Re: Circumfixes?

En réponse à David Peterson <DigitalScream@...>:

>
>     This reminded me of something...  In Spanish the word  order is SVO,
> and
> sometimes SOV when you get object pronouns thrown in (and, then again,
> sometimes not), but here's the one that makes me wonder: "Me gusta la
> radio".
>  Here, the subject is the radio, and "I" is the object, so the order,
> then,
> is OVS.  What's up with that?
>
This verb was a pain to learn in Spanish classes, because my Spanish teacher
never explained that "la radio" was the real subject and "me" was an indirect
object (which can be emphasized by adding "A mi"). As soon as I understood that,
there was no problem with this verb anymore. She was a native speaker of
Spanish, so now I wonder if Spanish people really recognize in "me gusta la
radio" what really is the subject and what really is the object. To me, they
think "me" acts, and "la radio" undergoes the action, so the order is really
Actor-Verb-Undergoer, which is more in agreement with usual Spanish verbs in
active voice. the "grammatical" order seems reversed only because of the strange
quirk of meaning of the verb "gustar".

By the way, another difficult verb to learn for French people is English "to
miss". It translates as French "manquer", but for translation the subject and
object have to be reversed. "I miss you" translates as "Tu me manques". Funny
the semantic differences that can happen between languages...

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr