Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: Word order

From:Nihil Sum <nihilsum@...>
Date:Sunday, August 11, 2002, 2:37
>if it did, they'd follow the noun. The only SOV language in Campbell >where the adjective regularly follows the noun is Tibetan (which has >both head first and head last compounds).
And then:
>You'll be pleased to learn that I've found one more natural language >with this quality - Akkadian. I'd like to read the article abstracted >at the top of the underlinked page, although I probably wouldn't >understand it http://www.cus.cam.ac.uk/~gd116/abstracts.html
>Interestingly, I've noted that there seem to be quite a lot of SVO >languages with adjectives that precede the noun, as opposed to only >these two SOV langs with adjectives that follow the noun. My research > has >been less than systematic, though.
You can add another! Persian is SOV and adjective-follows-noun as well. From the UCLA Language Materials Project - Persian Profile at http://www.lmp.ucla.edu/profiles/profp01.htm : "Word order in Persian is Subject-Object-Verb although modifiers follow the nouns they modify and the language has prepositions." By the way, that UCLA site is really cool. Have a look at it: "Teaching resources for less commonly taught languages." It's got "Language Profiles" that describe the structure etc. of lots of languages. I'll be absolutely strip-mining this one for grammatic concepts. Anyone know of other sites like this? Nihil Sum _________________________________________________________________ Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com

Reply

Tim May <butsuri@...>