• @[email protected]
    6•4 months ago

    If I were designing a natural language, I’d put adjectives after the nouns, so you start with the important things first

    So - French?

    • @lunarul
      4•4 months ago

      The thing is that in French, Spanish, etc. it still makes sense if you put the adjective before the noun, even if it might sound weird in some cases. An adjective is an adjective and a noun is a noun.

      But English is positional. Where you put a word gives it its function. So “red car” and “car red” mean different things.

      • ddhEnglish
        4•4 months ago

        And “red big car” is wrong.

      • @[email protected]
        1•4 months ago

        That’s because they are romance languages. They come from Latin where word order is irrelevant as each “word” has a different form for the specific use.

        • @lunarul
          0•4 months ago

          Yes, that’s what I said. My native language is a romance language too. And after speaking it her whole life, my wife has trouble getting the grasp of how in English swapping two words completely changes the meaning of what she’s saying (especially when it’s two nouns, like e.g. “parent council”)