Thanks for that comprehensive answer, Ray!
From: "Ray Brown" <ray.brown@...>
Sent: Sunday, March 14, 2004 6:45 PM
Subject: Re: Adjectives, Adverbs, Ad...
> *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.
Could you please give examples for the second group?
> --- 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'
I didn't mean it in the etymological (sp?) sense ... but anyway, thanks
for explaining that.
> 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
I did not want to boil it all down to adadadadadadadadnouns! Actually, I
just wanted to ask if it there could be other ad... things that describe
other parts of speech, such as ?adconjuction, ?adpreposition for
example.
Carsten