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In one exercise I'm doing, it has the following sentence:

> _世界で一番木の古い建物は法隆寺です。_

In this case, the position of the adjective 古い looks odd to me. I normally
find it appear before noun or noun phrase, so I think it should be:

> _世界で一番古い木の建物は法隆寺です。_

Is there a mistake with printing or something I should know about here?

Based on the content of that exercise, the sentence has the English
translation as follows:

_The oldest wooden building in the world._
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question
adjectives grammar
Odd position of adjective
This appears to be the が to の conversion which happens in relative clauses and
attributive clauses. The usual 木 **が** 古い gets converted to 木 **の** 古い because
it is embedded in the clause and is modifying a noun. See below for a similar
discussion on this topic:

  * [How does the の work in 「日本人の知らない日本語」?](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/12825/how-does-the-%e3%81%ae-work-in-%e6%97%a5%e6%9c%ac%e4%ba%ba%e3%81%ae%e7%9f%a5%e3%82%89%e3%81%aa%e3%81%84%e6%97%a5%e6%9c%ac%e8%aa%9e)

As for using 木が古い instead 古い木, this is not uncommon when describing some kind
of attribute or a personality trait. The format is `NounがAdjective` where the
adjective describes one particular attribute of the noun (but implies there
are others).
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answer
The two phrases are not identical. The difference is as follows:

  1. 世界で一番木の古い建物 = the building whose wood is oldest in the world
  2. 世界で一番古い木の建物 = the oldest wooden building in the world

The latter simply refers to the oldest building made of wood, which is 法隆寺.
The former refers to a building which uses very old tree. Strictly speaking,
the building itself does not necessarily have to be old. Yes, if you have
10000-year-old trees, you can use them and start building a 世界で一番木の古い建物 today.
(Well, this is a nit-picky discussion; practically speaking, they refer to
almost the same thing...)

木の古い建物 is the same as 木が古い建物, which has a relative clause that modifies 建物. If
you know how to parse 鼻の長いゾウ, 心が綺麗な人, 背の高い男 and so on, you can parse 木の古い建物
the same way. (See [this](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/a/53581/5010) if
you are unsure.)
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answer