[austinl]

I think it's interesting that many popular nouns can modify other nouns in English, and that the order of the words matters, e.g. you would never say "shoes hipster"

From A Canticle for Leibowitz:

"In Latin, as in most simple dialects of the region, a construction like servus puer meant about the same thing as puer servus, and even in English slave boy meant boy slave. But there the similarity ended... house cat did not mean cat house, and that a dative of purpose or possession, as in mihi amicus, was somehow conveyed by dog food or sentry box even without inflection."

[sdoowpilihp]

Even more subtly, there are things like adjective order that are also an important part of the english language that most native speakers just learn innately. Saying them out of order doesn't necessarily change the meaning of the phrase, but it sure sounds odd to a native speaker.

As an example, "a cute little paisley cat" would be considered the correct order, while "a paisley cute little cat" would not.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjective#Adjective_order

[dreamfactory2]

According to Pinker, every language falls into one of these two categories (meaning conveyed by word order or word case).

[platz]

Although there are lots of examples where people switched the word order. It might not be historicaly accurate, but the example I remember being told is that an 'ear wig' was so named because it went from one's wig to one's ear.

[cheese1756]

I'm sure that Latin is also helped by the fact that word order makes very little difference, while we place a huge emphasis on it in English.

One thing I love about Latin is that you can have the adjective at the start of a sentence and the noun it modifies thirteen lines later (Caesar does this quite a bit), and the sentence is still perfectly readable. In English, not so much.

[angersock]

e.g. you would never say "shoes hipster"

Unless you were describing a person who has a hipster-like behavior in regards to shoes, whereupon it makes complete sense.

It is a little unfortunate to see such a rich vocabulary of derision and ridicule being replaced with a single epitaph.

[bodhi]

> Unless you were describing a person who has a hipster-like behavior in regards to shoes

Wouldn't that be a "shoe hipster"?