On Thursday 12 August 2010 19:59:10 [email protected] wrote: > Thanks for the observations, Bill. > > Both French (which I know from having I lived there many years ago) and > Italian follow the same word order when specifying a mass (for instance, 50 > kg) and in fact the same word order as English ("fifty kilograms"). > > So, it's hard to see why the order would be reversed in some of the signs > in Italy.
In all Romance languages as far as I know, numbers precede nouns. Adjectives usually follow, but there are exceptions, including adjectives with different meaning (at least in French) when they precede the noun. "Ma propre chemise propre" means "my own clean shirt" - "propre" means "own" when it precedes the noun. "Real Academia Española" has the noun between two adjectives. I don't know a natlang where the number normally follows the noun, though I've seen that order in Latin (Gallia est omnia divisa in partes tres). In Lojban, numbers precede brivla (a part of speech which combines common nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs) when counting objects, but follow them when measuring them. E.g. "ci grana cu mitre li pa" means "three rods are one meter long". Malta, by the way, has its own language, which is Arabic with Italian influence written in the Latin alphabet. It is the only Semitic language which is normally written in the Latin alphabet. Pierre -- When a barnacle settles down, its brain disintegrates. Já não percebe nada, já não percebe nada.
