Re: CHAT: silly (Welsh place) names

On Sun, Mar 18, 2001 at 07:26:39PM +0000, Raymond Brown wrote:
> At 6:45 pm -0600 17/3/01, Eric Christopherson wrote:
> >On Sat, Mar 17, 2001 at 05:46:20PM +0000, Raymond Brown wrote:
> >> At 8:03 pm +1100 17/3/01, D Tse wrote:
> >> >Can someone tell me if such agglutinations are meant to be common in Welsh?
> >>
> >> *Pwllgwyngyll would not be odd as a place name.  After all, _pwll gwyn
> >> gyll_ as perfectly grammatical and acceptable Welsh as "white hazels pool"
> >> is in English.
> >
> >"White hazels pool" is not acceptable, in my idiolect. It has a plural noun
> >in apposition with a noun ("hazels pool"),
>
> No it does not!
>
> "white hazels" is an _epithet_, i.e. the phrase is adjectival, defining the
> pool.  Nothing whatever to do with apposition.
Granted, I'm not sure "apposition" was the right term.

> And a plural noun can quite well act as the epithet of a following noun in
> all versions of English that I know of, otherwise we'd not have "nice
> little girls school" quoted as an example of ambiguity so often.
I'm only talking about my idiolect here, wherein "nice little girls school"
is also ungrammatical.

> OK - add an apostrophe after "hazels" if you must.  "White hazels' pool" is
> 'pwll gwyn gyll' in Welsh also.
That works, but still sounds awkward.

--
Eric Christopherson / *Aiworegs Ghristobhorosyo