On the drive in this morning my wife and I got talking about how confusing word order can be in different languages. It’s a strange situation, as a native English speaker, to get all introspective about how we organize adjectives and nouns. Generally, we stack up the adjectives and point them at the nouns, instead of the other way around. So you don’t find out what you’re talking about until you know what it’s like.
For example, it’s perfectly natural for us to talk about “The huge gaudy blue-and-pink house.” but in some other language it would make more sense to arrange things so that you know you’re talking about houses first, before narrowing it down to a specific huge gaudy blue-and-pink one.
At least it’s not like German, where the verb at the end of the sentence often goes. Then you’d wind up with things like:
“The huge gaudy blue-and-pink house on the edge of town will have, by the time I this sentence finish, completely to the ground burned.”
In some more sensible language you’d start out with “The house, burning, on the edge of town…” and the fire brigade would be on the way before you got to the second subjunctive clause.
Just an update: having talked about this on the way in this morning has really messed with my day. We’ve got some new hires coming in soon, so I’ve been working on documenting various procedures. And that means breaking things down into small enough steps that the way you talk about them doesn’t diverge too much from way things actually work.
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