Board Thread:Linguistics/@comment-5178246-20130106163543/@comment-2040889-20130106192044

First, keep in mind that no language is fully synthetic, or isolating - Chinese could be analysed as extremely agglutinating at times, and compounds in the language are extremely frequent.

For the example you provided, could you say which modifier goes to which noun? Is it "the book" or "the table" ("šé" could refer to both nouns depending on circumstances - Old Norse does this and it can be a bit frustrating)

Edit: Could you translate "John wants to eat fish" ? That's a better indicator of head-directionality.