Re: Question about a grammatical term

On Fri, 4 Oct 2002 14:24:48 -0700, Padraic Brown <elemtilas@...>
wrote:

>--- Herman Miller <hmiller@...> wrote:
>
>> Is that really a characteristic of all adjectives?
>> You wouldn't say "the
>> more next day" or "my very left hand", but it
>
>"Next" is a superlative, and whether or not people
>realise it, they don't preface a superlative adjective
>with "more": *the more greenest leaf. The latter
>example is perfectly ok: my very own car, my very
>lovely girlfriend, etc.
You'd say "my very left hand"? Hmm, that sounds really odd to me. I can't
figure out what it might mean.

"Next" is a superlative in its etymology, but without knowing its history,
there's no reason to think it might be a superlative in modern English. You
don't say things like *"the red one is nearer, but the blue one is the next
of all". In any case, you can replace it with "following", which means the
same thing as "next" in this context; you still wouldn't say "the more
following day".

In Tirelat, the sort of words like "next" and "left", which identify one of
a number of similar objects, are adjectives, while the kinds of words that
are descriptive adjectives in English (like "green") are stative verbs in
Tirelat. So it's interesting that these two different sorts of adjectives
actually have some grammatical differences even in English.

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