Re: NG-NA correlation ...

En réponse à Andreas Johansson :


>In the languages I know of, noun-genitive syntax seems to correlate with noun-
>adjective, and similarly genitive-noun with adjective-noun. Is this
>a "universal" tendency, or just an artifact of the smallish sample?
It's one of those statistical tendencies. Just like you have languages that 
follow exactly the pattern, like Japanese, some decidedly won't behave 
(like Euskara ;)) ) and some decide to play clever and do a little of both 
(like French with the genitive - actually a prepositional complement - 
always after, and most adjectives going after, but quite a few common ones 
going before, or English with the genitive and the adjective always before, 
but the "of" construction always after). In short, like all universals, 
it's only a statistical measure of what you see happening mostly in 
languages, not a rule as such.

>I'm wondering because I'm trying to decide on Meghean's behaviour on this
>point. Of course, to complexify matters, Meghean uses noun-genitive 
>syntax, but
>possessive pronominal clitics go before their nouns (as in _me-ghean_, lit 
>"our-
>words").
Well, Maggel has a construct state construction with the possessor after 
the possessed, but personal possession is rendered with prefixes, and 
adjectives can be placed before as well as after the noun (some with a 
change of meaning, some not, but always with widely different syntaxes :)) ).

Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.