Re: 'noun' and 'adjective' (fuit: To What Extent is Standard Finnish a Conlang?)

Mark J. Reed wrote:
[snip]
>>>To my German brain, this _apple_ isn't an adjective at all;
>>>it's very obviously another noun, which forms a compound noun with the
>>>second noun, and they're written as two separate words because of some
>>>idiosyncrasy of English spelling.
>
> I'd say, rather, that they're written as two separate words because
> English doesn't share the idiosyncrasies of German spelling. :)
Yes, and in English _apple pie_ is not a compound in the same way as the
German compound nouns, as we can expand the phrase: apple and blackberry
pie; apple, pear and quince pie etc.

Nor it an specifically English idiosyncrasy. Cf Welsh
cig  moch
meat pigs = pork

cig  eidion
meat bullock = beef

Such juxtapositions of nouns as as common in Welsh as in English. IIRC
they are common in Indonesian/Malayan e.g.
orang utan
man   jungle = jungle man

I believe it occurs in quite a few other langs as well. English had
suffered enough in the past by those who would try to force it into the
grammatical mode of Latin - heaven preserve from having it forced into
the mode of German grammar (or any other non-English grammar, for that
matter).

Long years ago when I was a school kid, the 'apple' in 'apple pie' was
labelled an "epithet noun", i.e. a noun acting as an epithet to another
noun.

But English words have a habit of shifting parts of speech.

[snip]
>
> ?  Not the way I say it;  "apple pie" has equal stress on both words.
> When I say it with the stress only on "apple", the result sounds like
> someone speaking with a marked foreign accent.
Yep - I agree.

--
Ray
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