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Rex May - Baloo wrote: > > I found this all interesting, most especially the pidgin/creole > habit of having adjectives precede nouns and adverbs follow verbs. > If that were the case in Ceqli, we'd have. > > To bon kan ja kway. instead of > To bon kan kway ja. > > Does anybody think that alternative maybe a better system? Doing some searching around the Web on various creoles, it appears that several comments on the LANGX pages are a bit over-generalized. Although there may be some trends, there are some very striking variations among the various creoles of the world. One thing I recall reading on sci.lang is that "adverb" is a sort of catchall term, and may not cover the same kinds of words from one language to the next. In the case of Mandarin, adverbs precede verbs, with the exception of what Li and Thompson (section 8.5) call "quantity adverbial phrases". There is another construction where adverbs of manner appear to follow the verb, but actually the verb is nominalized, and what is translated as an adverb is actually a stative verb (adjective). I guess the equivalent contrast in Ceqli would be: To bon kan kway ja. To bon kan(sa) javo kway. The emphasis in the first is on the dog, while the emphasis on the latter is on the eating. (Is there a suffix that will explicitly change an adverb to a verb, or vice versa?) I don't see any particular advantage in having adverbs follow verbs, except to make Ceqli more like English--assuming that that would be an advantage. The trade-off would be the loss of a simple, uniform modifier-head principle that applies in every case. -- Mike Wright http://www.CoastalFog.net ____________________________________________________________ "The difference between theory and practice is that, in theory, there is no difference between theory and practice; in practice, however, there is." -- Anonymous