What type of clause is 「蛙飛び込む」 in the famous haiku by Basho? Usually, Basho's famous haiku, when written with a translation, is presented thus: > > > And translated roughly (similar to three out of five translations available in Wikisource): > An old pond > A frog leaps > The sound of water However, there are inversions of order of the last two lines, as was brought to my attention in a recent post I made in the Literature Stack Exchange: > An old pond > The sound of water > As a frog leaps in/Of a frog leaping in Here, the second line is modified by the third, whereas in the first, they stand separate. In Japanese, what type of clause is the phrase in this haiku?

Grammatically modifies as a relative clause. It's not that modifies . Japanese is an almost pure head-final language#Head-initial_vs._head-final_languages), which means a modifying part almost always comes before a modified part.

This relative clause is a bit special, and it's a bit hard to give a very literal translation of . This is called a gapless relative clause described here, or type C relative clause described here. Basically explains what kind of we are dealing with. One rather literal translation would be "the sound of water of/from a frog's leaping in." Although this one is grammatically closer to the original haiku, it doesn't look similar to the original in terms of line order. So neither is definitely better than the other.