Re: Why does English have so few compound words?


John Atkinson wrote:
<ranjit_mathews@xxxxxxxxx> wrote...

I read once that English's fixed word order came about partly as a(n
ad
hoc?) standardization of the confusing plethora of preferred word
orders introduced into England by various germanic languages - Low
Germanic, Danish and Norse.

OE had a pretty strict word order, not much different from modern
German. Old Norse was freer, I think, but similar in most respects.
All favour verb-second in main clauses, verb-last in subordinates.
Modern English word order is different from all of them. If there was
an outside influence that helped produce the change, it would have to be
Old French.

.... except that what I read was about standardization of word order
during the transition from Anglo-Saxon to late Old English when the
only influences on English, apart from ecclestiastical Latin, were the
various dialects that Old Norse broke up into. (It seems that Old Norse
had a fricative terminal r like Turkish does today).

I suspect, though, it was more just an internal
development.

John.

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Richard Heathfields personal threads.
    ... grammar is nothing like German grammar in my opinion. ... the fact that you English in the German word ... for the most part word order is identical. ...
    (comp.lang.c)
  • Re: Child Molester Assaults Children in Wal-Marts
    ... much differece because most of the ponies were in English word order. ... so you have a line of Latin spaced out so the English translation fits ... As I said, most of the ponies were in English word order, which did not do ...
    (alt.true-crime)
  • Re: History of French
    ... English as a second langauge ... dramatically differing word order. ... As I deliberately write Dutch ... Then German. ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Sentences without any subject
    ... Joachim> That strikes me a bit. ... Joachim> non-natives of English get the delicacies of the English ... Joachim> tense-aspect system right than non-natives of German master ... Joachim> the German word order. ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Academic/scientific journals in Esperanto?
    ... You pretend that word order is the SOLE alternative ... The equivalent of the Japanese solution is to ... always use a preposition to indicate the noun's role, ... a simple variant of English employing this idea could use "o" as ...
    (sci.lang)