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Your example works because English pronouns are the only nouns in English which still have different forms for parts of speech (e.g., nominative I, possessive m
by bdowling 7y ago
Your example works because English pronouns are the only nouns in English which still have different forms for parts of speech (e.g., nominative I, possessive my, objective me; he, his, him; they, their, them). In other languages all nouns have different forms for different parts of speech.
In languages like Latin, adjectives also have different forms which match the nouns they modify, making word order flexible without being ambiguous. In English, adjectives usually must preceed the nouns they are attached to, save a few exceptions (attorneys general, tacos supreme, Optimus Prime).
- tsimionescu 7y agoYou can do it with surnames as well: Peter does give his love to Jana. To Jana does Peter give his love. Give his love to Jana, does Peter. It sounds pretty unnatural, but it is understandable I believe. Not sure if the Czech versions would sound natural to a Czech or not.
- schoen 7y agoYou've gotten a benefit from having an indirect object expressed with a preposition, but presumably a lot of verbs don't take an indirect object and don't have a synonym that can.
- schoen 7y ago> attorneys general, tacos supreme, Optimus Prime Apparently "Prime" is a title or rank among the Transformers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Primes_and_Matrix_holders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Primes_and_Matrix_hold... In that case, it's probably not best analyzed as an adjective, unless we want to analyze "Senator" as an adjective in "Senator Wyden" or "Mister" as an adjective in "Mister Rogers".