follow* the
modified noun. These constructions are essentially noun-adjective
combinations after all. The various Sinitic languages, OTOH, have
adjectives *precede* nouns just as in English; and so their compounds
behave differently from Indonesian/Malay but similarly to English:
        hong2 shu1 (red book)
        tan4 bai2  (egg white)
        shu1 bao1  (book bag)

(See? I didn't need to re-translate for English, unlike the Malay
equivalents, which are reverse-ordered: _buku merah_ "book red" = "a red
book", etc.)


T

--
What are you when you run out of Monet? Baroque.