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

Andreas Johansson wrote:
> Quoting R A Brown <ray@...>:
[snip]
>>
>>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.
>
>
> Er, we can do the same in Swedish - _äppel- och björnbärspaj_ - and nobody has
> ever suggested that _äppelpaj_ is anything but a compound noun.
Yes, I know - and German can do the same. But to my anglophone mind that
expedient with the hyphen looks a bit like a fudge and I've wondered why
you stick to this clumsy way of writing things. Why not simple "äppel
och björnbär spaj"?    :)

In a language like ancient Greek which had real compound nouns you just
could not do as this Swedish trick. You would have to have
'appleblackberrypie' as a single compound with, of course, both 'apple'
and 'blackberry' taking the form necessary for a compound. I believe the
same is true of the modern language.

I really do not see why Carsten and our Swedish conlangers are being so
awkward about English and regarding our usage as 'idiosyncratic'. The
juxtaposition of one noun with another, where one is the head of the NP
and the other its attribute or epithet is *not* peculiar just to
English. It is common in Welsh, for example, (where the nouns in the
opposite order to English), in Indonesian/Malay and quite a few other
languages AFAIK.

As I see it, the German and Scandinavian use is a halfway house between
the full compounding of a language like Greek, and the analytic
construction of English, Welsh etc.
=======================================

Benct Philip Jonsson wrote:
[snip]
 >
 > Being tone deaf I might well have gotten the details of the
 > stress wrong, but you have to agree that _apple pie_ has the
 > same stress pattern as the "juice made of oranges"
 > version of _orange juice_, whichever the actual realization
 > is, don't you (and Ray)?

Yes, with stress on initial syllable of 'apple' and 'orange' and 'pie'
and 'juice' keeping their own word stress. But as the inevitable YAEPT
thread that has arisen from this shows (and, I have no doubt, will
continue to show) there is no common usage throughout the anglophone world.

I would not normally make any distinction in pronunciation between
'orange juice' (juice made from oranges) and 'orange juice' (juice which
is colored orange) - it would be context that decided the meaning. By
default I would understand 'orange juice', however it was stressed, to
mean 'juice made from oranges', and understand it as 'juice colored
orange' only if the context made it clear that that was the meaning.

It seems to me noteworthy that where a difference in stressing is
normally made by most people, we *do* write the thing as one word, cf.
blackbird ~ black bird
blackberry ~ black berry

In my neck of the woods, 'blackberry' has only two syllables in allegro
speech (blackb'ry), but 'black berry' would always have three.

The fact that English _does_ have compound nouns seems to have been
overlooked in the present discussion. It would be more helpful if:
- attention were paid to the difference between true compound nouns and
the 'epithet noun + head noun' construct in English;
- it were noted that English is *not* unique in having the 'epithet noun
+ head noun' construct, but shares it with several other unrelated
languages.

I've never had any problem with the notion of nouns being used as epithets.

--
Ray
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http://www.carolandray.plus.com
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