Re: Adjectives, Adverbs, Ad...

On Saturday, March 13, 2004, at 09:43 PM, Philippe Caquant wrote:

> Late Latin "adjectivum nomen", "added noun",
Latin is correct, but the translation isn't. The English is "adjective
noun" as opposed to "substantive noun" (substantivum nomen).*

> similar to Greek "epitheton".
In fact 'adiectiuum nomen' was simply a classical Latin translation of
'epithetikon onyma' or just 'to epitheton'.

All our traditional grammatical terms are derived from Latin which in turn
are translation (or mistranslations) of terms used by Greek grammarians.

Examples of mistranslations are 'accusative' and 'genitive'. More accurate
translations might have given us 'objective' and 'generic'.

But I'm afraid these terms have been around for a couple of millennia so
even tho not all are entirely satisfactory we've sort of got used to them
& they're going be difficult to change now.
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*As John Cowan wrote on Saturday, March 13, 2004, at 05:59 PM, :
[snip]
> Historically "noun" < L. _nomen_ was applied to both adjectives
> ("adjective nouns") and nouns ("substantive nouns").
Yep - there's no real divide between nouns & adjectives in ancient Greek
or Latin in that they all decline in basically the same way and it is, in
fact, useful to have one term to denote them all. But within this large
group called 'nouns', there are two subgroups:
- one which has (normally) one fixed gender and cannot qualify another
noun, i.e. substantive nouns;
- one which exists in all three genders and can either qualify another
noun (be used adjectively) or be used by itself as subj., object. etc,. i.
e. used substantively.

In our modern modern usage, we restrict 'noun' to the first group only,
and simply call the second group adjectives.
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--- Carsten Becker <post@...> wrote:
>
> And another, luckily on-topical question: why are
> adjectives called
> "adjectives" and not "adnouns" in analogy to
> "adverbs"?
>
*adnoun would be malformed in any case. 'ad' + 'nomen' would give *annomen
and, presumably, *announ - ach!

But the word was not formed in analogy to adverb.

Adverb <-- Latin: aduerbium - a translation of Greek 'epirrhe:ma'
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On Sunday, March 14, 2004, at 01:17 AM, David Peterson wrote:

> Carsten wrote:
>
> <<This question might sound a little stupid, but I wonder if there can be
> more
> ad- things than just adjectives and adverbs. Or: Can other parts of speech
> also be described in the way adjectives describe the noun and adverbs
> describe verbs? Well, ad-adjective would be quantifiers like "a little",
> "much" etc., but these are treated as modal adverbs of degree and measure
> (word?), aren't they? At least that's what I learned in school.>>
>
> To try to answer your first question, since there's been many answers to
> your second, yes.
>
> In English, we have what I would call an appreposition (that's how that
> assimilation works, right?), and it's "right".  So...
Yes, the assimilation is correct, unlike the 'adposition' which still
grates on my ears.

But really, adding extra terms like *adadjective (or even worse *adadnoun)
, *appreposition (and presumably *appostposition, *accircumposition and
*adadposition - ach!) ate IMO unnecessarily complicating things. Way back
in the 50s we learnt in school that:
"an adverb modifies a verb, an adjective or another adverb".

Rather than create a multiplicity of ad-words, it would surely be better
to give 'adverb' a more meaningful name if it's traditional name is
considered misleading (and arguably it is misleading).

Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem

Ray
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