Re: CONLANG Digest - 20 Apr 2000 to 21 Apr 2000 (#2000-111)

Muke Tever wrote:
> It's not an irregular inflection, 'gustar' inflects regularly to the
> subject.
Yes, it inflects regularly, I wasn't saying that.  What I was saying is
that it's syntactic usage is odd.  The subject is placed at the end, and
the object at the beginning, as in "A Juan le gusta comer manzanas".  Is
"Comer manzanas le gusta a Juan" grammatical?

> "Eating apples pleases me", roughly, yeah.   I was trying to come up with an
> example of object-firstness, and it happens _here_ because "gustar" has
> roughly a reverse meaning from what we usually translate it
> to--"like"--while the word order in the construction stays the same as
> "like".
In Portuguese, _gustar_ means "to like", so that one would say things
like "gusto comer chocolate", or something like that, it's been some
time since I took Portuguese.

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