Chinese adpositions (was: Re: inalienable possess

Douglas wrote :

Christophe Grandsire wrote:
>
> > Chinese derived PREpositions from *verbs* like *to give* as Nik
> > recalls and POSTpositions from *nouns* like *upper part* (shang).
>
> and elsewhere:
>
> > Mandarin does mix pre- and postpositions as Mathias said. I read
> > that other languages do the same.
>
> Myself, I find life quantum leaps easier if I continue to think of these
> nouns and verbs as nouns and verbs rather than pre- and postpositions
> derived from nouns and verbs. That way, two of the great maxims of
> Chinese - it's SVO and modifiers precede modifieds - hold up and the
> mental gymnastics are reduced.
[snip]
Yeah ! I'm in too ! Cant' make another conlang with adpositions since I practice
Khmer. Even Esperanto looks a stegausorus to me - not you Steg, the huge one
frothing behind you. Except that I follow Chinese and Khmer grammarians who
never thought in terms of modified-modifier (thus the *white horse* paradigm)
even when taking into account a fine-tuning of integration. In other words, I
see no difference between SV, VO and NN : *top* is a noun all right but it also
refers to the actor of a process or state like an *agent noun* as most *nouns*
do - however the artificial walling apart between semantics and syntax may
stand ;-)
Mathias

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