How do atomic languages handle breaking down and sequencing complex English noun-phrases?

Question

Along the lines of How do languages which have adjectives after the noun work with complex phrases? (my last question), I am wondering now more about compound English words and how to break these apart and somehow "reverse" the order of things (though not necessarily reverse, because I'm not 100% clear yet on what I want totally, still unclear to me so far).

Basically I am thinking of phrases like this:

• carefully planned meeting
• crazy beautiful
• insanely tricky puzzle

If I try and straight ahead "reverse" these, I first have to break them down into more atomic units. So first, before reversing, I do:

• care full [like] plan [past] meet [flow]
• crazy beauty full
• insane [like] trick [like] puzzle

Not perfect, but seems close enough. Then I try and go about reversing it (to make the adjectives trail after the head noun or element):

• flow meet past plan like full care
• full beauty crazy
• puzzle like trick like insane

It would be perceived sort of like this:

• [flow meet] [past plan] [like full care]
• [full beauty] crazy
• puzzle [like trick] [like insane]

To me, this doesn't make any sense, and feels really hard to grok. Is it just because it is unnatural to me? Or do languages do it like this? Or am I doing it wrong and real or constructed languages do it differently when they do the "adjectives last" approach? How exactly do they do it when these words like "beauty-full" are compound words which need to be split up, and somehow also rotated in the phrase?

How do you know what should feel natural? Meta-question, can I train myself to feel new ways of doing things are natural? The english way, where we have nested structures chained together like [[a, b, c], [d, e, f]] just "feels right" for some reason, and I'm not sure it's purely based on my upbringing.

Another simpler example to demonstrate the point is, -ed past tense. A word like "walked". Does it become [past] walk or walk [past]? Which part of English should be reversed and which shouldn't basically? I have been thinking about it in terms of a URL structure, how would I do that. Would it be one of these?

• /past/walk, where it's first scoping you down to an abstract past, then to a more specific action (general -> specific)
• /walk/past, where it's filtering the walk to a more specific walk, but really going specific -> general in terms of terminology.

I can't tell which one would be more appropriate, if the goal is to make a hierarchy of sort of "filtering" like this (a website even).

https://yourvietnamese.com/learn-vietnamese/vietnamese-adjectives/

Answer 1

Meta-question, can I train myself to feel new ways of doing things are natural? The english way, where we have nested structures chained together like [[a, b, c], [d, e, f]] just "feels right" for some reason, and I'm not sure it's purely based on my upbringing.

First and foremost, the answer to this is to learn another language. The best (really, the only) way to get used to non-English ways of structuring language is to see how other languages do it differently. Ideally, take classes from a native-speaking instructor for a semester or two (it'll be a lot easier and faster to absorb than Duolingo or the like). If you're looking for something distinctly non-English, Mandarin and Japanese are popular enough that you can find classes for them everywhere.

There's been an unfortunate tendency in linguistics since its earliest days to assume that the way English structures things is "logical" or "natural" and the way other languages do things is "strange" and "unnatural", which is absolutely not the case. If you grew up speaking Japanese instead, Japanese sentence structure would "feel right" and English would not. The field of linguistics as a whole is still in the process of recovering from this assumption.

To me, this doesn't make any sense, and feels really hard to grok. Is it just because it is unnatural to me? Or do languages do it like this? Or am I doing it wrong and real or constructed languages do it differently when they do the "adjectives last" approach? How exactly do they do it when these words like "beauty-full" are compound words which need to be split up, and somehow also rotated in the phrase?

Even staying entirely within the bounds of English, we sometimes do structure our compounds this way, thanks to all the syntax we borrowed from French. In English you can say either "beautiful" or "full of beauty"; "prettier" or "more pretty"; etc.

So instead of "extremely beautiful", we can say "full of beauty to an extreme". Instead of "careful movement" you can say "act of moving with care". The fact that the "after" forms of modifiers require prepositions is just a quirk of English grammar; other languages use this structure by default, and don't need any extra words to mark it.

Another simpler example to demonstrate the point is, -ed past tense. A word like "walked". Does it become [past] walk or walk [past]? Which part of English should be reversed and which shouldn't basically?

English puts the past-tense marking after ("walked"), but future-tense marking before ("will walk").

Ancient Greek does the opposite, with past-tense marking before (the augment) and future-tense marking after (the sigmatic future).

Latin puts all the tense marking at the end.

Swahili puts all of it at the beginning.

Lingála puts it on both ends, what linguists call a "circumfix".

Akkadian puts it in the middle of the word, changing out the vowels while keeping the consonants the same (an "infix"). English sometimes does this too: run vs ran.

Mandarin generally doesn't mark tense at all. It's a quirk of English that tense marking is required on every verb; many other languages don't require this (but may require something else: Turkish requires you to mark how you know the information).

Every permutation of this exists somewhere in the world. I really do recommend studying another language to a basic level to get a sense of what's possible.